The SRT Alliance, a community of over 450 solution providers supporting the SRT Open Source project, announced the completion of the SRT InterOp Fall 2020 Plugfest.
After a year like 2020, predicting the future is scary business. However there are several leading-edge technologies—many borrowed from the IT and consumer-facing industries—that certainly look to make a significant impact on video production and broadcasting in 2021. Here are some, in no particular order, that will see continued implementation and streamline production and distribution workflows. To date we’ve seen these new tools begin to alter the way video production and distribution is done, helping the industry move forward and media businesses grow, and that’s certain to continue in new and exciting ways.
The industry experienced futureshock head-on in 2020. The impact will take a long time to unwind but it’s already clear that some changes will be profound and not all of them bad. These changes include remote workflow permanency, virtual production shifts from exotic to routine and genuine efforts to save the planet. Here’s hoping.
This time last year, had anyone predicted or suggested what is now normal in live TV news, sports and entertainment, such as fake fans, laugh track-style crowd noise and regular live news reporting and interviews from reporter’s homes, they would have been laughed out of the industry. Who would have thunk?
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According to International Civil Aviation Organization rules, if an airliner transmits a certain four-digit transponder code, the world should assume that it is being hijacked. The 2019 film 7500, directed by Patrick Vollrath, takes that code as its title and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Aylin Tezel and Carlo Kitzlinger as the crew of an airliner during a hijack attempt.
With many production personnel working from home these days, gaining access to computers and systems back at the studio can be tricky, both logistically and due to obtaining the right security authorization. In many cases, a network- or software-based solution is not adequate because the available bandwidth might run out, the VPN connection does not always guarantee sufficient transmission quality, or the connection is not reliable or secure enough.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has had a highly disruptive effect on video production and distribution in 2020 and many agree it will be felt for several years. The inability for people to gather safely has made it impossible for full-scale video production to go ahead as it did before. Yet, the industry has risen to the challenge in a myriad of ways and learned to be more efficient in the process.
Migrating live and file-based video services to the cloud holds the promise of huge flexibility in deployment architectures, geographical backhaul possibilities, virtually limitless peak provisioning, pay per use pricing, access to machine learning and other advanced intellectual property on-demand, and much more. This migration is still in its infancy and will ultimately drive new cloud business models and partnerships to create viable financial common ground, but there are some critical technical challenges facing video service providers looking to de-risk the move to the cloud.
