Without standards, the world would be a very difficult place to live in. There are many kinds of standards that affect almost every aspect of live – technology is just one of those areas. We can consider language as a kind of standard that allows people in one part of the world to communicate with each other. International finance uses standardised methods of accounting to try to provide a consistent framework for doing business. Currency itself is a symbolic representation of value that we use as a standard for exchange of goods and services.
So we need standards to get on with our daily lives. In our industry and many others, technological development is not regulated or centrally organised; it takes place in a free-for-all where commercial realities hold sway. But in order to build workable infrastructure for a national or international cellular phone system or a broadcasting network, these commercial interests have to be tempered by some kind of framework that allows competing energies to be channeled in roughly the same direction.
For all of last year’s talk about distributing 4K television to home viewers, there has been little real progress on making it a reality. The only place 4K technology is being used regularly is in some sports production and in the making of premium television programming.
File-based workflows are ubiquitous in the broadcast world today. The file-based flow has brought enormous efficiencies and made adoption of emerging technologies like Adaptive Bit-Rate (ABR), 4K, UHD, and beyond possible. Multiple delivery formats are now possible because of file-based workflows and its integration with traditional IT infrastructure. However, the adoption of file-based flows comes with its own set of challenges. The first one, of course, is - does my file have the right media, in the right format and without artifacts?
_460_920_70.jpg "ATSC 3.0 preliminary list of standards. Image courtesy ATSC.")
The current digital terrestrial broadcast system, now referred to as ATSC 1.0, has been around for more than 20 years. Although it has seen widespread use and success, technologies and viewer expectations have changed dramatically since the standard was created.
Just when I thought it was going to be safe to go in the water, out comes a survey and a statement that Live over IP is still 5 to 10 years away. Really?
Changing channels is expensive. At a minimum, it will require a new antenna. Who’s going to pay for it and when?
Revenues of broadcast (linear) encoders are expected to decline by 21% in the distribution market and by 10% in the contribution market over the next 5 years, a new report from Futuresource Consulting has found.
OTT services are taking off with increased rates of growth driven by more content, more devices, more subscribers and more advertisers. In the last 12 months alone, OTT has grown to $9-12 billion in global revenues, with $1.9 billion of those revenues coming from emerging markets, according to a report from PWC. Viewers are slowly but steadily cutting the cord on traditional cable services in favor of broadband connections and OTT services, driving a new living room plus mobile experience.
