The Ultra HD Forum has declared HDR (High Dynamic Range) ready for full commercial deployment after successful trials at recent marquee sporting events including the 2018 FIFA World Cup and the earlier French Open tennis championships at Roland Garros, Paris. This also marks a milestone for the Forum in establishing its Phase A guidelines as fit and ready for full time primary services rather than just temporary trials, setting the stage for starting roll out of the next Phase B.
Broadcast television has witnessed many advances in technology since the first electronic images were transmitted in the 1930’s, and none have been as influential or disruptive as IP. But are we now at the dawn of the perfect win-win outcome? Can manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and broadcasters all equally gain from IP migration?
It seems that the conversation on the growth in OTT is an old one - except it isn’t. OTT continues to strengthen, gaining more subscribers every week. As this happens, broadcasters are providing OTT capabilities alongside their traditional TV platforms, making targeted ad insertion even more crucial in the modern TV landscape.
In part-1 of this series, Challenges, we introduced the basic concepts of the technology behind live OTT delivery. In this article, we dig deeper to help broadcast engineers and technical managers understand the intricacies of HTTP and IP technology, so they will be able to design and support OTT systems more effectively.
Many broadcasters are seeing the benefits of IP and progressing ever closer to migration. But making IP systems work and achieving the COTS benefits CEO’s demand involves more than just understanding the technology. In this article, we look at the migration from the perspective of the engineers who are making IP work, where they can find the best and most reliable information, and how to make IP workflows operate with optimal performance.
_460_250_70.jpg "This Bridge Technologies’ GUI displays unique packet flow analytics of latency on dual streams in a ST2022-7 redundancy configuration.")
Recognising the extremities of the bell curve distribution and the impact large jitter variances have on picture and sound stability is critical. Only when this is understood, do we hope to be able to build reliable, flexible, IP infrastructures that will meet the demands of real-time broadcast facilities.
Are you an IT engineer having trouble figuring out why the phones, computers and printer systems work but the networked video doesn’t? Or maybe you have 10-15 years of experience with video production equipment but really don’t understand why the rack room is filled with things called “switches.” Help for both levels of expertise is just ahead.
As broadcasters migrate to IP, the spotlight is focusing more and more on IT infrastructure. Quietly in the background, IT has been making unprecedented progress in infrastructure design to deliver low latency high-speed networks, and new highly adaptable business models, to make real-time video and audio work in IT infrastructures.
