Using lessons learned from its bubble experience during the 2020 pandemic season, the National Basketball Association (NBA) continues to reimagine how it broadcasts games to its viewers while also carefully returning to traditional production workflows that have served its TV coverage well. However, there’s no doubt that various REMI methods are allowing teams to produce NBA content with fewer production personnel and fewer technical assets located onsite.
“If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” U.S. president Harry S. Truman famously said. But when there’s a cooking show to produce, audio engineers have no alternative but to improvise.
Media streaming over the internet is unique. Packet switched networks were never designed to deliver continuous and long streams of media but instead were built to efficiently process transactional and short bursts of data. The long streams of video and audio data are relentless in their network demands and to distribute them effectively requires the adoption of specialist CDNs.
In the previous article in this series, we looked at the advantages of software-KVM and how it differs from some of the VPN solutions available. In this article, we look at further improving security through end-to-end solutions.
The Olympic movement can always be relied on to push the broadcasting barrier. Most innovations in its history have been incremental such as the move to color or HD and latterly UHD. Its host broadcast division Olympic Broadcast Services (OBS) is arguably in the midst of the most sweeping set of changes ever in transitioning its entire production fabric to IP and cloud in order to meet the goals of sustainability, flexible production, huge content demands and new formats and immersive presentation. BroadcastBridge examines this including a virtualised OB van project being tested at the Winter Games.
The production and scheduling of news programs has changed dramatically in the past few years, in direct response to viewers increased migration to online content. Indeed, according to recent Pew Research, more than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital device and viewership numbers around the world show a similar move to getting their news from the Internet. That’s more than those who get news from today’s linear television.
“It’s great for all of us, the fact that we can have the two biggest events in all of sports in the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics really on top of each other. It’s a great opportunity. And as I said to the team and as you and I have talked, if we can’t get excited for that, we are probably in the wrong business, so I think it’s fantastic.” NBC Sports Chairman, Pete Bevacqua.
As users return to the studio and office the need to work remotely is more powerful now than ever. Hybrid is the new way of working and computing innovation is rising to the challenge to provide broadcast users with easy to use, and secure operations from their local PC/Workstation.
