As subscribers demand more features, storage and the ability to simultaneously record multiple shows, Digital Video Recorder (DVR) services have emerged as one answer to those needs. However, a hardware solution is both expensive and short-term. A cloud-based DVR offers many advantages.
It pays to have a handle on your industry’s history. Today, few who write modern video software know that over $70 billion a year is generated in global broadcasting based on a non standards-based engineering decision made in 1953 when black and white television transitioned to color.
Pay TV operators and broadcasters struggling to measure viewing via mobile platforms could find help from firms specializing in analytics for wireless services. Birdstep of Sweden has signaled its intentions on this front by identifying video app and service providers as targets for the latest version of its analytics platform for measuring QoS across both cellular and Wi-Fi services.
The coding efficiency of audio compression is about to improve markedly because of a new MPEG audio standard—MPEG-H. This standard will permit many new and useful capabilities for those involved in television audio.
Continuous learning by staff can help your next technology deployment.
Moving to a 4K production environment requires a network with sufficient performance capability, but what does that mean?
The media industry is rapidly adopting file-based workflows in all stages of the content lifecycle including transcoding, repurposing, delivery, etc. Additional complexities could be introduced during media transformations, which if not handled properly, could lead to issues in video perceived by the end consumer.The issues are due to errors caused by media capturing devices, encoding/transcoding devices, editing operations, pre- or post-processing operations, etc. A significant majority of video issues nowadays are due to the loss or alteration in coded or uncoded video information, resulting in the distortion of the spatial and/or temporal characteristics of the video. These distortions in turn manifest themselves as video artefacts, termed hereafter as video dropouts. Detection of such video quality (VQ) issues in the form of dropouts are gaining importance in the workflow quality checking and monitoring space, where the goal is to ensure content integrity, conformance to encoding standards, meta-data fields and most importantly, the perceived quality of the video that is ultimately delivered. This end video quality can certainly be measured and verified using manual checking processes, as was traditionally the case. However, such manual monitoring can be tedious, inconsistent, subjective, and difficult to scale in a media farm.
Automated video quality detection methods are gaining traction……..
This paper discusses various kinds of video dropouts, the source of these errors, and the challenges encountered in detection of these errors.
The Switch is a U.S. based media operator offering local metro and long distance video transport services in major cities across the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Canada, to broadcast networks, production houses and major sports leagues. Among the various video transport services available to customers The Switch offers local on-demand connectivity, which has become a great success due to the company’s on-demand service model and easy, customer-controlled provisioning. The service was previously used by various media companies to connect internally between different geo- graphical sites and also to connect externally with companies offering complementary services, such as post-production houses. The success of The Switch’s metro service gave rise to the next logical step – to interconnect the isolated, local metro services and roll this out to more cities all over the country.
