Some TV people become concerned when all their eggs are in one basket. In fact, when everything is in one basket, you always know exactly where the basket is.
Live TV is a like a magic act. It works best when the audience can’t see what’s really happening.
Visitors to IBC 2017 this September in Amsterdam might have concluded that a prediction made almost 20 years ago that over the air services such as TV transmission would migrate to the ground while those already on the ground such as voice telephony would take to the air has now completely come true. They would have witnessed the bullishness of Wi-Fi proponents combined with the low visibility of the principle wired alternatives, Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) and Home Plug powerline (PLC) for transmission over power cables.
In today’s highly competitive media environment, companies are always looking for ways to streamline their operations and speed up the processes involved in content creation. One of the most critical is post production workflows and the need to find audio and video material stored on ever-larger repositories.
It seems almost impossible to fathom now, but it was only fairly recently that businesses within the telecoms industry focused on one thing and one thing only: delivering telephone services for voice communication. It was this service that used to account for almost every single penny of revenue they earned (in the residential market at least), and by delivering this service they all felt as if they ‘owned the customer’. This focus on telephony can still be evidenced by simply looking at the names of several companies, including AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) in the US, Telefónica in Spain and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) in Japan.
The business case for migrating to IP is compelling and driven by the needs of business owners. Broadcast engineers must rise to the challenge and if they are to deliver reliable IP infrastructures they must understand not only the technology, but the differences in how IT-Network and Broadcast engineers think.
As well as providing functionality, tangible products present the opportunity of adding worth through their aesthetic appearance, cost of manufacture and development expenditure adds to the perceived barrier to entry for other vendors, and combined with low volumes, the cost to broadcasters has been traditionally very high.
At the start of 2013, BCE at RTL City was a hole in Luxembourg’s ground and in less than four years they were on air broadcasting 35 different channels across Europe and Singapore. Costas Colombus is BCE’s Special Projects Manager and gave The Broadcast Bridge a unique insight into how they made this mammoth installation work, including describing the issues and how they overcame them along the way.
