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Consolidation is a sure sign of a maturing market and this was in evidence for OTT delivery at IBC 2016. Many of the companies that first emerged as OTT specialists have been acquired, as well as those associated with cloud based delivery, software encoding and virtualization. Envivio is now part of Ericsson for example while Elemental has been acquired by Amazon Web Services, both primarily involved in software transcoding.
This year’s IBC in Amsterdam witnessed a spate of discussions and partnership announcements between providers of various components across the OTT ecosystem in a bid to assemble complete end-to-end packages. While a few players can offer all components, most of the rest cover just part of the spectrum, splitting loosely between the front end and back end. The front end embraces the UI (User Interface), playout, content curation and navigation, while the back end covers billing, subscriber management, monetization, content management, aggregation, encoding and encryption. Analytics spans both since it requires data from, and generates actions across, both domains, which is one reason why there is so much activity joining the two together.
IBC is such a large event, it is impossible to see all the stands, exhibits and sessions. And, with more than 55,000 attendees, it is sometimes hard to get close enough to get your questions answered. These inside reports may help you see some of the highlights you might have missed.
Germany-based System integrators Broadcast Solutions GmbH has signed an order to design and build five new UHD OB Vans for NEP Europe, one of which, the company said, will be likely Europe’s largest ever.
IBC2016 was a great success by any measure, says CEO Michael Crimp.
Tascam’s new DR-100mkIII may be the best portable audio recorder design to come along since the category began over a decade ago.
As IBC 2016 winds down, The Broadcast Bridge asked Telestream president and CEO, Dan Castles, for his thoughts on the growing phenomena of video streaming. While technology can make it easy, he notes that there is more to creating and delivering good content than just ‘point and shoot’.
China Central Television (CCTV) is preparing to put a new audio OB van into service, simultaneously raising its sound production values and field testing the latest Lawo broadcast technologies.
Megahertz has announced that it has delivered a new hybrid fibre and satellite UHD links truck to BT TVOB, the outside broadcast arm of BT Media & Broadcast. The new truck (known as TES52), will be showcased on BT Media & Broadcast stand in the outside broadcast space at IBC2016. It is the first truck in the UK with the ability to transmit HD and UHD/4K via fibre and satellite simultaneously.
Brazil’s 24-hour news channel, Record News, has selected Dalet Galaxy to drive an integrated news production and playout workflow for its São Paulo and Araraquara locations. Creating a single content repository for the two sites to access, the Dalet system offers Record News a story-centric news solution that features affordable IT hardware and federated tools for managing ingest, search, browse, story planning and production, news playout, continuity playout, and archiving.
Party-line intercom systems continue to have a place in an increasingly digital and IP world. Broadcasters, installers and systems integrators still specify lower cost and easy to configure and run systems, a requirement that most manufacturers continue to meet with new product. RTS did this during IBC 2016 with the introduction of what are described as two universal belt packs that can connect to a variety of different formats.
ENCO Systems has released its next generation automated captioning solution for live or recorded video. Called enCaption3 R3, it is a real-time automated captioning system for television broadcasters that does not require special voice training.
Avid’s Nexis Pro is a scalable storage system for mid-size facilities, but its bigger brother, Avid Nexis Enterprise can handle more than 1.4 Petabytes of storage
The SubtitleNext platform has the capability to dramatically improve caption and subtitling speed and efficiency, and it simplifies the processes throughout the entire work cycle.