The TV industry is undergoing seismic change with the rapid increase in multiscreen viewing to the partial detriment of the big screen and the corresponding arrival of new threats and opportunities. Some of the threats are competitive but others are security related. Some of the latter are specific to TV, such as the rising specter of live stream piracy, while others are more part of a general diversification of the cyber threat landscape, as illustrated by high profile events such as the recent attack on UK broadband and pay TV operator TalkTalk.
Five traditional broadcasting equipment vendors have come together to form a trade association dedicated to accelerating and assisting the adoption of IP based workflows within existing ecosystems. Called the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), the new body founded by Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Lawo, Snell Advanced Media (SAM) and Nevion, will encourage interoperability within emerging all-IP based infrastructures based on existing open standards.
Dutch media group, DutchView Infostrada, part of the NEP group since the summer, has announced a successful broadcast of a live, IP-based multi-camera show. Infostrada’s Cloud Production platform is based on SAM Sirius routers, Kahuna switchers and IQ Modular technology.
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A wealth of over-the-top (OTT) media sources makes for a highly competitive marketplace, making it critical that broadcasters differentiate their offerings by ensuring exceptional quality of service (OoS).
Legacy operations like production and playout are gradually moving to the cloud as more systems connect to a facility’s IT backbone. These advances have opened the door to also moving operations-based tasks like QC and QoS monitoring to the cloud.
In a recent survey, we asked a handful of leading media facilities in Europe and North America, among other things, to what extent they agreed with the following two statements: 1. There are too many manual steps in my workflow. 2. There is potential to reduce the number of manual steps through workflow automation. Although there was a little variation between the European and American answers, the trends were largely similar, and the combined result is shown below for the first time.
At the beginning of each new year, I back up essential video, audio, photographic and text files onto SSD memory and take them to a safe deposit box at my bank. I do this off-premise backup in addition to online cloud backup and redundant back-up on a Drobo hard disk array at my office.
Using fiber optic links to interconnect RF for wireless microphones offers many benefits. Clean signals, much longer interconnect distances and easy build-out are among the advantages an RF-over-Fiber solution can bring.
