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Visitors to IBC 2017 this September in Amsterdam might have concluded that a prediction made almost 20 years ago that over the air services such as TV transmission would migrate to the ground while those already on the ground such as voice telephony would take to the air has now completely come true. They would have witnessed the bullishness of Wi-Fi proponents combined with the low visibility of the principle wired alternatives, Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) and Home Plug powerline (PLC) for transmission over power cables.
In today’s highly competitive media environment, companies are always looking for ways to streamline their operations and speed up the processes involved in content creation. One of the most critical is post production workflows and the need to find audio and video material stored on ever-larger repositories.
It seems almost impossible to fathom now, but it was only fairly recently that businesses within the telecoms industry focused on one thing and one thing only: delivering telephone services for voice communication. It was this service that used to account for almost every single penny of revenue they earned (in the residential market at least), and by delivering this service they all felt as if they ‘owned the customer’. This focus on telephony can still be evidenced by simply looking at the names of several companies, including AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) in the US, Telefónica in Spain and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) in Japan.
The business case for migrating to IP is compelling and driven by the needs of business owners. Broadcast engineers must rise to the challenge and if they are to deliver reliable IP infrastructures they must understand not only the technology, but the differences in how IT-Network and Broadcast engineers think.
As well as providing functionality, tangible products present the opportunity of adding worth through their aesthetic appearance, cost of manufacture and development expenditure adds to the perceived barrier to entry for other vendors, and combined with low volumes, the cost to broadcasters has been traditionally very high.
At the start of 2013, BCE at RTL City was a hole in Luxembourg’s ground and in less than four years they were on air broadcasting 35 different channels across Europe and Singapore. Costas Colombus is BCE’s Special Projects Manager and gave The Broadcast Bridge a unique insight into how they made this mammoth installation work, including describing the issues and how they overcame them along the way.
Broadcast equipment suppliers continue to add new types of IT-centric functionality to their signal distribution and playout platforms, leveraging the cost and operational benefits of COTS hardware and Software Defined Networks (SDN) as a way to attract new types of customers that increasingly require the handing of hundreds or thousands of media streams simultaneously and are looking to for a cost-effective way to do it.
The biggest challenge facing broadcasters is how to embrace mobile phones at both ends of the content spectrum, for creation and viewing, rather than rushing headlong into immersive TV for the big screen.
