For the past two and a half years Belgian broadcaster VRT—in partnership with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and iMinds (a digital research and incubation center)— has hosted an in-house R&D testing lab called VRT Sandbox. The project allows broadcast engineers and product vendors to test new IP-centric ideas and workflows.
Arena TV, a UK-based broadcast production company, has upgraded its entire fleet of OB vans with Lawo’s VSM control system. The VSM system creates a familiar workflow for users, and is the only control system on the market that is able to work in a fully IP-based environment as well as with other third-party equipment.
Thanks to a grant from Indonesia’s Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT), schoolchildren in Asmat, Papua now have access to reliable high-speed broadband. Local systems integrator Pasifik Satelit Nusantara (PSN) selected Newtec’s Dialog platform to deliver Internet access to the underserved rural population and surrounding areas.
The broadcast and production industry is at the beginning of a historic shift to IP environments. The real benefits of an IP environment come from virtualizing live production technology—video production servers, switchers and camera processing. That is where we reap IP’s true benefits.
From headend to backend, passing through contribution and distribution networks, IP is now almost everywhere in broadcast infrastructure, with its use only increasing. On the production and playout side of the business that’s also now set to dramatically increase. This is due to the flexibility of IP-based systems, their relatively low cost and their high performance: they are increasingly prevalent across digital video technologies and installations. However, transmitting data over IP networks is not an easy task. Transmission channel capacity isn’t infinite but a huge amount of data can be required to be sent simultaneously. Even if broadcast networks are properly structured and with enough capacity, IP packets still undergo a lot of challenges to reach their destination. Additionally, the different appliances used in a system can also be the cause of erroneous data in a transmission that operators need to detect and manage adequately.What are the sources of errors in an infrastructure?
While Arena opted to invest in an IP core for its new fleet, Sky Sport’s other regular OB supplier, NEP UK has gone a different route out of necessity. This article, a follow up to the article ‘Making The Leap To 4K Live Over IP - Under The Hood At Arena’, explains its decision.
As the industry continues its slow and steady migration to Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructures, the manufacturing community has coalesced around two initiatives ASPEN and AIMS, each of which is claimed to help ease the conversion from SDI to IP.
When the ATSC 3.0 broadcast television system replaces ATSC 1.0, the local TV station landscape is going to change drastically. Based on this first standardization effort, broadcasters will be able to deliver a hybrid mix of broadcast and broadband content, opening up opportunities for new media types and services, and subsequently revenue.
