ZDF – Germany’s national public television broadcaster - updated their flagship 7pm news show “heute”. The redisign and technical modifications of the 700sqm virtual studio cost 30 million Euro.
The goal of the new studio is to meet the expectations of the “internet generation”, therefore ZDF uses many 3D animations and effects.
Unfortunately, it will take a while until viewers will get used to it. Comments from the internet chat about the new studio were mainly negative. Comments were ranging from “to funky, boring, surreal” to “give us back the old cosy studio”.
I would say nothing to worry about, people are always like this. It should not always be the Necessity which drives inventions. if no one takes the risk of changing a good running system …. there would be no need for us to invent all that funky stuff for you!
To be honest, it is not Ventuz which powers this new studio. Most probably this will have have one of the following reasons. First: decissions and processes in german public televison take a long time. We most probably didn’t even sold our broadcast edition when they started working on their new studio. Second: By choosing Ventuz, they would have had to much money left in their budget! 
But we are good sportsman … Congrats whoever did it!
We are ready to raise the bar even higher, therefore expect us to strike back!
we are working on redesign of czech-tv news studio and this zdf studio inspired me a lot. … we will see what we can do for ventuz implementation there. but I have heard that vizRT have good possition in technical division of TV…
This may be unrelated to the original post but Is Ventuz looking to get more into the broadcast CG market? I think it’d be prudent to start a branch of the software that is more broadcast CG-like. The concept of “pages” and being able to call up an unlimited amount of pre-built pages and populate it with data via keyboard and/or data source is not part of the Ventuz philosophy at this point. I hate to bring up the name vizRT but Ventuz could very much compete with them on the CG level if they had a product like such.
“Is Ventuz looking to get more into the broadcast CG market?” Tom, Ventuz is already in the broadcast CG market – and not just for small stuff. From what you wrote I understand that you think more about how a traditional character generator such as Cyron works right? (or VizTrio). The usual CG stuff and especially automated rundown controlled template based graphics for news, sports, financial data, weather, etc etc are no problem with Ventuz and have been realized over and over.