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Since the dawn of television, studios around the globe have relied on coaxial cables to connect the broadcast world: cameras to recorders to mixers to routers to encoders. But studio coax may be on the brink of extinction. Like their colleagues in headends and uplinks, video engineers are swapping 75-ohm coax for IP cables.
Over the decades from our industry’s move from analog to digital based technology, codecs (encoders and decoders) have played a key role in the capture, editing, and distribution of video media. The MPEG-2 codec has supported all three tasks. Camera oriented codecs have moved from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 (H.264). Distribution has followed two paths. Television program distribution continues to employ MPEG-2. Internet distribution immediately went to progressive video encoded using H.264 because the codec is about 2X more efficient than MPEG-2. The newest distribution format is H.265 or HEVC (high efficiency video codec).
Forensic watermarking the key to combating OTT stream piracy
Is the rush of interest in Ultra HD a flash in the pan, or will we see complete broadcast chains from the camera to the home? If you attended NAB this year you would be forgiven for thinking that every broadcaster in the world will be moving to 4K in the next six months, such was the frenzy of new products. The move to 4K won’t happen that quickly, but Ultra HD transformations will happen in the very near future, and broadcasters and production companies should be investing sooner rather than later.
How can we maintain flawless multi-channel broadcasting and multi-platform streaming without giving operators information overload? Monitoring by exception is widely accepted as a vital capability. But to gain all its benefits, the monitoring system needs to interpret more than just the hardware and software error messages. It needs to understand what is passing through the system, too.
As consumer demand for video continues to increase, the range of delivery models expands and provides us with more ways to consume it. The challenge facing today’s broadcasters and service providers is to keep pace with this explosion in demand, and to anticipate future delivery models and behavioral trends. Whilst computer and storage clouds promise to supplement and ultimately replace today’s media factories, for these implementations to be truly beneficial, the applications and solutions they deploy must be designed and built for the virtual environment.In this article we explore how these technologies apply to ‘the guardian of the cash register’ within the broadcast facility: the playout automation system.
