Virtualization, on-prem, and off-prem are just a few of the new terms to find their way into the broadcaster’s dictionary. Discover how IT and HPC technologies are impacting broadcast television to revolutionize your operation.
Having a collection of PCs and MACs stacked under a desk to facilitate the multitude of operational requirements not only proves difficult to operate but challenges our modern ideas around security and makes maintenance almost impossible.
The changes in workflows with increased remote production will be sustained as vaccines help ease the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic during 2021 but with some change back towards traditional workplace interaction.
The industry experienced futureshock head-on in 2020. The impact will take a long time to unwind but it’s already clear that some changes will be profound and not all of them bad. These changes include remote workflow permanency, virtual production shifts from exotic to routine and genuine efforts to save the planet. Here’s hoping.
This time last year, had anyone predicted or suggested what is now normal in live TV news, sports and entertainment, such as fake fans, laugh track-style crowd noise and regular live news reporting and interviews from reporter’s homes, they would have been laughed out of the industry. Who would have thunk?
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has had a highly disruptive effect on video production and distribution in 2020 and many agree it will be felt for several years. The inability for people to gather safely has made it impossible for full-scale video production to go ahead as it did before. Yet, the industry has risen to the challenge in a myriad of ways and learned to be more efficient in the process.
With viewers demanding to watch what they want, where they want, and how they want, it’s not surprising we’re seeing an unprecedented growth in broadcaster OTT requirements. However, the change in delivery format from traditional broadcasting is providing us with some interesting challenges.
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.
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.