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This article has been taken from issue 107 of the IABM Journal. The full Journal can be accessed here.


Stan Moote

CTO, IABM






Smart business leaders regularly take time away from day-to-day business imperatives to look ahead and see what’s coming down the track. That way, they are part of the next wave rather than victims of it. I’ve engaged with many smart leaders and IABM members over the last few months and also taken some time myself to gaze into the future, taking into account solid, hard data from IABM’s Strategic Industry Analysis report released at IBC2018.

What follows is the result – my future-proofing technology trends checklist, and while not all of the items will necessarily apply directly to every one of your customers, it’s worth the time to encourage them to evaluate the potential impact in each of the areas I cover. Now let’s at these trends from the end-user point of view.

Broadcasting used to be a known quantity – it delivered all your entertainment, news and information. But thanks to Networking Everywhere, we now have multi-platform delivery. Also because of Networking Everywhere, we ended up with social media, and social media has become entertainment – which is what is taking us away from the norm of entertainment via TV. We also get news and weather – again, traditional broadcast staples – via social media today; I will leave the discussion about fake news to you though! What social media doesn’t do is documentaries, reality and game shows – but we are nevertheless talking about them on social media!

So my first technology trend is Social Media. In the US, adults watch an average of around five hours of video a day (content that is 20 minutes or more in length), and spend one hour and fifteen minutes a day on social media. Social media affects TV ratings – 85% of Twitter users who are active during prime-time say they are tweeting about TV content they are watching; tweets cause ratings, which helps drive more tweets. So you can use social media to increase viewership, and by understanding viewer interactions with TV programs and social media, you have even more ways to use this data.

People most definitely want local news and also world news with a local point of view; this includes local sports, events and weather too. The broadcasters who are doing well are focusing on making local content available – this is keeping their brands and ratings strong.

The second technology trend is Advanced Analytics, which has only just started to be used in the broadcast business. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Advanced Analytics has the power to look into extremely large data sets to reveal patterns, trends and associations. The insights gained can inform advertising decisions and uncover viewer trends, likes and dislikes way beyond the power of the traditional focus group. 63% of companies with well-established analytics strategies reported 15% or more improvement in operating margins in 2016. Today there is enough data that can be easily mined to improve the odds of programming bets and viewer preferences.

AI itself is my next trend – also at an early stage of adoption, but with an increasing number of broadcast and media companies planning to deploy it over the next few years. Potential applications for AI range across the content chain from acquisition and editing to content management and distribution. What areas of your operation are laboriously manual or couldn’t use an efficiency boost?AI is one of the keys to unlock this and free up your staff to do more profitable ventures which lines up directly with purchasing decisions to “Make us more efficient”.

Software-Defined Networking is the next trend to watch out for. Dynamic, manageable, cost-effective and adaptable, SDN is ideal for the high-bandwidth, dynamic nature of today’s applications. The premise behind SDN is that signals no longer need to line up with workflows; this will deliver a major shift in how facilities and upgrades will be designed, built and maintained.

IP is already on most people’s radar. With SMPTE ST 2110 now established, adoption of IP is already accelerating, bringing clear benefits to facilities, most notably in agility and efficiency. Be aware of the point where you have amortized your investment in SDI infrastructures and plan accordingly – or move to a hybrid IP/SDI approach to reduce lift-and-shift shock on your CAPEX books.

Enabled by the move to IP, my next trend is Virtualization, which replaces dedicated hardware functions with software running on COTS technology. Virtualization has a number of benefits; as well as eliminating custom hardware, it enables new services to be added quickly – and non-profitable ones to be turned off quickly too – and delivers agility to meet rapidly changing viewer demands. And, of course, it works with the cloud too, the adoption of which is reaching an advanced stage in broadcast and media.

Most organizations are opting for a private or hybrid cloud approach, with on-demand usage providing great flexibility and potential cost savings while delivering a much faster time to market for new services.

UHD may not have taken off as a mainstream OTA service as some predicted, but it has become the preferred acquisition format for future-proofing reasons (and also to serve the requirements of OTT operators). But UHD is not about more pixels – it’s about better pixels, enabled by HDR. There’s great interest in HDR because consumers can see the difference, and even if you are not planning on going down the UHD road any time soon, many others are looking at the benefits of HDR used with just an HD signal. That’s why HDR will be part of your future – and maybe sooner than you thought.

5G is coming, with predicted subscriptions rising from zero today to over 500 million in 2022. 10 times faster than 4G with a 90% reduction in network energy usage, 5G opens up a whole new world from smart cities and self-driving cars to IoT, and might even take the place of the wired internet entirely in countries that have yet to develop widespread broadband infrastructure. VR may yet be in its infancy and struggling for monetization models, but it is finding deployments in our industry – for the present, mostly in sports, with 5G making mobile distribution possible in the coming years – and who knows where it will go with social media then!

Blockchain will certainly change the dynamics of how programming gets paid for. Investment so far has been focused on advertising, but other potential use cases include conditional access, rights management and content monetization. It may take a while to really get a hold, but it is coming, so don’t ignore it.

And finally, as with every aspect of your business, Cyber-security is a must-have point to be examined.

Your ongoing success relies on you helping your customers to examine and reinvent everything they do –continuously. That way, you along with your clients will be part of the future – not a footnote in history. I urge you to pass around the above trends as a check-list and include a bias with your company’s directional roadmap. Also, be sure to sit down with your customers and clients and look at IABM’s IBC2018 Broadcast & Media Strategic Analysis interactive report together. This will be sure to strengthen your partnering relationships.

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Tag: Software-defined networking

Encouraging Your Customers to Tap technology trends to secure their Future

Smart business leaders regularly take time away from day-to-day business imperatives to look ahead and see what’s coming down the track. That way, they are part of the next wave rather than victims of it. I’ve engaged with many smart leaders and IABM members over the last few months and also taken some time myself to gaze into the future, taking into account solid, hard data from IABM’s Strategic Industry Analysis report released at IBC2018.

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IABM Member Whitepaper – Nevion – Architecture & control The two keys to IP infrastructure success in broadcast

The adoption of IP technology across the whole broadcast workflow is now well underway. IP has already been used for many years for the purposes of broadcast contribution over wide area networks (WANs). The technology is now also beginning to be used in local area network (LAN) environments for transporting broadcast signals within studio- and campus facilities. In many cases though, broadcasters are initially considering a like-for-like network replacement of baseband with IP, which, for the time being, still implies higher initial cost, not least because of the need to convert the SDI output of existing equipment to IP (until all broadcast equipment becomes IP capable). There is much more to IP than simply mimicking existing baseband networks though. The seminal VRT/EBU LiveIP project (the first practical demonstration of using a multi-vendor all IP environment for live production, back in 2015-2016) made the point very eloquently: IP enables workflows to be “remote, shared and automated”. IP brings the opportunity to harmonize local and long-distance media networks around a single technology – so-called IP LAN/WAN (local and wide area network) convergence. This means that it becomes much easier to share equipment, studios and control rooms, and even production staff, across locations...

BaM™ Product Highlight: Nevion

Increasingly based on IP, virtualization and Cloud technology,  Nevion’s solutions enable the management, transport and processing of professional-quality video, audio and data – in real time, reliably and securely. From content production to distribution, Nevion solutions are used to power major sporting and live events across the globe. Some of the world’s largest media groups and telecom service providers use Nevion technology, including AT&T, NBC Universal, NASA, BBC, CCTV, EBU, BT and Telefonica.

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