Broadcasters used to predominantly deliver SD and HD linear content. Today, consumer expectations for high-quality video on every screen, including on-demand, have propelled the industry toward adopting a more flexible and efficient approach to video production and distribution.
IP video over Wi-Fi provided a solid new signal transport solution at a fraction of most wireless link costs. Wi-Fi was easy. The challenge was finding available devices to convert camera HDMI into IP for Wi-Fi transport, and decoders to convert IP back to HDMI for the production switcher.
Robotic tape library technology has been proven over three decades across thousands of users demanding the highest performance and reliability standards. Additionally, LTO tape technology has been perfected through 15 years, nearly 7 generations, and millions of units in production.
_460_307_70.jpg "Video engineers may recall tape libraries were like this film storage. Finding something was difficult. Image courtesy Irish Film Institute")
In 2007, it was estimated that the planet had stored 275 zettabytes (or 10 to the 1021) of data - the equivalent of a stack of CDs reaching from earth to beyond the moon! And in a single generation, our planet will add more information than in all of recorded history, some 40 trillion gigabytes of digital information. But, that data is delicate and easily lost.
UHD, 4K, 6K, 8K…the proliferation of high-resolution formats and files, along with the growing number of skillsets that can collaborate on projects, can push storage bandwidth and capacities beyond their limits. With millions of assets available to potentially hundreds of creatives, resource contention across storage and lack of sophisticated media management tools become a major issue. Efficient, reliable and high-availability media storage, normally reserved for enterprise-class applications, is fast becoming the requirement across all levels for production and post.
Anyone who says engineering live field production is a breeze isn’t serious.
While it is easy to mount multiple wireless GoPro cameras around an event area.The real issue becomes how to accurately switch between them. Fortunately, there now is a solution.
Today’s standard industrial IT infrastructure has already overtaken the technology of AES/EBU, MADI and TDM routers in terms of performance, cost and flexibility. The rate of development of IT systems, fuelled as it is by a multi-billion dollar industry many times the size of the broadcast industry, is certain to widen this gap in the future. Over the next few years IT infrastructure will replace current broadcast infrastructure, delivering additional flexibility, better scalability and significantly lower costs.
