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A wealth of over-the-top (OTT) media sources makes for a highly competitive marketplace, making it critical that broadcasters differentiate their offerings by ensuring exceptional quality of service (OoS).
Legacy operations like production and playout are gradually moving to the cloud as more systems connect to a facility’s IT backbone. These advances have opened the door to also moving operations-based tasks like QC and QoS monitoring to the cloud.
In a recent survey, we asked a handful of leading media facilities in Europe and North America, among other things, to what extent they agreed with the following two statements: 1. There are too many manual steps in my workflow. 2. There is potential to reduce the number of manual steps through workflow automation. Although there was a little variation between the European and American answers, the trends were largely similar, and the combined result is shown below for the first time.
At the beginning of each new year, I back up essential video, audio, photographic and text files onto SSD memory and take them to a safe deposit box at my bank. I do this off-premise backup in addition to online cloud backup and redundant back-up on a Drobo hard disk array at my office.
Using fiber optic links to interconnect RF for wireless microphones offers many benefits. Clean signals, much longer interconnect distances and easy build-out are among the advantages an RF-over-Fiber solution can bring.
Now it is the turn of IPTV operators to feel the pinch of cord cutting in the US while their cable competitors are holding firmer against the OTT onslaught. At one time IPTV was seen as the new wave undercutting the legacy satellite and cable operators, but now that it is part of the mainstream operators in this category are equally at threat from cord cutting to a combination of free to air and lower cost subscription VoD services such as Netflix.
A group of manufacturers have come together to form a group promoting a set of open standards for transitioning the industry to IP. Founder members Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Lawo, Snell Advanced Media and Nevion are initially promoting promoting the implementation of SMPTE 2022-6, audio over IP standard AES67 and VSF technical recommendations TR-04 and TR-03 as the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS).
As the broadcast industry continues its calculated migration from SDI to Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructures—and all of the targeted file transfers, reduced equipment costs and resolution independence that comes with it—many of the major equipment vendors have begun forming alliances to support each other’s efforts and ensure interoperability in this new world.
