On the morning of March 9th, Bill Macbeth, Chief Engineer at local Fox affiliate KBSI hit the switch on the station’s Rohde & Schwarz THU9evo liquid-cooled UHF transmitter and, in a video posted on social media, uttered the words: “Transmitter is on, we are making power.” Just like that, they were broadcasting a new NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) signal over the air to its audience in Southeastern Missouri, Western Kentucky, and Southern Illinois.
As network speeds continue to advance, broadcasters are finding they are no longer restricted to single solutions such as SDI. Instead, new methods of reliably distributing high quality media signals are finding their way into the broadcast infrastructure.
Whether we think of it as virtual production, or just a particularly sophisticated variation on the back projection techniques that have been used for years, direct-view LED video displays have gained a hugely positive reputation in film and television effects work.
Since the smartphone era began in the mid-2000s, there has been an explosion of audience engagement around broadcast of entertainment and sports events. This engagement takes many forms including commenting, giving opinions, voting, consuming complementary content (e.g. short form video), playing along and entering competitions to name a few. Much of this engagement takes place on social media and broadcasters have been keen to look for ways to both reflect this activity into the broadcast itself and as well use social media as a means of distribution for supporting content such as short form clips for marketing and/or commercial purposes.
After two years of virtual gathering, broadcasters convening in person for this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas will see a lot of new faces due to management and staff changes at the various vendors. One notable “new” figure will be Dr. Andrew Cross, formerly with NewTek, Vizrt and now the new CEO of Grass Valley (GV).
Philo T. Farnsworth’s reported first words upon seeing the first TV image, which happened to be transmitted wirelessly, were “There you are, electronic television!” Some 95 years later, TV broadcasters and viewers rely more on wireless electronics than ever.
News content production and distribution have been revolutionized in almost equal measure by social media in an ongoing process dating back to the dawn of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the others around 2005.
A consortium of the five largest motion picture studios in the U.S. is developing the next generation of production and post workflows, using the cloud at its core, to save time and money and allow the best and brightest production teams to be located anywhere in the world yet collaborate and share files as if they were in the same room. Indeed, by the end of 2030, entertainment productions will be produced in very different ways, rearranging or inverting today’s workflow steps dramatically.
