Architecture of a Broadcast and Media Production Learning Center Integrating Cloud-Based Ingest and Automated News Classification

This paper presents a reference architecture for a learning center designed to support engineering education in television broadcast and media production. The proposed environment replicates a small-scale but operationally complete television broadcast facility and is intended to give students hands-on access to the equipment, software, and workflows that characterize modern newsrooms. The architecture is organized around four interconnected components that follow the content lifecycle: media acquisition, processing and planning, production, and distribution. Two original subsystems, previously designed and evaluated by the authors, are integrated into this architecture in order to expose students to current technological trends. The first is a cloud-based automated ingest subsystem, embedded within the media acquisition component, which removes manual steps from the file-transfer pipeline and accelerates the availability of mobile journalism media assets. The second is a supervised machine-learning subsystem for the automatic classification of Romanian news stories, embedded within the processing and planning component, which supports editorial organization and newsroom decision-making. Five learning scenarios are defined to illustrate how students engage with the architecture across all four components, ranging from mobile journalism capture and cloud-based ingest to control room operation and on-air delivery through a streaming platform. The paper’s contribution is the consolidated reference architecture and the integration of these two previously evaluated subsystems into a coherent educational framework. A systematic assessment of student learning outcomes is planned for future work.