IP networking is taking the radio and broadcast industry by storm, but as a method of distributing data, it has been available since the 1970’s. So, what are IP Networks? And why have they become so popular recently?
Consumers in the digital age are quick to adapt new media consumption habits as new media and methods of accessing it and interacting with it evolve. Every media technology must innovate and compete or become obsolete. For broadcast television, this challenge is practically existential. The broadcast model of one-to-many for television (and radio) dominated the second half of the 20th century. But the introduction of cable and satellite TV and the Internet enabled not only a direct one-on-one relationship between a media source and consumers but tailored personalized services and offerings that bolster “stickiness” or loyalty.
The broadcast industry is undergoing significant changes that impact nearly all aspects of business and technical operations. In this Q&A sit-down, Ian Valentine, engineer and business director, Video Products at Tektronix discusses three major trends impacting the broadcasting industry, covering both content production and delivery. As Valentine explains, these trends will require that video engineers and technicians adapt to some significant changes and embrace new tools and workflows.
Broadcast television is the point where the creative arts and technology meet. It’s different from any other discipline as to operate at an optimum level, and get the best possible quality, artisans, producers, and creatives have a deeper technical understanding of their craft than any other artistic discipline. And over the years, the demarcation between creativity and technology has become blurred as members of the creative teams have found themselves delving deep into engineering disciplines.
Historically, broadcast-related activities had to located near the actual broadcast production chain. But with the advent of cloud services, many auxiliary broadcast services can be located anywhere.
Media technology must deal with highly variable demand for time-sensitive work that involves geographically distributed locations, while operating on extremely large professional media files. These inflexible and harsh demands make the agility and cost effectiveness of cloud-native SaaS particularly relevant.
Due to advances in IP content delivery and production crew collaboration, new virtual tools are augmenting the connected studio. Broadcasters are now able to customize studios and workflows with virtual interfaces that talk directly to anything that touches the IP audio network. They’re replacing hardware newsrooms with virtual mixers, mobilizing the studio using tablets and other virtual interfaces in the field, and scripting their own version of what broadcast looks and feels like.
In this series of articles, we will explain broadcasting for IT engineers. Television is an illusion, there are no moving pictures and todays broadcast formats are heavily dependent on decisions engineers made in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In this article we start to look at the human visual system and color temperature.
