Television broadcasters have long relied on compelling content to maintain and increase audience loyalty in an increasingly aggressive marketplace. But with viewers now spoiled for choice, will strong content alone be enough to survive in the 21st Century? If not content, what other tools can broadcasters employ to actively engage audiences?
While international broadcasters covering this years Summer Olympic Games in Rio mostly worked in HD, 1920x1080, NBC used a fair bit of Ultra-HD equipment to cover specific events, such as the opening and closing ceremonies. The 4X HD resolution provided visual excitement to the events, even in slow motion.
KVM is more important now for broadcast-IP systems than it ever has been. As manufacturers turn to server based architectures private cloud installations have become more mainstream, requiring us to configure systems through traditional server control inputs, that is keyboard, video and mouse.
Many seats may have been empty for some of the events at the Rio Olympic Games but online audiences as expected scaled new heights. Streaming traffic for the games has obliterated records set by previous events, according to CDN giant Akamai, which delivered more video data in the first eight days of Rio than it did for all 34 days of the 2012 London and the Sochi winter games combined.
As OTT consumption continues to rise, broadcasters and content distributors see the cloud as a way to respond to an insatiable demand for new channels. Likewise, the cloud seems to be a good solution to disaster recovery (DR). Cynics, however, are quick to note that the cloud, especially a public cloud, is unproven and unprepared both in terms of security and the QoS required by broadcasters.
_460_306_70.jpg "A key requirement to supporting new transmission formats is additional bandwidth. Image: Morten N. Almeland © Bridge Technologies 2016")
The Duchess of Windsor, the American wife of the man who was previously England’s King Edward VIII, famously said: “You can never be too rich or too thin”. If she’d lived in the 21st century, she might have added: “… or have too much bandwidth”.
You don’t have to look very far to see yet another industry story on ‘cord cutting’. With more viewers seeking less costly ways to watch TV, broadcasters must be concerned about their potential for dwindling audiences.
The summer of 2016 has long been expected to be a breakthrough moment in the evolution of live streaming. Many experts believe the 2016 Summer Olympics is where that will happen.
