Video over HDMI has proven for more than a decade it has a place in professional and broadcast TV infrastructures and its use continues to grow. Will HDMI replace the SDI interface?
The choice between systems for ATSC 3.0 audio is now down to MPEG-H versus Dolby AC-4 and there is about equal support for each system. It’s now mired in politics within the committee, though a decision is due by the end of 2015.
Interest is growing in the broadcast industry about the AES67 standard, and its potential benefits as users transition from wired to networked audio systems.
The Media Networking Alliance has issued a maintenance revision to AES67-2013, the AES standard for high-performance streaming audio-over-IP interoperability.
The inevitable merging of computer networking technology and audio distribution has arrived. Now is a good time to re-examine the assumptions and concerns that are holding some professionals back from choosing audio over IP solutions, as decisions made today will affect their facilities and clients for years to come.
The growing ability of CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) to enable live video streaming over the Internet was a major theme at the Content Delivery World 2015 forum in London on October 5-7. Vendors and operators agreed that virtualization of the CDN was essential for scaling high quality OTT services by separating network control from the underlying hardware, avoiding reliance on a specific configuration that might run out of capacity. With virtualization, a given service can call on large reserves of capacity as required to meet peak demand.
Media needs to be found, edited and delivered and each stage of the process presents its own issues. Ideally, editors need to be able to search, browse, select and bring media into edit, without copying, transcoding or re-wrapping. However, at the moment, not every edit system is able to handle every flavour of media. This situation is getting worse as new capture formats frequently appear.
When computers began replicating and replacing expensive electro-mechanical broadcast TV production and playback systems, the gravy train ended for some and started for others. Affordable digital TV production gear has slashed the ante for producers and is making mountains of television content with high technical integrity available for everyone.
