The explosion in OTT platforms has created new opportunities for traditional media companies to reach larger audiences worldwide. As a worldwide distributor of Spanish-language content, this organization is no exception – and the company now offers its programming on virtually every major OTT outlet.
How to Navigate Today’s Bandwidth-Constrained, Multi-Codec World
In many ways, 2020 has forced us to rethink norms we’d previously known to be true. But when it comes to video delivery, the primary concerns and demands from 2019 remain the same, if not elevated by the pandemic: bandwidth is still limited and consumer demand is still growing. And with people continuing to consume increased levels of content at home, the bandwidth challenge remains. As we look ahead to 2021, content distributors and video service providers must ask themselves: How do we deliver high-quality video at scale efficiently, while maintaining a high-quality user experience? The answer is a bit like 2020 – it’s complicated.
Matrox White Paper: Insiders Guide to Validating Devices for SMPTE ST 2110 Infrastructures
Why Test ST 2110 Devices?
A SMPTE ST 2110-networked environment must deliver all of the benefits of an IP infrastructure – with the predictability of SDI – in order for it to be useful. This challenge can be met only when the infrastructure is well-managed and edge devices respect specifications. A rogue ST 2110 device may not deliver as expected, which would be bad enough. More importantly, it could adversely affect other functioning devices and lead to unpredictable general failure, which could be catastrophic.
With this in mind, the first step to take after acquiring a new ST 2110 device for a broadcast network is to make sure that it is a good “network citizen.” A good network citizen will not affect the network or disrupt operations when it is directly connected to an on-air production environment. The second step is to actually test the promised functionality and its compliance to SMPTE standards and industry norms. For example, a production environment that is architected around ST 2022-7 redundancy would be very poorly-served if devices do not actually support the ST 2022-7 specification properly – which could ultimately lead to disruptions.
It is important to understand that some devices might actually work well in a small synthetic setup, but fail when put into a real working environment. Due to a number of unaccounted variables, a simple pass-fail test may not be sufficient to make informed decisions on choice of equipment. For example, network packet timing is very different when several transmitters are sending to one receiver compared to a single transmitter sending to a receiver. The timing of a sender is also different if it sends a single ST 2110 flow vs. several flows. Another typical testing pitfall is the dependence on one kind of transmitter. A receiver might work great with a narrow gapped transmitter – like an SDIto-IP gateway – but not work well with a wide linear transmitter.
At first glance, issues like these may not appear to be a problem if the environment may only contain narrow gapped devices. However, knowing the functional boundaries of a working environment is critical to maintaining future expansion. Misinformed decisions taken today may limit future capability and possibilities, (e.g. supporting wide senders). To pre-empt this, it is advisable to build up a test suite that pushes the test boundaries for imperfect, but sufficiently good cases. It is only with these types of tests that informed decisions could be made, eventually leading to judicious ST 2110 device purchases, safe device firmware/software updates, and beneficial service agreements.
Building a 100G Uncompressed Media Backbone for the Future
Research reveals that there were around 2.4 billion Internet users in 2014. By June 2019, that number doubled to 4.4 billion. That’s an 83% increase in the Internet user base in a span of just five years. For the media and telecommunications sector, this raises an all-important question: How far can current underlying networks scale to accommodate the growing traffic on the Internet?
While the good news is that no one single network will need to support this burgeoning traffic, there remains some scepticism around existing networks and their ability to keep pace with the bandwidth demands of next-generation connected devices.
Enabling AI-powered Transcription, Closed Captioning, and Translation With Elevated Speed and Efficiency for a Leading Provider of Entertainment Content
Consumers’ insatiable and growing demand for streaming media on ever-greater numbers of OTT platforms offers fantastic opportunities, as well as daunting challenges, for content providers. The goal is to deliver high-value content tailored to the specific requirements of each platform, including multi-language transcriptions and compliant closed captions, and to do it as fast and efficiently as possible. Speed and efficiency are especially important in a news and entertainment environment, where every second counts in delivering breaking stories.
As one of the premier entertainment news sites with a focus on Hollywood, this Digital Nirvana client recently signed on as a short-form content provider for Quibi.
Mediaproxy Whitepaper: Take Control of OTT Monitoring
OTT has become increasingly popular with viewers and is an important form of distribution and revenue generation for broadcasters. As these trends continue, content owners and regulators alike are looking to apply the same standards for video, audio, and captioning to OTT as with traditional television.
For OTT services, broadcast engineers need to ensure compliance and quality of service for live content viewed on multiple devices that rely on multiple ABR formats each with several profiles. Keeping up with this complexity can be daunting, which is why having a unified system for monitoring compliance and identifying issues across all traditional and OTT playouts is critical…
E-Learning Course: Introduction to video – from camera to display
From camera to display, this course provides an insight to the technology that transforms live images and transfers them to a High Definition picture on televisions and mobile devices. It covers image acquisition in the camera, the video formats that move video between devices and the colour coding that make this all possible. The course will be a appreciated by anyone who needs to know more about underlying technology supporting modern television systems in production and distribution.
Supply Trends Report – August 2019
IABM Supply Trends Report – September 2019
Next Generation Logging!
Anant Khanolkar, Sr. Director, International Sales, Digital Nirvana
Video Logging is a age old technology that started with recording on tapes for proof of broadcast. Over the years broadcasters have creatively used these recordings for various applications. With the advent of Digital Video, HD/UHD, SDI over IP there have been demands on Logging technology to keep up. Increasing demands from regulators, customers and partners means a new way of thinking this technology and how it should change to meet with the needs of tomorrow. This presentation talks about how current crop of Logging products need to move to Next Generation of Logging and how broadcasters can benefit from such an approach.
VITEC at NAB Show 2019
Kevin Ancelin (VP Worldwide Broadcast Sales) shows IABM TV some of VITEC’s new encoder and decoders
