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OTT delivery continues to expand to meet the relentless growing consumer demand. This trend shows no chance of abating and technologists are continually looking to innovation to scale infrastructures accordingly. In this sponsors perspective, Ryan Nicometo, SVP of Product for Vecima, presents the OTT Scale – Maturity Quadrant to help decision makers clearly see the potential technical challenges and opportunities to meet the demands of OTT delivery.
It’s one thing to be confronted by a big pile of technology and to be confused by it. It’s another to know something about that technology and conclude that things could be a lot simpler than they are. That’s the reaction a lot of people have to color and brightness handling in modern cameras which offer more than enough options to make things confusing. Clearly, we need standardization, but with each camera manufacturer keen to promote the benefits of its proprietary approach, it seems pretty unlikely that we’ll one day find that every camera is outputting signals and files that can be treated identically.
It’s all very well reading all this theory about colorimetry, but what can be done in practice? First of all, it is necessary to consider that imaging, be it still or moving, is a creative process that relies totally on technology. Wherever that happens, there are always two different ways of thinking about choices: objective and subjective.
20 years ago, broadcast television went through an evolution as it transitioned from analog to digital distribution. This migration was driven by the demand for larger channel counts and spectrum reallocation. Since that transition, another, even more significant sea change has occurred, the internet.
Whether we’re routing signals or remotely operating equipment, the need for reliable system control is one of the most important aspects of a broadcast facility. But as we migrate to IP, some of the working practices we took for granted with SDI operation don’t necessarily transfer and this is most evident in signal routing.
The CRC (cyclic redundancy check) was primarily an error detector, but it did allow some early error correction systems to be implemented.
There are many different CRCs but they all work in much the same way, which is that the data to be protected are divided by the CRC polynomial. This was done serially by shifting the data bits into the CRC generator at the same time as they were being written to a medium such as disk or tape or sent into a serial transmission line.
For many years broadcasters have been working with static systems that are difficult to change and upgrade. Although we have video and audio routing, the often-tangled mess of jackfield patch-cords is testament to how flexible broadcast systems really need to be to meet the demands of modern program making.
SDI is one of those technologies that is so well established and ubiquitous it can almost be taken for granted.
