Earlier this year I had the honor of taking office as the President of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), a position I will hold until the end of 2018. It is a truly exciting role; SMPTE has worked tirelessly to address the industry’s growth and to provide standards – in concept and practice – to enhance the current and future work of engineers, creatives and professionals. Its work has been highly influential, with the embrace of software-defined networking and media processing, and the rise of a fully connected world illustrating the extraordinary advances we have enabled in the evolution of TV and media.
SMPTE ST 2110 is currently in final draft and possibly will soon be published. Different from previous SMPTE standards, SMPTE 2110 is a Family of Standards covering live production based on IP. However, because it is still under wraps in the secret world of committee, there is scant information on where things stand This article will provide some important background.
There are any number of media conventions, conferences, trade shows and technical meetings across the world, but before last year there was only one technology retreat, HPA.
Growth of online services both from pure OTT players like YouTube and also operator offerings like AT&T’s DirecTV Now in the US and Sky’s Now TV in Europe is creating a boom in associated streaming devices for casting to main screen TVs. At the same time, rising bandwidth and QoS over the Internet, along with availability of suitable TV sets, is propelling this market towards 4K devices, as was confirmed by the latest data from ABI Research. Indeed by 2022 all streaming media adapters shipped in Europe will be 4K capable, according to that study, and by then the worldwide annual total will be 56 million.
Splitting your media into individual components improves automation, reduces costs and increases the volume of media you can process. So how do you switch to componentized working when all of your workflows use interleaved media? In this continuing series of educational video clips, Bruce Devlin explains the technology behind automated content processing workflows and IMF.
Point to point connections with well-designed standards have given broadcaster engineers piece of mind for many years, knowing when they connect one AES-3 audio output to an AES-3 audio input, the two will connect seamlessly and audio will pass without incident. The same can be said of MADI and analogue twisted pair. Signal routing is easy to follow using numbered cabling and system diagrams.
Media asset management vendors are having to evolve as workflows move to the cloud. One way they are doing so is to segment part of their product offer into orchestration but – just as with MAM - it’s not entirely clear that everyone means the same thing when they use the term. The Broadcast Bridge asks a number of MAM vendors and consultants for their view on whether orchestration is a MAM by any other name.
As broadcasting moves to highly efficient production lines of the future, understanding business needs is key for engineers, and recognizing the commercial motivations of CEOs and business owners is crucial to building a successful media platform.
