AP Television News
AP Television News is the video news agency service of the Associated Press, the American newsgathering cooperative, and it is headquartered in London. Operating as Associated Press Television News Ltd, a United Kingdom corporation owned and controlled by the Associated Press, it gathers and distributes breaking-news video from bureaux around the world to television broadcasters and digital publishers. In its current form the service is also referred to simply as AP Video, the video division of the Associated Press, providing many of the world's broadcasters with a round-the-clock continuous feed of news, sport, entertainment and feature video content. For many years it was widely known by the abbreviation APTN, a name that many broadcasters continued to use long after it ceased to be the organisation's official branding.
Origins in 1994
The Associated Press decided in 1994 to move into video news, having previously concentrated primarily on text and photographs. In that year it set up Associated Press Television, abbreviated to APTV, as a wholly owned subsidiary, and it chose to base the new operation in London rather than in the United States. The London operation was given a separate legal constitution and was separately audited, while remaining wholly owned by the parent organisation. The decision to place the video agency in London reflected the city's established position as a centre for international television news agencies, with the time zone and the existing agency infrastructure making it a practical base from which to coordinate coverage of Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia for clients elsewhere in the world.
The acquisition of Worldwide Television News
The decisive step in the agency's early history came in 1998, when APTV bought Worldwide Television News, known as WTN, from its owners. Contemporary reporting of the purchase described the AP buying WTN from the ABC News division of The Walt Disney Company, Nine Network Australia and ITN in London. WTN itself had a long pedigree: it had formerly been known as UPITN, a joint venture between ITN and United Press International, and it carried the heritage of UPI's newsfilm service, United Press International Television News. Following the acquisition, the combined operation became APTN, and the two major global video news companies were then Reuters, which had bought Visnews, and APTN. The merged agency moved to its present headquarters in 1999, and in New York the WTN building and facilities at 1995 Broadway were judged more suitable than the existing AP headquarters, shaping where the agency's New York operation was based until later AP office moves in the city.
Headquarters and bureau network
AP Video is based in North London, in a former gin warehouse on the Regent's Canal called The Interchange, a building whose original function was to interchange freight between the canal and rail systems. From that London headquarters, material gathered around the world is aggregated, edited and distributed to clients. The agency has described a network of more than eighty bureaux; one account of its services refers to bureaux in 85 cities and 79 nations, including New York City, Washington DC, Paris, Rome and Moscow, as well as coverage of current-event regions such as Iraq and Afghanistan. An earlier account, from the period when Ian Ritchie was chief executive of APTN, likewise put the number of bureaux at 83 around the world, and noted that content aggregated and distributed from the London headquarters was provided to services including CNN, ABC, NBC, MBC and Fox, which took international coverage from London rather than coverage of the United States itself.
What the agency supplies
The core product is video itself, rather than finished programmes for viewers to watch. AP distributes live and edited video to clients, who include broadcasters and online publishers around the world, largely historically by satellite and increasingly by fibre-optic links and streaming. Many major broadcasters and networks rely heavily on the agency for major breaking news from around the world, because very few individual television stations can afford to place camera, editing and satellite transmission equipment everywhere that news might happen. Agency footage is typically supplied with natural sound and loose editing, leaving client newsrooms to edit the material to suit their own style and to add their own graphics and voice-overs before transmission. In addition to news, the feed encompasses sport, entertainment and feature content.
Live coverage and AP Direct
The Associated Press was the first news agency to launch a live video news service, in 2003, covering the invasion of Iraq in real time. That live product, known as AP Direct, combined satellite delivery of live video with an interactive web page providing twenty-four-hour coverage and a means for the agency's content managers and broadcasters to communicate in real time. APTN Direct won the award for the most innovative use of technology in international broadcasting at the inaugural Association for International Broadcasting awards. AP later expanded the offering, so that alongside AP Direct, which was introduced for broadcasters in 2013 in its developed form, broadcasters could also access additional live content streams from the AP Video Hub, offering scheduled live global and regional events on top of breaking news. The agency has described offering seven simultaneous live video channels to clients, together with live channels under the AP Live Choice name for broadcasters and digital publishers. Over a year, the AP has reported publishing tens of thousands of videos and thousands of hours of live video.
Broadcast services and AP360
Beyond the regular news feed, the company provides specialised broadcast services to clients, through its AP360 operation. Those services include editing, crewing and satellite feeds from news and sports events, and the provision of on-site production and transmission facilities, either through the bureau infrastructure or at breaking or set-piece news events. The value of that infrastructure was illustrated after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, when APTN managed to get a satellite dish and transmission equipment into Banda Aceh in Indonesia before the region was closed to air traffic; for a time it was just about the only live video feed point available for the world's media, and network reporters used it extensively to transmit recorded reports or to appear live in their bulletins. The agency's corporate services have also produced and distributed video news releases, a video form of press release designed for use on broadcast television, for businesses' public relations campaigns.
The archive
Historical footage is a further part of the service. The agency makes material available from extensive film and video archives dating back to 1895. That depth is explained in part by the WTN acquisition: the archive includes the film and video archives of the longtime newsfilm service of UPI, the original agency from which WTN ultimately derived. For broadcasters and producers, such an archive provides a licensed source of pictures for anniversaries, documentaries, obituaries and historical features, complementing the same-day news feed. Archive and live services together mean that a client relationship with the agency covers both the immediate demands of a breaking story and the illustrative demands of programmes looking backwards.
How agency footage is gathered
The agency obtains footage from several sources. Its own camera crews are the foundation, supported by arrangements with local television broadcasters to redistribute their material, by material shot by freelancers who sell footage to the agencies, and on occasion by footage shot by members of the public, such as the widely distributed pictures of the 2000 crash of an Air France Concorde outside Paris and of the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, which ditched off the Comoro Islands in 1996. Footage shot with broadcast-quality cameras is preferred, but quality can come second to content or immediacy where an exclusive story is concerned. The network of local bureaux also means that local staff with expert knowledge are on hand in places where outside camera crews could be in danger, as during the Kosovo War, when most journalists left Serbia before the NATO bombing campaign, and that television reporters without the budget or expertise for a full satellite uplink can use the local agency bureaux.
Rebranding as AP Television News and AP Video
Since a rebranding in 2005, the APTN name and logo were dropped in favour of AP Television News, featuring the red AP logo of the Associated Press to emphasise the connection to the parent organisation. As of 2023 the APTN abbreviation was not officially used, although many broadcasters still refer to the organisation by it. In current AP usage the service is presented as AP Video. The changes of name reflect a broader shift in the market the agency serves: clients are no longer only television newsrooms taking a satellite feed, but also digital publishers who need live and edited video for websites, mobile applications and social platforms, delivered through customisable online interfaces in multiple bitrates, including high definition.
Place in the world of television news
Video news agencies such as AP, and its main competitors AFP TV and Reuters Video News, occupy a largely unseen position in television. Wherever viewers see the same footage on more than one news station, the chances are that it came from or via a video news agency. In the early 2000s the chief executive of APTN estimated that APTN and Reuters together accounted for in excess of ninety per cent of the video news agency market, with most big international broadcasters taking both services, although cost pressures were leading some to consider taking only one. Academic attention has been limited, but a 2011 book on the international television news agencies argued that, through their agenda-setting role, they are an important but mostly hidden force shaping the global conversation about politics and international affairs. Headquartered in London, owned by an American cooperative and staffed through bureaux worldwide, AP Television News exemplifies that hidden infrastructure: a British-based company whose pictures appear, usually uncredited in the viewer's mind, in bulletins across the globe.
