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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.
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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.
The forthcoming transition to ATSC 3.0 will usher in the need for higher data rates and more channel capacity in the over-the-air architecture. Broadcasters will apply their experience as “Bit Managers” in the studio infrastructure to the RF operation, with the knowledge that more power leads to higher quality of service (QoS).
ThinkAnalytics announced that its recommendations engine has been selected by Canadian SVOD provider, shomi, a joint venture between Rogers Communications and Shaw Media. shomi believes the combination of an elegant user interface and personalized recommendations will distance it from rivals in the fast-growing Canadian OTT sector.
Telos, a company with a long history supplying telephone systems, audio mixing consoles, codecs and processing equipment to radio stations around the world, has slowly evolved its business over the past few years, through mergers & acquisitions and extensive product R&D, to become a force in television broadcast audio technology as well.
With offices with in Los Angeles, London and Sheffield in the UK, ZOO Digital, a provider of media production, localization and digital distribution services has joined forces with UK-based Honeycomb TV, a video advertising distributor, to offer a faster and more cost-effective subtitling service to the TV advertising industry.
