_
ARD
NEWS STUDIO
Every evening at 8 p.m., Germany’s premiere public television station ARD broadcasts its flagship news program “Tagesschau”. What does that have to do with AMBION? Quite a lot, as it all turned out. Originally, it was planned to have an oversized, curved media wall positioned behind the presenters of the Tagesschau. The big advantage of this over a green screen: Presenters can use the content on the media wall to orient themselves spatially and react appropriately to what is shown.
At least that was the plan of the designer of the Tagesschau studio. But all attempts to implement the idea failed. In 2012, LED walls were only available without curvature. Plus there was insufficient space in the studio, so the technology that was actually used had to be as smart and compact as possible.
We developed an alternative idea on a completely new technical basis – for which we were initially simply laughed at. But a few weeks and experiments later, a prototype of the media wall that would ultimately be used in the studio was in our warehouse. With the test recordings, we not only convinced the designer of the solution’s technical feasibility, but also the ARD board of directors. Finally, “no can do” simply isn’t part of our playbook.
