The broadcast industry is talking increasingly about the importance and role of cloud technology. Perhaps a related question should be asked, “Is the cloud ready for prime time?”
There is a lot of discussion about implementing facility-wide all IP infrastructures. Even so, there are good reasons why selecting hybrid SDI/IP video/audio over IP gear offers a smoother and more cost-effective transition to the all-IP future.
Facebook’s over statement of video consumption for the last two years has sparked fresh calls for independent measurement of viewing across all the major Internet platforms. It has also highlighted once again the challenges involved in conceiving a metric that fairly and accurately represents the relative value of views across different online properties, especially to advertisers.
Is IT, the acronym for Information Technology, still meaningful when it comes to operating media networks?
Sometimes technical managers and engineers get caught up in technology as though it exists by itself. It is important to remember all new solutions must be installed and maintained by humans—and that may require new skills.
The compression of high-quality video has traditionally been a compute-intensive operation requiring dedicated hardware. But the steady progression in computational power of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment has enabled the gradual transition of some video processing operations to software-based environments. A software-based approach can offer significant flexibility and agility improvements over purpose-built hardware, but at a potential cost to video quality or density.
The cloud is one of the hot topics in the world of broadcast and media at the moment. Every vendor, it seems, is keen to offer a cloud solution, even if some are not always clear what it means, and where the benefits lie.
Broadcast television is undergoing a tectonic revolution from artisanal service provider to industrial scale producer. As the industry moves to its mature phase business owners require a highly efficient production line approach that is scalable, agile and cost predictable, allowing creative production teams to deliver better programming and viewer experiences.
IP is the enabling technology for this revolution, not the reason for it.
