Just as in stadia and in cinemas where audiences expect to be able to enjoy the same connectivity on their second screen as they enjoy at home, so the airline industry is waking up to the potential of in flight broadband. Airlines want to enable their passengers to have access to this connected environment within the aircraft, allowing them to interact with both social media, email and, increasingly, on-demand and even live TV at 35,000 feet. While domestic flights in the US have long had this advantage, given the size of the territory for content licencing deals and air to ground WiFi transmission, the market is now being opened up globally making Inflight Entertainment and Connectivity a market to watch.
Media security is top of the list for broadcast executives. And the recent Sony Pictures hack illustrates that everyone is a potential target. John Watkinson looks at why cyber-attacks have become common, and what broadcasters, Hollywood and TV show makers can do to try and protect their investments.
OTT revenues are set to rocket to $42 billion by 2020, creating opportunities and threats in equal measure for media owners. As consumers are awash with great content on exciting new platforms, behind the scenes the logistics elements of the TV supply chain are creaking and starting to show their age: The old MAM architectures no longer appear to meet the new media management challenges.
Don’t confuse YUV color space with RGB color space. The differences are critical for broadcast signals.
Amidst steadily increasing image resolution and multichannel surround sound audio, consumers now have access to the best viewing experience ever, but a company in Ohio wants to take it one step further and allow viewers to “feel” the broadcast during live events coverage.
For contemporary cutting-edge audio infrastructure, many broadcasters continue to choose AES10 (ANSI S4.43-1991), a.k.a. MADI, to transport up to 64 channels of digital audio over a single coax or fiber optic cable.
Although there continues to be some debate about whether the industry as a whole will embrace a next-generation television broadcast standard, dubbed ATSC 3.0, due to a number of technical and financial hardship hurdles (for both broadcasters and the consumer), several live demonstrations of the proposed standard’s capabilities continue to be staged at various industry gatherings. The latest such demonstration is occurring this week at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) convention in Las Vegas.
The rise of VoD, OTT and online has created new viewing habits that have caused some disruptions in audience measurement. There is a growing gap between broadcasters’ and rights holders’ need to understand their audiences’ habits and media buyers’ request for more standardized tools that can help them decide on which channel and when to buy advertising spaces. This means that audience ratings are critical for broadcasters as media buyers focus upon this measurement data when deciding which channels to advertise on and, viewership quality being equal, broadcasters can potentially charge more for slots that drive more eyeballs.
