The video industry is going through a period of acceleration fuelled by the internet as a catalyst. According to an annual survey by Cisco, video will account for roughly 80% of all traffic by 2020 - or nearly a million minutes of HD video sent every second. While there will be plenty of formats circulating, the networking giant suggests that 20% of it will be UHD/4K. However, today’s networks are finite; for content owners, TV service providers and ISP’s, the main challenge consists in deciding how to compress, secure and deliver content to a global audience of 2.8 billion IP enabled people.
This leads us to questioning what the codec of the future will look like, and whether it is already here. When it comes to the codec landscape, there is still a great deal of fragmentation. The main incumbents are the VP series, the MPEG family and its latest derivative HEVC. Although offering various strengths, weaknesses and directions, they are all intertwined around content requirements, technology advancement and industry rivalries.
When media organizations combine various types of storage — high-performance disk, solid state drives, object storage, tape and the public cloud — with data management technology in a multi-tier storage strategy, they are in the best possible position to maximize the cost, access, and performance benefits of storage across all workflow areas.
Back in the day, the analog waveform monitor and vectorscope were the essential tools of the trade for video engineers. Fast-forward a few decades and signals that were once based on pulses have been replaced by digital SDI signals — and soon, those SDI signals will be replaced by Ethernet packets. With the new SMPTE ST 2110 standard for uncompressed IP video and audio about to come online, engineers need to learn all they can about the standard called Ethernet.
The AES67 standard is sometimes misunderstood as the specifications on how all professional digital audio gear is supposed to work and interconnect. Not exactly. In fact, AES67 simply defines the requirements for high-performance AoIP (Audio-over-IP) interoperability. A manufacturer can implement AES67 anyway it wants, and there’s the rub.
Does your test bench need a refresh? IBC 2017 is the best place to see the latest in new video, audio, RF and broadcast test and measurement technology.
In its essence, a Media Management system is not built to generate revenue for organisations. The implementation of one can, however, streamline workflows and free-up time for revenue-generating activities. Of course, every organisation is different and so that means what they need from a solution will also be drastically different. As long as video content is being produced (and it is doing so at an unprecedented rate), it will require organisation and management. A media management system remains the best way to do this.
Spinning disk (HDD) and flash storage (SSD) drives are nearly the same cost these days, so it’s no surprise that broadcasters are turning increasingly to SSDs for long-term storage of our most critical media files. But did you know that SSDs and camera memory cards should be powered up from time to time, to maintain a high writing speed and reliable data storage?
Since the start of the millennium, TV and video services have changed enormously. Along with the changes to the content itself, the infrastructure used to create, process and deliver that content has also changed. However, the rate of transformation is about to increase significantly, with radical changes to multiple facets happening concurrently. The first digital TV services were Standard Definition (SD) and encoded as MPEG-2. Since then, there has been a major shift towards HD, mostly in MPEG-4 AVC and now the early stages of Ultra-High Definition (UHD) using the latest compression standard: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Already some SD services are starting to be discontinued and, where SD is still needed, down-conversion from HD is becoming the norm. As each major technology shift is expensive – in terms of content creation, production and consumer devices – it therefore makes sense to have steps where there is a meaningful value resulting from a combination of changes that can occur together.
