The importance of data for the media and entertainment industry was front and center at this year’s NAB conference in Las Vegas. The theme even sparked a news article headline, “Content is King but Data is Heir to the Throne.”
The stars are aligning for a new era of immersive audio in storytelling. Audiobook sales are steadily growing, the popularity of non-musical audio in personal podcasts is exploding and immersive audio technology is making compelling audio cheaper and easier to produce.
The HPA Retreat took place in February in Palm Springs, CA. Part 1 of this two-part series can be found in the link at the end of this article.
Earlier this year I had the honor of taking office as the President of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), a position I will hold until the end of 2018. It is a truly exciting role; SMPTE has worked tirelessly to address the industry’s growth and to provide standards – in concept and practice – to enhance the current and future work of engineers, creatives and professionals. Its work has been highly influential, with the embrace of software-defined networking and media processing, and the rise of a fully connected world illustrating the extraordinary advances we have enabled in the evolution of TV and media.
There are any number of media conventions, conferences, trade shows and technical meetings across the world, but before last year there was only one technology retreat, HPA.
What’s old is new again. An ironic confluence of interrelated events — one that brought ribbon microphones to the front and center of broadcasting in the 1930s and to seemingly lose favor in the 1960s — is back again after 85 years.
Point to point connections with well-designed standards have given broadcaster engineers piece of mind for many years, knowing when they connect one AES-3 audio output to an AES-3 audio input, the two will connect seamlessly and audio will pass without incident. The same can be said of MADI and analogue twisted pair. Signal routing is easy to follow using numbered cabling and system diagrams.
Broadcast is a whole new world. With OTA being challenged by OTT, streaming and new viewing platforms. Traditional broadcasters need to incorporate new state-of-the-art systems in their facilities if they want to survive.
