The bewildering number of video and audio compression formats available is difficult for those new to the industry to come to terms with. For broadcast engineers and IT engineers to work effectively together, IT engineers must understand the formats used, the legacy systems still in place, and the reasoning behind their existence. In this article, from the series Broadcast for IT, we investigate compression formats.
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Point to point connections dedicated to delivering video and audio signals have dominated the broadcast industry since the 1930’s. But migrating to IP is compelling engineers to think differently about packetized signal distribution. In this article we investigate the potential sources of congestion and the effects of buffering.
Millions of dollars of savings are being achieved as broadcasters continue to switch from expensive satellite ad-hoc contribution to the public internet. Reliability, low latency, and high-quality connectivity has been difficult to achieve and wrapped in secrecy as vendors locked broadcasters into proprietary software and centralized server systems.
To deliver efficient media solutions IT engineers must be able to communicate effectively with broadcast engineers. In this series of articles, we present the most important topics in broadcasting that IT engineers must understand. Here, we look at compression, why, and how we use it.
The term, “metadata” may be one of the most misunderstood terms in the video business. It is often defined as, “data about data.” Even that phrase does not encompass the real value of metadata when it is combined with the latest production technology.
There’s been a lot of talk about the resource efficiencies related to remote operations for live production, but the cost of bandwidth to connect all of the disparate locations continues to make this way of working prohibitive for most second-tier producers.
Protecting media systems from hacking, malware and viruses are genuine concerns to every broadcast and production facility engineer. Unfortunately, antimalware protection software is seldom used on audio and video media systems because the two technologies often prove incompatible.
“May you live in interesting times.” The expression suggests there is more than one interpretation of the word interesting. There can be no doubt that the media industry is living in those interesting times as it tries to navigate its way through a radical change in the way media is delivered to and consumed by the end customer.
