ACN, Agència Catalana de Notícies (Spain) - case study

The Catalonian News Agency (ACN) is one of the first digital news agencies in Europe, and it operates since 1999, pioneering the use of IT technology, telecommuting and decentralized organization applied to a journalistic environment. News production is presented in text format, audio, pictures and digital videos that can be incorporated into traditional media and new content platforms, such as the Internet, mobile telephony, PDAs or DTV.

VSN provides ACN´s system with an increased agility and flexibility

The Challenge

• Using standard tools (tapes, microwave links and satellite) entailed an economic unfeasibility. From the beginning, the implementation of a modern IP content exchange tool for contribution and distribution was agreed

The Solution

• ACN runs now a modern site for news delivery in a distributed way
• IPexVideo tool is used to manage this environment
• The transfer manager both for contribution and distribution is the GTransfer engine, provided by VSN

The Results

• ACN is able to provide Comunicàlia with a minimum of 10 news pieces of general interest per day, edited and with voice over, for associated TV channels, for exclusive use
• Moreover, although a fixed number of news will be kept before 13.00h and 19.00h (like nowadays), the vsnIPTransfer technology enables a constant update, as well as providing the system with an increased agility and flexibility
• In a second phase, the bi directionality with TV channels could be achieved; this way, the channels can populate the news service with their own information, interesting for the whole group