Over the past few years we have undoubtedly been witnessing some massive changes in the media entertainment landscape. We have gone from linear viewing on a TV screen to widespread consumer adoption of multiple over-the-top services, delivering content anywhere, anytime. With this evolution has come a great deal of technological innovation based around IP delivery, which is changing contribution. Some might (and do) say that satellite has had its day.
With each new technology transition—from SD to HD to 4K— remote production truck companies in the U.S. have been at the forefront, providing clients with the latest production tools to expand their production capabilities and make live sports and entertainment telecasts the best they can be.
Not so many years ago, distribution was the most difficult part of the video-making process. Sure one could create a video, but who would see it? In those days, only a handful of television networks could show a video. Distribution was everything. YouTube changed all that.
Choosing a professional video codec is tricky. Whether you want H.264, JPEG2000 or Perseus you need to understand the complex commercial and business compromises involved. In this short video Bruce Devlin highlights some of the issues that you need to consider..
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.
