Nine moves AI-enabled news production into the cloud

Nine has begun moving its news broadcast operations onto a new cloud-based media production platform starting with its 9News Morning program.

The media company said the show was the first to successfully broadcast a live bulletin using the centralised platform, a milestone that has arrives 18 months into its 'future news' transformation, due for completion at the end of next year.

It is now starting to use the platform to generate video content for 9News and Current Affairs social media channels, with 9News Sydney’s 4pm and 6pm bulletins expected to start using it from October.

In a statement, Nine executive director, news and current affairs Fiona Dear said that the transformation is a response to strong growth in the division’s digital audiences.

“While newsrooms have been required to adapt to new technology over the years, we have never fundamentally changed the way news is produced – and that’s exactly what we’ve achieved. We are building a modern, multiskilled newsroom,” Dear said.

Nine said that the transformation is the largest in the station’s history and would see it “embrace automated capabilities, digital personalisation, and AI” for its TV news production and workflows to streamline the process for journalists.

The new platform combines a newsroom control and rundown system called Saga with Mimir, which, according to Mimir Media Tech’s website, is a subscription-based, cloud-native production asset management, archiving, asset management and object-store.

Among Mimir’s features are the ability to integrate with multiple AI technologies for metadata “enrichment” including AWS’ celebrity face recognition libraries.