Intelsat and its partners demonstrate the readiness of 4K UHDTV technology for satellite delivery
The Super Bowl is as much about sound as it is the specular images generated by millions of dollars in video gear.
One of the prevailing technology narratives across the industry is the wholesale transition of processes from dedicated machinery housed on site and managed internally to remotely located servers which offer greater scalability and efficiency. Yet the answer is rarely as simple as transitioning an entire process to the cloud, and nowhere is more apparent than in transcoding/ repurposing. Here, select transcoding vendors share advice with operators on where to place their investment. Broadly speaking they come down on the side of hybrid solutions but there are nuances.
In a modern production workflow, online tools enable different people to participate from different locations. Media files and production information, often separately stored and managed at different locations, need to be exchanged. Due to a lack of standards, producers rely on Facebook or exchanging documents via email. As a result, individual media fragments are hard to retrieve, reuse of content is expensive, and the overall production cost explodes as the number of distribution possibilities increases.
The key to solving this problem is an electronic script. It enables concurrency and systematic interaction between the story editing, shooting and various post-production operations downstream. Proper interaction reduces production cycle times and the overall production cost, it minimises the time to market, and enables the production crew to focus on maximum quality.
Just as in stadia and in cinemas where audiences expect to be able to enjoy the same connectivity on their second screen as they enjoy at home, so the airline industry is waking up to the potential of in flight broadband. Airlines want to enable their passengers to have access to this connected environment within the aircraft, allowing them to interact with both social media, email and, increasingly, on-demand and even live TV at 35,000 feet. While domestic flights in the US have long had this advantage, given the size of the territory for content licencing deals and air to ground WiFi transmission, the market is now being opened up globally making Inflight Entertainment and Connectivity a market to watch.
Media security is top of the list for broadcast executives. And the recent Sony Pictures hack illustrates that everyone is a potential target. John Watkinson looks at why cyber-attacks have become common, and what broadcasters, Hollywood and TV show makers can do to try and protect their investments.
OTT revenues are set to rocket to $42 billion by 2020, creating opportunities and threats in equal measure for media owners. As consumers are awash with great content on exciting new platforms, behind the scenes the logistics elements of the TV supply chain are creaking and starting to show their age: The old MAM architectures no longer appear to meet the new media management challenges.
Part 2 of the Digital Production Partnership’s guidelines for independent producers looking to refresh or create a file-based asset management policy examines where content should be kept and advice for organising a digital file.