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Nine months before the 600 MHz auction is scheduled to open and proponents on all sides claim reasons and rights to spectrum territory. The drama leading up to the big auction has all the ingredients of a ratings-winning TV show. This is extreme reality TV nobody will see on TV.
You don’t need a “secret decoder ring” to understand IP terminology. However, if you think that a DAM involves water, that SOAP is for the shower, that PAM is your cousin’s name and ESB is short for Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band, read on. You have some catching up to do.
A recent pricing announcement by HEVC Advance, one of two groups pooling patents for HEVC compression technology among rights holders, has done little to clarify the situation for device makers. The launch in April 2015 of HEVC Advance surprised many in the industry who are not close followers of the compression field since it had appeared until then that all patents would be administered by another group called MPEG LA.
Online video providers may be gaining subscribers from established pay TV operators but they are not having it all their own way with high churn rates among themselves. This applies to leaders such as Netflix and Amazon as well as smaller OTT players, according to the latest OTT Video Market Tracker from Parks Associates.
Without standards, the world would be a very difficult place to live in. There are many kinds of standards that affect almost every aspect of live – technology is just one of those areas. We can consider language as a kind of standard that allows people in one part of the world to communicate with each other. International finance uses standardised methods of accounting to try to provide a consistent framework for doing business. Currency itself is a symbolic representation of value that we use as a standard for exchange of goods and services.
So we need standards to get on with our daily lives. In our industry and many others, technological development is not regulated or centrally organised; it takes place in a free-for-all where commercial realities hold sway. But in order to build workable infrastructure for a national or international cellular phone system or a broadcasting network, these commercial interests have to be tempered by some kind of framework that allows competing energies to be channeled in roughly the same direction.
For all of last year’s talk about distributing 4K television to home viewers, there has been little real progress on making it a reality. The only place 4K technology is being used regularly is in some sports production and in the making of premium television programming.
File-based workflows are ubiquitous in the broadcast world today. The file-based flow has brought enormous efficiencies and made adoption of emerging technologies like Adaptive Bit-Rate (ABR), 4K, UHD, and beyond possible. Multiple delivery formats are now possible because of file-based workflows and its integration with traditional IT infrastructure. However, the adoption of file-based flows comes with its own set of challenges. The first one, of course, is - does my file have the right media, in the right format and without artifacts?
_460_920_70.jpg "ATSC 3.0 preliminary list of standards. Image courtesy ATSC.")
The current digital terrestrial broadcast system, now referred to as ATSC 1.0, has been around for more than 20 years. Although it has seen widespread use and success, technologies and viewer expectations have changed dramatically since the standard was created.
