Blick TV is making Swiss media history and breaking all the boundaries of traditional publishing & broadcast mediums. Its ‘web first’ live news platform, powered by nxtedition, means Blick TV is the first digital-only TV broadcaster in Switzerland.

Blick TV chose nxtedition to take care of journalistic planning tools, story scripting, media management, rundown creation, studio automation, graphics, ingest with metadata and final channel playout all from within one nxtedition system. 

Based in the newsroom of Ringier Pressehaus, Zurich, Blick TV is taking a radically different approach to live news coverage by leveraging nxtedition’s unique capabilities to collate, produce and output content to Blick.ch and the Blick app as both a live video stream and video on demand.

Blick TV isn’t predicated on the traditional linear television format but instead relies upon news which can be updated every hour and also broadcast live in the case of breaking news reports. Viewers can watch live or on-demand at the Blick.ch website and on the custom-designed Blick app. The editorial focus is on breaking news, politics, business, sport and entertainment.

‘Ringier has the courage to conquer television and reinvent it for the Internet. I am really looking forward to working with my competent, creative and powerful team’

Jonas Projer, Editor-in-Chief of Blick TV. 

The installation was a collaboration between Qvest media & nxtedition. Qvest worked over the summer to build a two studio installation complete with green screen, virtual set, respeaking subtitling along with the two control rooms and robotic camera systems.

nxtedition provides all the journalistic planning tools, story scripting, media management, rundown creation, studio automation, graphics, ingest with metadata and final channel playout all from within a single nxtedition system.

Blick TV broadcasts 16 hours a day in 15 minute repeating segments between 6 am to 11 pm each day before switching to a repeat playout stream to complete the 24-hour news cycle. 

Rather than using a mix of different software from multiple vendors, the entire team of 48 collaborate within nxtedition’s single unified system from story concept right through to production delivery. The efficiency and productivity gains in creating live and pre-recorded content speeds up and enhances the production workflow vastly. 

‘I was very impressed with the flexibility and adaptability of nxtedition. It was very easy to tailor it to our specific workflows! Also, working with minimal technical staff, every bit of automation counts, and especially reducing potential sources for human error in the control room during fast and complex live shows. nxtedition helps us with that with its many clever and well-designed features.’

Beat Vontobel, Head of Technics

A good example of these gains can be measured in how nxtedition’s unique ‘salami-slicing’ feature is utilised by Blick TV. During each live segment, every individual news story is automatically sliced off the nxtedition ingest server as soon as the director steps into the next news story. 

Each newly created video ‘slice’ is automatically added to the repeat rundown for the live stream channel, as well as available for publication for VOD. This is achieved without any human intervention at all and all the salami clips are packaged for playout with subtitles and graphics included as metadata.

The mobile version of Blick TV can be viewed in both portrait and landscape format with no pause in the streaming and all videos have graphics and subtitles overlaid inside the app using metadata that streamed with the video. 

Directors are capable of accessing each individual story segment for any graphicsor subtitle corrections, new developments or even drop in live over any segment, anytime day or night. By fully exploiting these productivity gains, when breaking news happens - Blick TV can truly be ‘fast and first’ to on-air. 

“Blick TV is the first digital TV in our country and we are the first to be live within minutes if something happens,”

Christian Dorer, Editor-in-Chief of the Blick Group.

“This has been a great project for all of the team at Blick, Qvest Media & nxtedition. The challenging vision that Blick set out to us at the beginning of this project was always a perfect fit for the nxtedition solution, it’s exciting to see it all up and running today. We worked hard alongside the Blick team and Qvest Media to create a truly 21st-century virtualised news solution for the Blick audience to enjoy”.

Ola Malmgren, Co-Founder & CEO of nxtedition

Blick TV is available on the Blick.ch website and iOS and Android apps are available from the relevant app stores.