Try our new AI powered Smart-Search!
In a time of social distancing, video professionals have turned to technology that allows them to work remotely yet collaboratively over a secure Internet connection. This remote production strategy has helped production and postproduction companies as well as video streaming, enabling service providers to set up and automatically distribute files to their desired destinations.
As the number of channels for OTT delivery continues to grow, monitoring these channels in a highly automated way has become paramount to ensuring a good Quality of Experience for the viewer. To deliver QoE that’s as good as linear TV broadcasts, the entire system—from ingest to multi-bitrate encoding to delivery to CDN—must be monitored continuously.
The complexity of modern OTT and VOD distribution has increased massively in recent years. The adoption of internet streaming gives viewers unparalleled freedom to consume their favorite live and pre-recorded media when they want, where they want, and how they want. But these opportunities have also presented content owners with unfortunate challenges, typically piracy and overcoming illegal content copying.
By sheer count of productions, the Indian film market is possibly the world’s largest for film in terms of admissions. On average, the country’s cinemas see more than 1.5 annual admissions per capita – and with a population of nearly 1.4 billion, that’s a lot of capitas – with more than 1600 features passing before the country’s censors in 2012.
With the proliferation of Ethernet networks and computers in the video world, many media companies are replacing traditional dedicated video links like satellite and microwave with Ethernet-based infrastructures. This is being done for internal contribution applications as well as for delivering content directly to the consumer.
It’s hard to object to raw recording. The last thing anyone wants is for the creative intent to be adulterated by unfortunate technical necessities like compression, and the flexibility of raw makes for… well. Let’s admit it: better grading, but also easier rectification of mistakes after the fact, to the point where the glitch isn’t really noticeable.
Any experienced master control operator or quality control manager will tell you that monitoring hundreds of feeds requires that each individual channel is delivered reliably, on time and to the exact location it was meant to go. When these signals are distributed over the public internet, strict protocols must be followed in order to ensure reliability and quality for every video service it supports.
The latest displays looking to gain a footing in the studio production arena are made from a technology known to mobile phone developers called organic liquid crystal displays (OLCD). It’s now being tested for dynamic set elements where video can be wrapped around and on top of a set piece. Other ultra-thin, shapeable technologies being discussed but not yet implemented include Flexible Open Frame OLED, In-Glass Wallpaper OLED and Ultra Stretch LCD signage displays.