Point to point connections with well-designed standards have given broadcaster engineers piece of mind for many years, knowing when they connect one AES-3 audio output to an AES-3 audio input, the two will connect seamlessly and audio will pass without incident. The same can be said of MADI and analogue twisted pair. Signal routing is easy to follow using numbered cabling and system diagrams.
Broadcast is a whole new world. With OTA being challenged by OTT, streaming and new viewing platforms. Traditional broadcasters need to incorporate new state-of-the-art systems in their facilities if they want to survive.
As broadcasting moves to highly efficient production lines of the future, understanding business needs is key for engineers, and recognizing the commercial motivations of CEOs and business owners is crucial to building a successful media platform.
SmarDTV, part of the Kudelski Group, has been chosen by South African maker of hybrid set top boxes (STBs) and gateways Altech UEC to supply System-In-Package (SIP) products for the country’s OpenView HD free-to-air (FTA) digital satellite TV platform. Altech UEC will be integrating the SIP package into new HD STBs sold on the retail market to consumers of the OpenView FTA service.
Snell Advanced Media (SAM) has announced that Broadcasting Center Europe (BCE) has gone live with its end-to-end IP infrastructure at RTL Group’s new Luxembourg headquarters, RTL City.
With recent events in mind, IP-Security has jumped to the top of the queue once again. The world’s biggest cyber-terror attack wiped out hundreds of thousands of computers and many more critical files, causing chaos in train terminals, the health service and institutions alike.
Broadcast engineers have a whole plethora of tools available in their kit-bag to integrate systems. The common denominators are SDI, AES and MADI for media exchange, serial and ethernet protocols for control, and the trusted GPI should everything else fail.
The rise of over-the-top (OTT) content has made an already tricky job even more complex for broadcasters. It’s challenging enough to deliver perfect live video to traditional platforms 24/7 – now try doing it over broadband connections, to millions of consumers all over the globe.
