At IBC, San Diego CA-based Athensa announced a joint project with Wide Network Solutions (WNS) to create hundreds of affordable and ready to use playout servers for TV channels around the globe. WNS has invested millions of dollars in developing reliable infrastructures to host ATHENSA playout solutions on some of the fastest servers in the world. WNS is a leading satellite operator.

Marco Smith, Wide Network Solutions’ CTO, says, “The aim is to create a playout farm like a render farm, where TV channels or occasional users can benefit from a playout solution that is reliable, fast, and ready to be controlled in just a few clicks.”

WNS is ATHENSA’s official business partner. The partnership allows WNS to bring ATHENSA’s state-of-the-art IP playout solutions to clients in several emerging markets which previously had no access to ATHENSA’s solutions.

Aveco and ETV Bharat won the IBC Innovation Award for Content Everywhere. The IBC Awards ceremony is the highest project honor of the global TV industry. The massive news automation project includes 24 studios and 24 full-time news channels for live and on-demand mobile viewership.

Aveco's automation system drives 24 studios and 24 full time news channels in 13 languages for mobile news consumption. The award was presented for the "News App at Massive Scale."

Launched in March, the ETV Bharat app provides the ability for users to “drill down” from national news to news from 29 Indian states and then to 725 districts across the country for hyper-local content. With over 5,000 mobile journalists (MoJo) trained and empowered with state-of-the-art mobile news reporting equipment, and with Aveco’s production control room (PCR) and master control room (MCR) automation managing the dynamic workflow for all 13 language versions, the efficiency of news production at ETV Bharat is exceptional.

Aveco also announced a new partnership with Harmonic and also announced a strategic partnership with Ocon Solutions Company (OSC), an industry-leading broadcast design company developing “software-defined master control”, and, “software-defined station operations” solutions.

Harmonic announced partnership with Aveco to simplify the deployment of hybrid on-premises and cloud workflows for playout applications. The partnership allows operators to use a single interface to control hybrid on-premises and cloud playout workflows for more efficient delivery of broadcast and OTT channels, including live streaming.

Harmonic’s VOS 360 channel origination and Spectrum X media servers provide the cloud and on-premises infrastructure and management capabilities necessary to deliver playout of scheduled and live content for broadcast and OTT platforms. With Aveco’s ASTRA MCR system, operators can easily manage on-air operations in multiple locations through a common user interface.

At IBC, the companies demonstrated how pay-TV operators can now deliver personalized, low-latency live sports experiences on OTT and hybrid set-top boxes (STBs) using Harmonic’s VOS cloud-native live video platform, a powerful UHD STB and the 3READY custom launcher application from 3SS.

BroadStream Solutions announced it is integrating Screen Systems subtitling products including VoCaption Automated Captioning and Subtitling into OASYS, providing customers with the best of breed playout system with a fully integrated subtitling system. BroadStream also announced Screen Systems will begin selling BroadStream’s OASYS Integrated Playout to their customers and contacts in Europe and Asia.

BroadStream also announced that PBS station WVIA in Pittston, PA went live with BroadStream’s OASYS Integrated Playout as their broadcast automation solution. PBS station KUAC-TV9, Fairbanks, Alaska also recently went live with BroadStream’s OASYS Integrated Playout as their broadcast automation solution. KUAC’s OASYS Integrated Playout System includes 5 playout channels with Extended Graphics capability and Secondary Recording.

The Cinegy IBC stand featured eye-popping Sharp 8M-B80AX1E 8K displays, the first 80-inch 8K professional display to be mass produced. The Sharp 8M-B80AX1E has 33 million pixels (7680 x 4320), four times that of 4K UHD and sixteen times the resolution of full HD.

Sharp's 8C-B60A 8K broadcast camera delivered 8K images in 4:2:2 10-bit via four 12G SDI outputs to Cinegy's Capture PRO real-time 8K recording software. The 8K video files were written to a 10 Gb shared NAS storage and edited while being recorded by Cinegy's Desktop Edit software and/or by Adobe Premiere Pro. The edited 8K video was played out using Cinegy's Air PRO playout software to Sharp's 80" 8K display. End-to-end and glass-to-glass was all in real time, using common PC and server hardware.

Cinegy also announced it has become a part of the Haivision SRT Hub Partner Program. A SRT Hub is an intelligent low latency media routing service built on Microsoft Azure that connects edge devices and systems with cloud resources regardless of geographic location. With SRT Hub, global media workflows connecting vendors and spanning multiple Azure datacenters and broadcast services can be defined, orchestrated and launched within minutes.

Grass Valley recently announced that India's Network18 standardized on Grass Valley's iTX Playout to leverage agile, future-ready operations.

Network18 is one of India's largest media groups. It deployed Grass Valley's highly flexible and scalable iTX integrated playout platform to underpin the transition to a standardized playout model across all its facilities. The solution was chosen for its proven future-proof features, and that it enables the Mumbai-based company to manage and operate multiple playout channels, across multiple platforms, with greater scalability, flexibility and efficiency.

Pebble Beach Systems announced it has partnered with graphics specialist Vizrt to integrate the Viz Engine into its Dolphin and Orca integrated playout solutions. A new Viz Engine software plug-in for Pebble’s Dolphin and Orca integrated channel devices will improve best-of-class real-time 3D graphics workflows.

Pebble Beach Systems also demonstrated a new Adobe After Effects integration, incorporating a plugin and pre-render workflow, designed to simplify graphics and promo production.

In conjunction with Pebble Beach Systems’ Dolphin integrated channel device under Marina automation control, this new integration manages the process of automatically rendering After Effects templates and delivering them straight to playout. By removing the need to convert Adobe graphics into vendor-specific formats, the plugin gives graphics designers the creative freedom to use any feature supported in After Effects for on-air graphics, and it eliminates the laborious task of individually rendering many different versions of a promo or graphic.

Pebble Beach also announced that Brazil-based Grupo RBS has chosen Pebble Beach Systems to provide playout automation and control all its stations. As part of the second largest commercial network in the world, RBS TV is a TV Globo affiliate group which broadcasts news, entertainment and sports throughout Brazil via their local stations, transmitting up to 12 TV broadcast playlists. Pebble Beach Systems provided an automation system that can adapt to different operating models.

Pixel Power announced it will add uncompressed IP playout capability, based on the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards, to its established StreamMaster playout technology. The development comes as a natural progression of incorporating new standards within its software defined technology platforms: StreamMaster Media Processing and Gallium Workflow Orchestration.

Like all StreamMaster and Gallium functionality, SMTPE ST 2110 will be supported as software solutions whether on-premise or virtualized in the cloud. The SMPTE ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards is a major contributing factor in the movement towards one common IP-based connectivity protocol for the professional media industries.

At this year’s IBC, SGT and HEXAGLOBE exhibited together for the first time as HEXAGLOBE Group to showcase the results of common R&D efforts over the last months. The exhibit unveiled a new, entirely virtualized workflow for linear and non-linear broadcast distribution as well as updates to our key products, including the premium VEDA MAM & broadcast playout automation system by SGT and Advanced Replay live video clipping tool by HEXAGLOBE.

The company also announced that long-time Customer, Canal+ Groupe, has confirmed their trust in VEDA Playout & MAM solutions, which will now serve broadcasting the Group’s premium and live event UHD channels. It also announced that RTL Croatia is using the company to modernize their broadcast center to High Definition.

STRYME announced successful integration at Bavaria Studios & Production Services GmbH. Bavaria Studios are one of the largest service providers in Europe.  More than 12 Bavaria Studios produce many well-known German TV series.

A STRYME VideoServer GENESIX V9 configured for 8 channels was integrated into the Bavaria Studios infrastructure to provide specific I/O formats at the server level and presently working in two formats.

Behind these productions of video and television formats are several technical processes carried out with the help of the video servers. To do this, it is necessary to adapt them specifically to the production for playout formats and handle the in- and output effectively.

Tightrope Media Systems latest entry is its new Cablecast VIO family, the latest generation of multi-format video servers for the Cablecast Community Media platform. First previewed at the 2019 NAB Show, the new technology expands on the versatility, efficiency and cost-effectiveness of preceding models by consolidating more of the platform’s rich functionality into a single hardware unit and offering broader live and file-based native format support.

Cablecast VIO provides a powerful and reliable foundation for station automation, playout, branding and multi-platform content distribution. Users can take complete control of content scheduling, publishing and playout from anywhere, on any device, through an intuitive, web-based interface. The Cablecast VIO series amplifies the Cablecast platform’s efficient workflow integration by enabling more of its software options to run together on just one server, significantly lowering hardware costs while minimizing space, power, cooling and maintenance requirements.

Broadcasters can now operate their community bulletin boards on the same server that powers their scheduling, automation and playout. Each Cablecast VIO server can run multiple instances of Cablecast CG, the broadcast-optimized bulletin board software based on the Carousel digital signage engine.

Vector 3 released a brand-new version of its VBox News Client, to control programming in live studio conditions such as news productions.

Vector 3 is fully integrated with Associated Press/AP ENPS and Octopus Newsroom NRCS as well as with some other prestigious operators in the market.

The News Client is part of the ongoing development and renewal of the Vector 3 suite of solutions. The new user interface was initially presented at the IBC 2018 and has been progressively implemented across the Vector3 product range.

These developments build on the heritage of Vector3 solutions developed over more than 30 years, with a fresh "look & feel" as well as enhancing the control operators have on the program output, they are responsible for.

This new paradigm in command and control of News and Playout operations not only increases the operational efficiency. It allows the control of multiple streams of multiple channels located in remote locations around the globe by operators in a single location.