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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.
In this second article in the series we look at the IP routers Costas and his team chose, and why.
Disasters can strike at any time and in many forms, leaving facilities with severe damage and stripping broadcast data centers of power for days. Though this can have catastrophic results, many broadcasters — through no fault of their own — surprisingly don’t have plans about how to truly protect content/playout since most of their time (and money, mind you) is spent creating, managing and delivering that content. But in the wake of several hurricanes in the US this year, as well as the horrific earthquake in Mexico, media companies are in fact putting greater emphasis on securing content and making sure their station’s main and backup feeds aren’t compromised during a disaster.
The growth in online video consumption has been associated with a decline in traditional family viewing around the big screen but is now bringing about a new form of social TV where people congregate remotely via second screens. This is happening as OTT enters its third generation, according to Francesco Moretti, Deputy CEO at Fincons Group, an IT consultancy and systems design group headquartered in Bern, Switzerland.
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.
