Al Hadath journalists bring their vision to air with Viz Story

Al Hadath, a 24-hour news channel that is part of Dubai-based MBC, faces the same challenges as most modern news channels: How do you efficiently create video stories to cover world news with a minimal staff?

Al Hadath’s solution was to bring Vizrt’s Viz Story into the newsroom as a fast and simple tool for journalists to create and edit their own stories. A solution that, according to Fadi Radi, Chief Creative Office at Al Arabiya, would go on to “enable our journalists to create and publish over 32,000 stories in under 6 months.”

“I know what I want for my story, and with Viz Story, I can take control of the package creation without having to explain my vision to someone else,” said Badih Younes, senior journalist, Al Arabiya & Al Hadath News. “Viz Story allows us to produce our stories in a shorter time and more accurate way.”

Viz Story is a story creation tool which allows journalists to easily edit videos, add branded graphics, and quickly distribute the finished stories to any location including video servers, VOD platforms and social media.

Part of the unique Viz Story workflow at Al Hadath and sister network Al Arabiya, is an integration with Reuters for gathering images and stories. Both networks have the Reuters wire service integrated with their Viz One media asset management (MAM) system. The integration, made possible by Viz One’s open API, allows Viz Story users to browse the latest Reuters images, with robust metadata, and drag the images into their timeline for editing, all from the web browser.

  Play now

“Finding media is very easy with the Reuters integration,” said Fadi Radi, senior manager of on air graphics. “We have the latest pictures, up to the minute, and each picture includes metadata about the story. We get around 2500 to 4000 images per day. All a journalist has to do is open Viz Story in their browser, check out images to see what is going in the world, and quickly build the story.”

Video content from an Avid archive is imported into Viz One, giving journalists full access to the in-house video library from Viz Story, where they can add any number of graphics templates.

“The most exciting part is that the journalists also have access to any of Vizrt’s graphics templates from within their browser. So, not only are they editing video, they are adding custom graphics to the story, making the stories uniquely Al Hadath,” added Fadi Radi.

Finished stories are rendered to a target folder in the video format needed to automatically be ingested into the channel’s on-air video playout server.

“The newsroom is always a fast-paced environment and Viz Story helps save time since we don’t have to go to other departments to do the work. Everything is on our desktop and is easy to use”, said Aroub Abdelhaq, writer/reporter, Al Arabiya & Al Hadath News.

“It’s amazing how people (journalists, reporters, editorial teams, and social media producers) are interacting with Viz Story and its integration with Viz One. It’s been the biggest revolution in our workflow since we started using Vizrt, and its going viral within the organization,” concluded Fadi Radi.