Broadcast equipment suppliers continue to add new types of IT-centric functionality to their signal distribution and playout platforms, leveraging the cost and operational benefits of COTS hardware and Software Defined Networks (SDN) as a way to attract new types of customers that increasingly require the handing of hundreds or thousands of media streams simultaneously and are looking to for a cost-effective way to do it.
At IBC, Zixi announced new and expanded partnerships with several industry leaders including Harmonic, Ericsson, and Imagine Communications.
Adobe’s TV Everywhere study shows that people are increasingly watching home television on TV Connected Devices (TVCD) as opposed to mobile devices. Mobile viewing is actually losing ground to TVCD viewing, say researchers.
Companies Cedexis and Mux announced at IBC 2017 a joint solution to cost-effectively drive superior Quality of Experience (QoE) through data-driven global traffic management. This partnership enables video publishers to gain clear visibility over their users’ video experiences, while using unique algorithms to guarantee optimal QoE at the lowest possible cost.
Harmonic’s IBC exhibit includes tech for migrating to cloud, IP workflows, HEVC and UHD-HDR.
Since the start of the millennium, TV and video services have changed enormously. Along with the changes to the content itself, the infrastructure used to create, process and deliver that content has also changed. However, the rate of transformation is about to increase significantly, with radical changes to multiple facets happening concurrently. The first digital TV services were Standard Definition (SD) and encoded as MPEG-2. Since then, there has been a major shift towards HD, mostly in MPEG-4 AVC and now the early stages of Ultra-High Definition (UHD) using the latest compression standard: High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Already some SD services are starting to be discontinued and, where SD is still needed, down-conversion from HD is becoming the norm. As each major technology shift is expensive – in terms of content creation, production and consumer devices – it therefore makes sense to have steps where there is a meaningful value resulting from a combination of changes that can occur together.