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The industry experienced futureshock head-on in 2020. The impact will take a long time to unwind but it’s already clear that some changes will be profound and not all of them bad. These changes include remote workflow permanency, virtual production shifts from exotic to routine and genuine efforts to save the planet. Here’s hoping.
This time last year, had anyone predicted or suggested what is now normal in live TV news, sports and entertainment, such as fake fans, laugh track-style crowd noise and regular live news reporting and interviews from reporter’s homes, they would have been laughed out of the industry. Who would have thunk?
With many production personnel working from home these days, gaining access to computers and systems back at the studio can be tricky, both logistically and due to obtaining the right security authorization. In many cases, a network- or software-based solution is not adequate because the available bandwidth might run out, the VPN connection does not always guarantee sufficient transmission quality, or the connection is not reliable or secure enough.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has had a highly disruptive effect on video production and distribution in 2020 and many agree it will be felt for several years. The inability for people to gather safely has made it impossible for full-scale video production to go ahead as it did before. Yet, the industry has risen to the challenge in a myriad of ways and learned to be more efficient in the process.
Migrating live and file-based video services to the cloud holds the promise of huge flexibility in deployment architectures, geographical backhaul possibilities, virtually limitless peak provisioning, pay per use pricing, access to machine learning and other advanced intellectual property on-demand, and much more. This migration is still in its infancy and will ultimately drive new cloud business models and partnerships to create viable financial common ground, but there are some critical technical challenges facing video service providers looking to de-risk the move to the cloud.
The legacy gamma adopted in 709 and 240M has recently been supplanted by two more approaches to applying non-linearity to luminance, namely the Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) system developed by the BBC and NHK and the Perceptive Quantizer (PQ) developed by Dolby.
Low Complexity Enhancement Video Coding (LCEVC), otherwise known as MPEG-5 Part 2, has emerged as de facto codec of the year after adoption by a number of broadcasters and technology companies, as well as promotion to MPEG/ISO final draft international standard in November 2020.
With viewers demanding to watch what they want, where they want, and how they want, it’s not surprising we’re seeing an unprecedented growth in broadcaster OTT requirements. However, the change in delivery format from traditional broadcasting is providing us with some interesting challenges.
