The broadcast industry is undergoing significant changes that impact nearly all aspects of business and technical operations. In this Q&A sit-down, Ian Valentine, engineer and business director, Video Products at Tektronix discusses three major trends impacting the broadcasting industry, covering both content production and delivery. As Valentine explains, these trends will require that video engineers and technicians adapt to some significant changes and embrace new tools and workflows.
Broadcast television is the point where the creative arts and technology meet. It’s different from any other discipline as to operate at an optimum level, and get the best possible quality, artisans, producers, and creatives have a deeper technical understanding of their craft than any other artistic discipline. And over the years, the demarcation between creativity and technology has become blurred as members of the creative teams have found themselves delving deep into engineering disciplines.
Historically, broadcast-related activities had to located near the actual broadcast production chain. But with the advent of cloud services, many auxiliary broadcast services can be located anywhere.
Media technology must deal with highly variable demand for time-sensitive work that involves geographically distributed locations, while operating on extremely large professional media files. These inflexible and harsh demands make the agility and cost effectiveness of cloud-native SaaS particularly relevant.
Due to advances in IP content delivery and production crew collaboration, new virtual tools are augmenting the connected studio. Broadcasters are now able to customize studios and workflows with virtual interfaces that talk directly to anything that touches the IP audio network. They’re replacing hardware newsrooms with virtual mixers, mobilizing the studio using tablets and other virtual interfaces in the field, and scripting their own version of what broadcast looks and feels like.
In this series of articles, we will explain broadcasting for IT engineers. Television is an illusion, there are no moving pictures and todays broadcast formats are heavily dependent on decisions engineers made in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In this article we start to look at the human visual system and color temperature.
Amidst swirling competition and a need for new revenue, radio personalities have expanded their audiences and their reach by installing video cameras in their studios and broadcasting from remote sites related to their genre’s scope. This has been particularly true of sports talk radio shows, which use major sporting and entertainment events to draw their listeners in. They have also invested heavily in live remotes to attract attention.
The broadcast industry is on the cusp of a new era with the launch of ATSC 3.0 This flexible platform supports multiple types of encoding, which can result in viewers always getting the best available signal over a variety of reception conditions.
