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In a time of social distancing, video professionals have turned to technology that allows them to work remotely yet collaboratively over a secure Internet connection. This remote production strategy has helped production and postproduction companies as well as video streaming, enabling service providers to set up and automatically distribute files to their desired destinations.
German pay TV operator Sky Deutschland has combined with Spanish telco Telefonica for 5G Broadcast of a live sports event from camera to client, claiming this to be a first for Europe.
TV audience measurement has been moving steadily from households to individuals in line with the decline in family viewing around the big screen and rise in OTT consumption on connected devices.
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.
The complexity of modern OTT and VOD distribution has increased massively in recent years. The adoption of internet streaming gives viewers unparalleled freedom to consume their favorite live and pre-recorded media when they want, where they want, and how they want. But these opportunities have also presented content owners with unfortunate challenges, typically piracy and overcoming illegal content copying.
With the proliferation of Ethernet networks and computers in the video world, many media companies are replacing traditional dedicated video links like satellite and microwave with Ethernet-based infrastructures. This is being done for internal contribution applications as well as for delivering content directly to the consumer.
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.
There was a time, not too long ago, when 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) IP switching was only considered for IT data centers moving large amounts of financial and military data. With the growth of media and the urgent need for remotely controlled production infrastructures, 100 Gb/s is no longer a far off dream for content distribution system engineers and has become a slow-but-steadily emerging contribution reality that meets the capacity needs of today’s bandwidth-hungry media industry.
