FOX News has redesigned its news room from the ground up and have installed an army of enormous 55-inch Microsoft tablets, making your prime-time news coverage seem like a screening of Minority Report. New anchor Shepard Smith walked his viewers through the new setup in a report last night, and described the revolutionary setup the "FOX news deck."
The renovation has occurred because audiences have vastly changed in the 17 years since FOX News began airing. The "non-linear" viewers out there just don't sit and watch TV anymore. News comes faster through handheld devices: smartphones, tablets, the Internet and apps. FOX News now gets its news in the same fashion.
"Just like you, we get our news from multiple platforms," Smith said, "and this is the place where viewers can watch us sort it all out as it happens."
FOX's journalists and information specialists are being put to task by finding stories, confirming sources and shifting through the important ones all while on air, to give the process a faster and more streamlined look. The stations are placed throughout the studio, and can throw images and stories up onto the main screen straight from the tablets.
"That's where our journalists will be, using brand new tools to track developing stories and bring them to your screen as quickly as possible," Smith claims.
Smith refers to its new computer technology as BATS, Big Area Touchscreens, which uses Microsoft's PPI technology to run Windows 8 at the high resolution. Not yet officially released, the new PPI technology has just been given the opportunity to make an appearance in the wild on a nationwide news broadcast watched by millions.
Check out the report on the FOX News Deck at the network's official page. Would you like a enormous tablet running Windows like that in your house? TechCrunch says each 55-inch slate runs for $7,000, and that an 80-inch model is also available. Either I'd need longer arms or a new pair of eyes trying to use a touchscreen that big.
Update: TechnoBuffalo has learned from an anonymous source that the company behind the new Fox tablets is Oblong.
