Software was the big winner across the board at the recent IBC 2015 in Amsterdam. This was especially true for video encoding, highlighted by the two major acquisitions of Elemental Technologies by Amazon Web Services and Envivio by Ericsson within the space of a week.
Cloud solutions are cost and capacity-prohibitive, argue LTO Program Representatives Shawn Brume (IBM); Terry Cochran (Quantum) and Laura Loredo (HP).
Anyone who wandered through IBC hall 7 this year might be led to believe that everyone is peddling the same wares. As vendors we all have a sign somewhere on our stand saying we specialize in IP solutions for broadcasters. While Video-over-IP is a big buzzword in our industry, it’s important to realize that Video-over-IP has different meanings depending on whom you are talking to.
The UHD Forum spelt out its roadmap at the recent IBC 2015 broadcasting convention in Amsterdam and indicated how it will work with its sister body the UHD Alliance to shape the future of immersive television. There was an indication that the two groups would eventually converge into one after pursuing their parallel agendas separately for the time being. But there was also a whiff of tension even among UHD Forum members with some clear disagreements over the exact form of emerging profiles for UHD.
Traditional linear playout and viewing on-demand has evolved more quickly than many expected into the concept of ‘content everywhere’ via smart TVs, tablets, smart phones and PCs, at least in digitally maturing markets. To keep up with the pace of this consumer behaviour, broadcasters need to have a number of key processes in place including multi-site, multi-format (4K is becoming a reality now), multi-platform delivery, and increasingly media business reporting. In turn, MAM systems have evolved to manage users as well as large amounts of content and related media and data such as audio languages, subtitles and all the additional metadata, images and attachments needed for non-linear distribution.
Intel announced its membership in the Alliance for Open Media. And with that, we reinforce our commitment to open formats and announce our efforts for delivering the next generation of video coding tools. With founding partners Amazon, Cisco, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Netflix, the Alliance for Open Media is collaborating to develop the next generation video formats that will reduce the end user cost of video delivery by being optimized for the next generation processors. Video is critically important to Intel’s business. Our customers are under constant pressure to improve video coding efficiency – whether to overcome the infrastructure challenges of the next 100M smartphones in India, or the difficulty of fitting 4K BT.2020 into legacy cables, we need technologies like HEVC to enable the next generation, and we will need to continue evolution in the generation beyond. To provide some insight into the recent history of broadcast video formats, let’s consider what broadcast video really means.
The few remaining moving parts in television stations other than automated studio cameras are fans, pumps and disk drives. Electro-mechanics has been replaced by chips and buffers with settings. Maintenance engineers need a new tool box.
In a KVM system, the letter V – short for video – plays the most important role because it is the only component that is visible when transmitting and switching signals. The migration from analogue to digital image signals constituted a major challenge for KVM: higher resolutions require higher data rates. However, the bandwidth of cable infrastructures, especially when using CAT cables, is extremely limited. Here, signals cannot be transmitted without being compressed. For the benefit of their customers, Guntermann & Drunck (G&D) rely on their proprietary compression technology.
