The playout business received another jolt today when facilities provider Arqiva announced that it intends to move out of the sector over time. The company, which has been a major player in playout for the past 18 years, also plans to redirect its Occasional Use (OU) division away from conventional uplinks and satellite distribution.
With a sharp focus on IP-based operations and the impact they have on a variety of broadcast operations and workflows, broadcasters are operating in one of the most dramatic periods of technological change that the international broadcast industry has ever experienced.
At both SMPTE and NAB fall shows, Harmonic will demonstrate its software-defined and SaaS solutions targeted at OTT and next-gen TV applications.
Broadcasting used to be simple. It required one TV station sending one signal to multiple viewers. Everyone received the same imagery at the same time. That was easy.
Broadcasters and playout facilities are already coming to grips with distributing programming to a multitude of outlets and platforms, in addition to conventional broadcast channels. This is only set to grow as more operators enter the market to exploit the potential of emerging technologies such as 5G. As this burden increases, facility and service operators are looking for ways to reduce costs and complexity by having centralised distribution rather than separate means of playing out programmes to terrestrial TV, OTT, streamed services and social media.
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