It seems almost impossible to fathom now, but it was only fairly recently that businesses within the telecoms industry focused on one thing and one thing only: delivering telephone services for voice communication. It was this service that used to account for almost every single penny of revenue they earned (in the residential market at least), and by delivering this service they all felt as if they ‘owned the customer’. This focus on telephony can still be evidenced by simply looking at the names of several companies, including AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) in the US, Telefónica in Spain and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) in Japan.
The business case for migrating to IP is compelling and driven by the needs of business owners. Broadcast engineers must rise to the challenge and if they are to deliver reliable IP infrastructures they must understand not only the technology, but the differences in how IT-Network and Broadcast engineers think.
As well as providing functionality, tangible products present the opportunity of adding worth through their aesthetic appearance, cost of manufacture and development expenditure adds to the perceived barrier to entry for other vendors, and combined with low volumes, the cost to broadcasters has been traditionally very high.
Virtualization and cloud computing is taking us back to the architecture of the mainframe era. A thin client, maybe just a browser, provides the user interface, and the processing takes place at a central location. The co-location of processing and media storage gives the performance needed in a post-production environment. The lightweight, network-connnected client give producers a new flexibility as to where users can access their content. Production is a global business, and producers need the ability to work wherever suits the needs of the production. An associated download from L.A. post house, DigitalFilm Tree, decribes their deployment of Avid Media Composer for global production services.
At the start of 2013, BCE at RTL City was a hole in Luxembourg’s ground and in less than four years they were on air broadcasting 35 different channels across Europe and Singapore. Costas Colombus is BCE’s Special Projects Manager and gave The Broadcast Bridge a unique insight into how they made this mammoth installation work, including describing the issues and how they overcame them along the way.
Will AI lead us to a dystopian nightmare or is it a useful tool for the Media Industry to add value? Bruce Devlin looks at Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
Broadcast equipment suppliers continue to add new types of IT-centric functionality to their signal distribution and playout platforms, leveraging the cost and operational benefits of COTS hardware and Software Defined Networks (SDN) as a way to attract new types of customers that increasingly require the handing of hundreds or thousands of media streams simultaneously and are looking to for a cost-effective way to do it.
In this conclusion, Part 3, of our tutorial on AES 67, we examine proper connection and configuration for AES 67 links. Understanding how each of these elements fit into the overall network will make both setup and troubleshooting easier.
