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.
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KT Skylife, South Korea’s largest satellite broadcaster, has chosen the Alticast Ambient TV platform as the platform for Telebee, its end-to-end turnkey OTT service.
Differing approaches to providing audio solutions are emerging in the broadcast world. Audio over IP is a given, but where to start and which vendors to choose are proving tough decisions to make, especially as the hardware investment can have a ten-year life expectancy. And moving from an analogue, MADI or AES system can be a daunting task for any broadcaster.
If there’s one thing that became very apparent during the Mayweather-McGregor pay-per-view experience, it’s that delivering live streaming premium events to large-scale audiences is inherently difficult. And notoriously unpredictable.
