A few years ago, on a visit to the CBS Broadcast Center in New York City, a visitor and host were walking a hallway that seemed longer than a crosstown Manhattan block. Both sides of the hallway sported heavy cable races hung from the ceiling, each with a cross section of a foot square, brimming with cables.
The EBU (European Broadcasting Union) has acknowledged that public service media (PSM) face a major challenge staying competitive or even remaining relevant under the onslaught from competitors from all directions, including new sources of TV series and other content. The EBU has called for substantial regulatory reform to help PSMs meet these challenges.
European cable operators are ending 2016 in good health but reliant on broadband subscribers to maintain modest revenue growth as TV business stagnates or declines. This is a key finding of the 2016 European Broadband Cable Yearbook published by analytics group IHS Markit and Cable Europe, the European cable trade association.
While some cloud-first post services are developing a solid business, many conventional facilities remain reluctant to remote host some or all of a client project. Leading facilities share their input into whether cloud is having an impact on their investments and workflow.
In the last article, we looked at Quality of Service in IT networks. In this article, we continue the theme of looking at a network from a broadcast engineers’ point of view so they can better communicate with the IT department, and look at the benefits of sending audio over IP.
Copyright infringement is a big problem for broadcasters transmitting Hollywood block buster films. Compromising film revenues, unscrupulous staff can easily copy films to USB disc drives and distribute them illegally on BitTorents and other public distribution systems.
As the mission of television stations evolves, the underlying technology of routing video, audio, data, sync, time of day, tally and metadata through broadcast plants must also evolve. But does that mean you need an all IP infrastructure? Maybe not.
How does one prevent network problems? The first thing is to understand what’s going on in the network. That may sound obvious – but, in fact, for anyone coming from the world of SDI, it presents more of a challenge than might be expected. The fact is that IP is a very different kind of animal.
