Now that the virtual IBC 2020 has passed with hardly a whimper on the world broadcasting stage, paradoxically vendors, service providers and content producers are counting the indirect cost of the real event’s absence.
With the release of the core parts of the SMPTE ST 2110 suite, the confusion around different transport standards for audio and video over IP is settled. However, the adoption of these solutions for day-to-day use is still far from easy. While there are more and more pure IP facilities and OB trucks now in service, they take significant time to set up and are only practical when a single vendor interface is used.
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With the population of China approaching 1.4 billion, it’s perhaps no surprise that it is fast becoming the biggest market in the world for theatrical film exhibition, with the largest number of cinema screens of any single country. Directors such as Wong Kar-Wai and the stars of Chinese cinema – names like Jet Li and Zhang Ziyi – have long been enjoying international attention, but the grass roots of Chinese film and (particularly) TV production are less often encountered outside the country.
The consumer video market is growing fiercely competitive between content creators and content aggregators and OTT live and OTT VOD formats are growing increasingly fragmented. Consumers are benefiting from the tremendous choice of content and sources for that content while their tolerance for a negative Quality of Experience (QoE) continues to fall. Providers find themselves in the stark reality of having to balance getting to market faster, with greater unit cost efficiencies and with persistent QoE.
When the pandemic began shutting down TV stations in the spring of this year, journalists and producers were left to figure out how to work from home and set up technical systems they were very unfamiliar with. In many cases panic set in.
Among a number of things, the pandemic has accelerated product development timelines for remote production and the migration to virtualized IP infrastructures, supporting the ability to produce content remotely and stay socially distanced. Many of these new tools were already in place but were often still in early stages, and some were cobbled together nearly on the fly as broadcasters coped with the careful return of live sports.
Big-screen LCD TVs are not going away any time soon. Given the economy of scale, the LCDs in our homes and studios work well enough and will continue to work well enough for several more years. But given the advances in LED display technology, especially microLED, the writing of sub-micron size pixels is literally on the wall.
“‘Chris,’ she said, ‘it’s about an order of nuns who’re protecting the world.’”
