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Growth of online services both from pure OTT players like YouTube and also operator offerings like AT&T’s DirecTV Now in the US and Sky’s Now TV in Europe is creating a boom in associated streaming devices for casting to main screen TVs. At the same time, rising bandwidth and QoS over the Internet, along with availability of suitable TV sets, is propelling this market towards 4K devices, as was confirmed by the latest data from ABI Research. Indeed by 2022 all streaming media adapters shipped in Europe will be 4K capable, according to that study, and by then the worldwide annual total will be 56 million.
Point to point connections with well-designed standards have given broadcaster engineers piece of mind for many years, knowing when they connect one AES-3 audio output to an AES-3 audio input, the two will connect seamlessly and audio will pass without incident. The same can be said of MADI and analogue twisted pair. Signal routing is easy to follow using numbered cabling and system diagrams.
Broadcast is a whole new world. With OTA being challenged by OTT, streaming and new viewing platforms. Traditional broadcasters need to incorporate new state-of-the-art systems in their facilities if they want to survive.
As broadcasting moves to highly efficient production lines of the future, understanding business needs is key for engineers, and recognizing the commercial motivations of CEOs and business owners is crucial to building a successful media platform.
SmarDTV, part of the Kudelski Group, has been chosen by South African maker of hybrid set top boxes (STBs) and gateways Altech UEC to supply System-In-Package (SIP) products for the country’s OpenView HD free-to-air (FTA) digital satellite TV platform. Altech UEC will be integrating the SIP package into new HD STBs sold on the retail market to consumers of the OpenView FTA service.
Snell Advanced Media (SAM) has announced that Broadcasting Center Europe (BCE) has gone live with its end-to-end IP infrastructure at RTL Group’s new Luxembourg headquarters, RTL City.
With recent events in mind, IP-Security has jumped to the top of the queue once again. The world’s biggest cyber-terror attack wiped out hundreds of thousands of computers and many more critical files, causing chaos in train terminals, the health service and institutions alike.
Broadcast engineers have a whole plethora of tools available in their kit-bag to integrate systems. The common denominators are SDI, AES and MADI for media exchange, serial and ethernet protocols for control, and the trusted GPI should everything else fail.