In lobbying to get rid of the CableCARD, the cable television industry shot itself in the foot. Now, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has taken the lead in using their misstep to loosen the industry’s monopoly on cable set-top boxes. It is all shaping up to be a huge fight with billions of dollars at stake.
Broadcasters didn’t invent wireless. They invented how to bring wireless news and entertainment content to the public for free, and make money at it. Since the first US wireless broadcast with sound 106 years ago, radio and TV broadcasters have built the largest, most powerful wireless networks in the world and people love it. Wireless is in broadcasting’s DNA. The unique key to its future success is equal bandwidth for all.
According to a 2015 study from Digital TV Research, global OTT TV and video revenues will reach $51.1 billion in 2020.
The great promise of IP is to create a truly open and interoperable environment for the smooth plug and play of best of breed technologies. A bit like SDI in fact, but with greater potential for economic and creative benefit. There are a number of overlapping initiatives trying to solve the same problem: IP in the Live Production environment. Some fuse proprietary technologies with open standards, others are attempting to work with a mix of standards and technical drafts before committees at SMPTE. There isn’t one which has all the pieces of the puzzle to genuinely claim to be fully open, end-to-end and standards based. Here we take a close look at one of them, the ASPEN initiative, founded by Evertz and backed by over 30 end-users and manufacturers.
Dolby Laboratories has announced major partnerships that will bring Dolby Vision to your living room HDR TV faster than 4K video is becoming available. Look for it in home movie releases and theaters, too.
Despite the explosion in Over-the-Top (OTT) in the last year or so, it is still linear TV that attracts the majority of viewers by a long way. One of the major drawbacks of OTT has been its failure to address and capitalize on live content in a way that traditional live TV has done so. Live sport on traditional TV, for example, remains one of the most lucrative advertising channels available to broadcasters, yet in the OTT space revenues garnered from live sports is overshadowed in comparison. In order to bring live OTT experiences and revenues up to levels that are more reflective of live viewing demand media operators need to make live OTT as appealing, if not more appealing, than traditional broadcast TV.
If adding captions to your streaming content – whether it’s on-demand or live – feels daunting, you’re not alone. Both present new challenges that arise in step with fast-evolving formats and consumer tastes.
This is the story of one of two ATSC 3.0 experimental transmissions that took place at CES 2016. Under a FCC Special Temporary Authority permit for Channel 18, station KHMP transmitted an ATSC 3.0 UHD signal to the LG CES exhibit booth using a GatesAir transmitter and Dielectric antenna. The other CES ATSC 3.0 demonstration transmission is covered in a recent Broadcast Bridge article.
