Part 1 of this The Broadcast Bridge 2024 NAB Show BEIT Conference (BEITC) report compiled and covered virtually all BEIT sessions related to ATSC 3.0 and broadcast TV transmission. This second part provides details of other broadcast TV-related BEIT sessions covering Streaming, Wi-Fi, AI & more.

Please note that many BEIT ATSC 3.0 and broadcast TV transmission presentations occur at the same time but in different rooms than the sessions listed in this report: Proof once again that no single NAB Show visitor can see everything.

Saturday, 13 April

BEITC is quite accessible on Saturday because NAB exhibits don’t open until Sunday. The BEITC Sessions open at 10AM in West Hall Rooms W220-221, with welcoming presentations by Lynn Claudy, NAB Senior VP-Technology, and Sam Matheny, NAB Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. Continuing in the same room at 11:30AM is a discussion on ‘Application of Large Language Models (LLM) in Media’ exploring generative AI use cases. It will be moderated by Sherri Powers, Chief Engineer at Beasley Media Group.

The LLM discussions begin with ‘Television Viewership Reimagined Through Generative AI’, a paper introducing a multi-dimensional Question-Answer (QnA) chatbot employing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and large language models (LLM.) The BEIT paper will be presented by AWS India Principal Solutions Architects Punyabrota Dasgupta and Maheshwaran G.

It will be followed at 11:50AM by ‘Making Your Assets Mean Something: Evolving Asset Management Systems Using Semantic Technologies’, a paper presented by Shailendra Mathur, Vice President and Chief Architect with Avid Technology. Mathur will be followed at 12:10PM with ‘Creating and Implementing AI-powered Conversational Search to Drive Viewer Engagement, a paper presented by Naveen Narayanan, Senior Director, Product Innovation and Strategy at Quickplay.

Other Saturday sessions are focused on radio or ATSC 3.0 & TV RF.

Sunday, 14 April

Opening day for exhibits is also one of the busiest BEITC session days. At 10:00AM, sessions in W220-221 begin with a panel discussion about video workflows and latency, presented by Andy Rayner, CTO at Appear, called ‘Navigating Time - When is Real Time No Longer Real Time - and Does it Matter?’

Concurrently on Sunday at 10:00AM in rooms W222-223 are sessions about ‘General AI for Media’, moderated by Ling Ling Sun, CTO at Nebraska Public Media. Titles of papers are ‘Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning's Rising Potential to Transform Transcription and Translation for Media Editing’ at 10:00AM, ‘Concept for Generative Artificial Intelligence Structure, Strategy, and Capability for Sports Media’ at 10:20AM, and ‘Solving Localization & Compliance Pain Points with AI’ at 10:40AM. Presenters include Randy Fayan, Sr. Director of Engineering at Avid Technology, Dan Goman, CEO of Ateliere Creative Technologies; and Jesse Pitt, Specialist Leader at Deloitte.

In rooms W220-221 at 11:30AM will be a panel discussion titled ‘Quantifying Quality in Video Technology,’ moderated by Terry Douds, Broadcast Operations Supervisor at WOUB Public Media. Lakshmanan Gopishankar, Principal Engineer at Telestream will begin at 11:30AM with his BEIT paper ‘Making the CIE Chart Indispensable for Color Grading.’ Japan Broadcast Corporation (NHK) Staff Engineeer Nariaki Takahashi follows with a presentation on ‘Objective Evaluation System for 2K Video Quality Transcoded from 4K Source Using Dynamic Thresholds and Statistical Method.’ At 12:10PM, Yogender Singh Choudhary, Engineering Project Manager with Interra Systems will present ‘Elevating Video Quality With the Video Compression Score Metric.’

At 1:30 in rooms W220-221, ‘NABA: The Role of ITU in Broadcasting’ will be discussed by Matthew Goldman, Chair of the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA) Technical Committee; Rebecca Hanson, NABA Director-General; and Louis Libin, VP, Spectrum Policy & Engineering at One Media Technologies.

A panel discussion in rooms W220-221 about ‘Video Encoding and Codecs’ starts at 3:00PM moderated by Cindy Cavell, Director of the Cavell-Mertz Spectrum Division at Capitol Airspace Group. Papers include ‘Versatile Video Coding: Technical Guidelines for Broadcast and Streaming,’ presented by Lukasz Litwic, Research Leader at Ericsson, and Justin Ridge, Principal Engineer at Nokia.

Another BEIT paper, ‘MV-HEVC, the key format to stream stereoscopic content to VR headsets’ will be presented at 3:20PM, by Thomas Burnichon, Ateme VP Innovation Strategy, and Khaled Jerbi, Advanced Research Engineer at Ateme. At 3:40PM, BEIT paper ‘A Comparison of Video Encoders Across H.264, HEVC, and VVC’ will be presented by Tony Jones, Principal Technologist at MediaKind.

Monday 15 April

Rooms W220-221 at 10:00AM, a discussion will begin on ‘New Workflow Techniques’, presented by Hank Greening, Broadcast Producer with Association of Pickleball Players (APP); Don McKinney, VP Edge Division at Mobile TV Group; Linda Rosner, Managing Director at Artisans PR, and Tom Wehrle, Freelance Producer, Director, Tech Manager, Workflow Designer.

At 10:40 down the hall in rooms W222-223, ‘Developing Media-Specific Traffic Profiles for Reliable Media Over IP Network Testing’ will be presented as part of the ‘Broadcast Facility Design’ track. Speakers include Thomas Kernen, Principal Architect at Nvidia; Pavlo Kondratenko, Project Manager, Media Production over IP Networks with EBU; Levgen Kostiukevych, Team Leader, Media over IP and Cloud Technologies also with EBU; and Willem Vermost, Head of Media Production Facilities at Vlaamse Radio en Televisie (VRT).

It will be followed at 11:00AM in W222-223 by three, ‘Generative AI Uses and Video Transcoding’ BEIT paper sessions. First is ‘Unraveling the Power of Single-Pass Look-Ahead in Modern Codecs for optimized transcoding deployment[JC1],’ followed by ‘The Power of Generative AI for Personalizing Video Content’ at 11:50AM, and ‘Speech Intelligibility and Audio Monitoring in OTT’ at 12:10PM. Speakers will be Thomas Lund, Senior Technologist at Genelec OY; Alain Nochimowski, CTO at Viaccess-Orca; and Vibhoothi Vibhoothi, Research Assistant at Trinity College Dublin.

At 1:30PM in W222-223, is the Digital Online Operations session, moderated by Terry Douds, Broadcast Operations Supervisor at WOUB Public Media. In the session, Yoann Hinard, Chief Operations Officer at Witbe will present “AI Innovations in Testing and Monitoring: How Machine Learning is Transforming Testing and Monitoring On Real Devices.” Next is ‘Audience Aware Streaming,’ presented by Mickaël Raulet, Ateme CEO and Khaled Jerbi, Advanced Research Engineer at Ateme. At 2:10PM, Thierry Fautier, Managing Director at Your Media Transformation will present his paper ‘Boosting the Efficiency of OTT Delivery with State-of-the-Art Streaming Optimizations.’

At 3:20PM, in rooms W222-223 will be a presentation on ‘How IP-based Broadcast Meets 5G for Resilient and Sustainable Media Distribution,’ by Emily Dubs, Head of Technology with the DVB Project.

Finally on Monday at 3:40PM in rooms W222-223 is a presentation on a Private 5G BEIT paper titled ‘Connecting Wireless Cameras in High Demand Density Environments – Using a Private 5G Network to Support the International Broadcast of the Coronation of HM King Charles III’, presented by Malcolm Brew, Lead Engineer at Neutral Wireless. It could be very interesting to broadcast engineers who have dealt with similar high public RF traffic events.

Tuesday, 16 April

At 10:00AM Tuesday morning in rooms W222-223 will be three presentations on “Video Technologies’ moderated by Joe Seccia, Regional Director of RF Transmission at TelevisaUnivision. The first paper is ‘HDR-SDR Conversion: Live HDR Single Master Production Conversion Interoperability Challenges’ by David Touze, System architect – Research engineering with Interdigital.

It will be followed by, 'UHD 12G Design - Lessons Learned' presented by Clyde Scott, Vice President & Creative Director - New World Media at New World Symphony, and Dan Slentz, Director of Technology at WOIO-WUAB Gray TV - Cleveland, Ohio. The third paper titled ‘A Framework for Efficient Data Scripting in High-Volume Sports Graphics Workflows’ will be presented by Chyron Senior Solution Architect David Mayer, and Chyron Product Portfolio Director Nikole McStanley.

At 11:30AM, in W222-223 will be a session on ‘Emerging Technologies in Media Delivery’ presented by Stefan Cardenas and Kyle Suess, both Co-Founder / CTO of Amira Labs. It will be followed by ‘A Platform for the Development and Deployment of Software-Defined Media Processing Pipelines,’ presented by Thomas True, Senior Applied Engineer for Professional Video at NVIDIA.

At 12:10PM in W222-223, ‘The Rise of Private 5G: A Challenger to Wi-Fi and Public 5G’ is scheduled to be presented by Jim Jachetta, EVP Engineering & CTO at VidOvation Corporation.

Tuesday sessions in rooms W220-221 wrap up with sessions on ‘Data Delivery, Cybersecurity and Live Production’, ‘Broadcast Cybersecurity Precautions & Verification’, ‘Asynchronous Processing – A Paradigm Shift for Live Production: Anatomy and Consequences’, ‘Content Credentials - New requirements for media provenance labels for Gen AI content’, and ‘Panels on New Challenges and Opportunities in Media.’

Session speakers include: David Francois, VP of Enterprise Strategy with The E.W. Scripps Company, John McCoskey, COO at SpectraRep, Helge Svela, CEO at Media City Bergen, Mounir Ibrahim, EVP Public Affairs and Impact at TruePic, Mark O'Brien, President at SpectraRep, Denise Willsey, Director of Sales & Business Development at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Andrew Jenks, Director, Media Provenance, Azure Media Security at Microsoft, Judy Parnall, BBC Head of Standards and Industry, Bruce MacCormack, Chair of Project Origin, Andy Parsons, Sr Director Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe, Marwan Al-Habbal, Product Manager at Matrox Video, Rick Ackermans, Director of R.F. and Transmissions Engineering at CBS Television, Wayne Pecena, Associate Director Engineering at Texas A&M University - KAMU TV/FM, and Liam Power, Senior Systems Engineer at ONE Media Technologies.

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