Working at the limits of broadcast technology, news providers are constantly stretching systems to deliver their story first. Discover how the winners operate and quickly master the technology they value.
With the pandemic’s alarming numbers now decreasing, news anchors have carefully begun reporting from the studio again, albeit in separate parts of the building and socially distanced. However, the IP-enabled technology and remote workflows developed by equipment vendors across the industry during the worst of it have endured and will for some time. These new tools allow reporters, producers and technicians to work from home by streamlining the process of producing a newscast.
The #1 rule of live broadcasting is that things tend to fail at the worst possible time. The greater the ratings, the more likely something highly unlikely but mission-critical will fail, broadcast RF and wireless communication systems included. Count on it.
Timing accuracy has been a fundamental component of broadcast infrastructures for as long as we’ve transmitted television pictures and sound. The time invariant nature of frame sampling still requires us to provide timing references with sub microsecond accuracy.
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.
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 its core business in live sports production, Grass Valley has seen its revenue contract significantly over the past eight months but with a new integrated software-defined product roadmap, it looks to bounce back while “reducing the pain” of migrating to IP. This insight, and more, was revealed during a virtual press conference presented by company management in early October.
Changing TV station dynamics, new markets, and new technologies are driving wireless remote broadcasting link solution innovations.
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.