That smartphone has become another tool for a news-producing station to get more feet on the street. It’s clear that streaming video (and audio) can add to the daily newscast by getting viewers involved in the newsgathering process. After all, a station can only support so many crews in the field. The thousands of viewers in a DMA can be a powerful resource to capture news as it happens.

Citizen journalists simply see something happen, take some video with their phone and live-stream or upload it to the station for inclusion on the nightly newscast as well as on the station’s website and social media platforms.

“One of the things we see with larger broadcasters and news stations is that they are encouraging their audiences to become citizen journalists and capture news on their smart phones,” said Chris Knowlton, Vice President and Streaming Industry Evangelist at Wowza Media Systems. “We also see station journalists using their iPhones and other devices to shoot news as well. So leveraging the operational and cost benefits of an IP-based content delivery infrastructure is gaining a lot of traction with network level as well as local news broadcasters.”

Indeed, with the new generation of smart phone facilitating 4K content delivery at upload speeds as low as 4Mbps, the quality is broadcast ready. Using Wowza’s Streaming Engine software, which includes transcoding, TV stations can ingest that video stream from the phone live or they can hit Auto Record to save that footage and repurpose it later for the 11:00 o’clock news.

With industry predictions that claim that in four years more than 80 percent of Internet traffic will consist of video, developing a reliable streaming media delivery workflow now is key to broadcasters’ future. Indeed, If a local news organizations wants to deliver content to more than just its own website, they can use the Wowza Streaming Engine software or Wowza Streaming Cloud service to find and attract viewers wherever they are.

“News today is about immediacy and who’s got it first,” Knowlton said. “We’re making it easier for a broadcaster to bring in late-breaking content from alternate sources in the field as well as allowing stations to distribute this content beyond their own website.”

Wowza’s business model is to offer the transcoding & delivery software on a per-server license basis, or as a Wowza Streaming Cloud service that handles all of the ingest and transcoding remotely. Thus far the in-house licensing model has been most popular with local broadcasters, but the cloud-based service is gaining traction as well.

“I think broadcasters today are more comfortable with the idea of sending content to places other than an over-the-air transmitter to reach their audience,” Knowlton said. “They see what it can do to expand their ratings and get their content out to more people. At the end of the day that’s the real goal.”

The challenge Wowza is addressing is getting that video transcoded into all of the various streaming formats in a fast, reliable and highly automated way.

The benefits are clear. One of Wowza’s customers is a U.S-based lifestyle content provider, distributing to 400 program distributors (large and small cable companies and others) across the U.S. and internationally. Rather than set up a satellite feed, which gets expensive, they are streaming their content over a standard Internet connection. Each cable outlet has installed a small COTS box running Wowza Streaming engine software. When content arrives, the cable operators convert the IP signal to an MPEG stream for use in-house. This keeps the cost down and is as reliable as a satellite feed. They then re-package the program content for delivery to subscribers’ set top boxes, desktop computers and mobile devices.

As Wowza’s flagship product, Wowza Streaming Engine server software provides multi-format transcoding and delivery of audio and video streams. It allows the user to take in any form of content, from a surveillance camera or ENG camera or smart phone, and translate that into all of the different display formats on viewer’s playback devices. This includes iOS and Android devices as well as set top boxes and IP-enabled gaming consoles.

Video is sent to the station’s Wowza server at the cable company and it’s transcoded into multiple bit rates so you can do adaptive bit rate streaming (basically automatically adjusting the bit rate for each viewer based on their available bandwidth), like that used by Netflix and other OTT competitors.

The streaming media software is completely customizable and the company offers its Wowza GoCoder SDK that allows users to build apps like Periscope, Facebook Live and others to support live streaming from a smartphone.

The company has received requests from a number of broadcasters asking for a mobile encoding app SDK to build their own customer applications and unique user interfaces. While the Engine and Cloud products enable a station to use streaming media to promote and deliver its programs to its audience, the GoCoder SDK allows them to tell consumers to download a special app to their phone and then go shoot news when they see it and live-stream it back to the station.

The latter makes sense, as viewers can be in more places than the resource-limited ENG crew. Viewers can report a news event and then get an email from the station, which contains a URL they can click on and start broadcasting live, over IP, on the air.

“Using streaming media helps news stations get more feet on the street, and that’s good for everyone,” Knowlton said. “It takes about two minutes to get it going, and for the cost of a cup of coffee a station could deliver a 2-hour event to more than 100 people. There’s a lot of value and bang-for-your-buck there.”