EidosMedia has developed new live-coverage features for its Cobalt digital content delivery platform.
Event reports can use Cobalt Live on any mobile device to post text and multimedia content directly into an online newsstream, embedding tweets and other social content, photos and videos captured locally or found online.
Coverage from individual or team contributors can be coordinated by a moderator, with posts from contributors arriving in a 'staging area' for editing if necessary.
"Some types of news can really benefit from real-time coverage," says chief information officer Ismail Gazarin. "High-profile events, technology announcements, natural and manmade disasters are all opportunities for news producers to add extra value to their output by covering them live, while boosting site traffic through repeat visits."
Gazarin says that while the technology to do this has been around for some time, integrating it into the rest of the newsroom workflow wasn't straightforward.
"Cobalt Live makes setting up and managing a live sequence as easy as creating a normal news story," he says. "Everyone involved works in the same space, whatever device they're using, and their access and actions are subject to normal workflow permissions.
"What it does effectively is to move the workflow out of the newsroom and into a shared mobile workspace close to the action."
Chief marketing officer Massimo Barsotti says technology for covering live events needs to be as transparent and user-friendly as possible. "Real-time coverage is rapidly becoming a mainstream news activity," he says.
The aim with Cobalt Live has been to enable contributors to create and manage media-rich news streams with minimal distraction.
Pictured: Live footage of Sundar Pichai in a Google keynote is managed in Cobalt