Broadcast Solutions GmbH draws a very positive balance of their Broadcast Innovation Day 2019. On 28 November 2019, the system integrator invited the broadcast community to this one-day event at their headquarters in Bingen, Germany. With around 350 participants from 30 countries, more visitors than ever before came to Bingen and turned the event into an international industry meeting.

Stefan Breder, CEO at Broadcast Solutions GmbH, comments on the event: “We invented the Broadcast Innovation Days as a series of events years ago, and they have increasingly developed into a meeting place for the international broadcast industry. This year’s edition has been the highlight so far. As an international company, it is extremely important for us to show our innovation leadership and attract international visitors to Bingen. The compact size and the direct contact to and between the visitors make up the charm of the Broadcast Innovation Day.

As part of a strategy of continuing investment to track with the latest market requirements, Finepoint Broadcast, a leading UK dry hire provider of production and OB equipment to the global marketplace, has announced the further addition of a range of Canon lenses to its hire stock portfolio.

The additions include the standard Canon CJ24, plus the Canon CJ45 and large UJ90 lenses (UHD DIGISUPER).

Finepoint Broadcast Hire Manager Clive Northen said, “Finepoint has not seen the disruptive business peaks and troughs of recent years that have been so prevalent in various broadcast sectors. To the contrary, our growth has been steady and continuous, due in part to our continual evaluation and investment in technologies, such as these Canon lenses, that provide a direct benefit to our customers.”

Finepoint Broadcast Chief Engineer Andrew Mckenzie said, “The Canon CJ24 is an acclaimed telephoto lens with a 24x broadcast zoom and a focal length of 7.5-180mm that offers 4K performance that is ideal for on-the-shoulder newsgathering. The ultra-high zoom CJ45 is packed with innovative, class-leading technology that is perfectly suited to wildlife and live-sport deployments.

And with a 90x zoom, 9-810mm focal length, and image stabilisation that's fully compatible with 2/3" 4K cameras and broadcast environments where HDTV is currently in use, the Canon UHD DIGISUPER 90 lens is perfect for expanding Finepoint Broadcast’s 4K lens range.”

Custom Consoles announces the completion of Module-R studio control desks and two MediaWall monitor display mounts for Cardiff University's School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studios. The desks and display mounts form part of a full broadcast-quality news studio facility designed by UK-based system integrator ATG Danmon.

"We were invited to propose a turnkey solution based on an outline specification provided by the university," explains ATG Danmon Managing Director Russell Peirson-Hagger. "The project coincided with a relocation to new city-centre premises. It comprised a large TV studio and dedicated gallery, a smaller TV studio with its associated gallery, plus a broadcast newsroom. These will be used to train the next generation of television, radio, online and printed-media journalists. Module-R desks and MediaWalls are used in many broadcast facilities in the UK, Europe, MENA and Asia, so were a logical choice given the need to match the functionality and processes of a real broadcast environment. They are robustly constructed, ergonomically efficient for engineering staff and well as operators, and attractively styled. Both product series also gave us the freedom to match the available room dimensions from standard modular elements."

Atlanta DTH, Inc. (ADTH) announces that it has joined the SRT Alliance, a broadcast media industry collaboration created to develop an open-source protocol allowing low-latency video streaming over the internet. ADTH will provide full support for the SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) protocol.

Developed and pioneered by Haivision, the SRT protocol optimizes streaming performance across unpredictable networks with secure streams and easy firewall traversal. It accounts for packet loss, jitter, and fluctuating bandwidth, maintaining the integrity and quality of a video stream.

"With its 25 years of experience in the broadcast and telecommunication sectors, ADTH is a very welcome addition to our membership," comments Haivision CCO & EVP Strategic Alliances Peter Maag. "With increasing support from across the entire industry, SRT is rapidly becoming the globally preferred standard for low-latency video streaming."

"Efficient and effective standards are essential to the advancement of any industry, not least in the OTT streaming sector where signal delivery needs to overcome many technical variables," adds ADTH founder and Managing Director Michael Day. "The SRT Alliance's aims and objectives are in full accord with our own strategy of promoting the highest possible video quality-of-experience securely, efficiently and at the lowest possible latency. We are SRT-ready."

Altered Images, a leading UK supplier of visual communications technology solutions, has chosen Custom Consoles Module-R, M-Desk Technical and custom-designed studio furniture for a newly completed broadcast media training suite at Plymouth Marjon University.

The new resource includes a total of seven desks in an open plan configuration. Located on the former BBC South West villa site in Plymouth, it is equipped with all the facilities required for the university's courses in journalism and broadcast production. These include a four-camera TV studio, a TV news room and TV production gallery, a radio news room, radio studio and central apparatus room.

"The design brief we were given was to create a fully professional radio and TV production environment including latest-generation Dante IP networking", says Altered Images' Media and Broadcast Solutions Director Russell Butcher. "Custom Consoles desks are very widely used throughout the broadcast media industry so will be met by many students as they progress into their careers. The desks and equipment bays look good, are ergonomically comfortable and efficient, and are very long-lasting."

ATG Danmon announces the completion of a broadcast-quality production facility for the London headquarters of That Lot, one of Europe's leading providers of social media content production support. Core of this project is a multi-camera studio plus a fully equipped control room including lighting, vision and audio mixing, routing, recording, monitoring and archiving.

"Working with ATG Danmon, we have been able to create the most flexible possible system for use across our wide range of creative services," comments Ben Forder, Head of Video at That Lot. "The new studio and its control suite enable us to offer our clients versatile resources for creating broadcast-quality content for a wide range of media applications."

"A full-colour back-lit LED cyclorama, which we believe is the first of its kind in Europe, provides sharp chroma-key superimposition onto on any background. Lighting is from a ceiling-mounted rig which can be adjusted to get the exact style of illumination we need for live-streaming or recording sketches, scripted videos, interviews, podcasts, vodcasts and social media photoshoots. That includes 360 degree surround video and audio capture if specified."

PlayBox Neo Ltd reports a buoyant 2019 with strong demand for its Channel-in-a-Box and software-based TV channel branding and playout systems. Total unit deliveries reached and surpassed 18,500, supported by product demonstrations at NAB Las Vegas, Broadcast Asia, IBC, NAB New York and regional events in various countries.

"Our Channel-in-Box series, refined over 20 years, continues to sustain us as one of the strongest performing companies in the global playout solutions market," says PlayBox Neo CEO Pavlin Rahnev. "Success in the media playout sector stems from paying close attention to the industry's needs. The primary demand in the playout sector is for operational flexibility. PlayBox Neo Channel-in-a-Box can be configured from a wide range of software modules to match practically any workflow and any required level of backup security. With our SaaS-based Cloud2TV offering, we also offer great flexibility in the way channel managers can handle supplementary aspects such as intelligent archiving, event-specific channels and emergency recovery.

Magewell will launch a powerful new model in its Eco Capture family of ultra-compact, power-efficient, M.2 video capture cards at the upcoming ISE 2020 exhibition in Amsterdam. The high-performance Eco Capture SDI 4K Plus M.2 captures one channel of 4K video up to 4096x2160 at full 60 frames per second over a single-link, 12G-SDI interface. The new card will make its global debut in stand 8-G475 at the event, taking place February 11-14, 2020.

Ideal for use in small and embedded systems where full-sized PCIe slots are not available, the cost-effective Eco Capture family offers systems integrators and OEM developers a robust capture solution with low power consumption for space-constrained applications. The low-latency Eco Capture devices feature a high-speed PCIe 2.0 bus interface with an M.2 connector and measure just 22x80mm (0.87x3.15in), matching the M.2 2280 size specification.

The new 4K 12G-SDI model joins four existing Eco Capture M.2 configurations: a single-channel model that captures 4K video at 30fps via an HDMI interface; dual-channel models that capture HD and 2K video over HDMI or SDI; and a quad-channel HD/2K model with SDI inputs. All five Eco Capture products also support up to eight channels of embedded audio per input.

NEP Group, the leading outsourced technical production partner supporting premier content producers of live sports and entertainment, announced today that Lise Heidal, Managing Director of NEP Norway AS, has been promoted to SVP, Global Media Solutions. In her new role, she will lead NEP’s Global Media Solutions Team and the company’s strategic initiative in 2020 and beyond. She will report to Mike Werteen, Global President for NEP’s Broadcast Services and Media Solutions, and become part of NEP’s senior leadership team.

ATEME, the emerging leader in video delivery solutions for broadcast, cable, DTH, IPTV and OTT, announced today that CJHello, the largest cable operator and a leader in Korea’s media industry, has successfully deployed its TITAN Live software solution for MPEG-2 HD transcoding for delivery of high-quality video services to its viewers.

TITAN Live is a hardware agnostic, real-time multi-channel/format solution designed for processing SD, HD and Ultra HD content for any screen. TITAN Live enables CJ Hello to deliver a premium experience to its customers while providing the following major benefits:

·      Lower OPEX: based on ATEME’s High-Efficiency MPEG-2 (HE-MPEG-2®), CJ Hello is able to save bandwidth and add additional HD channels to existing transponder

·      Flexible operations: ATEME’s software is server-agnostic and can run on any private/public and on/off-premises cloud infrastructure with the same benefits and value proposition.

·      Future-proof solution: TITAN Live benefits from ATEME’s continuous research and innovation in video quality, allowing for future evolutions of the solution

Blackmagic Design today announced that South African music festival, Rocking the Daisies, was powered by an end to end Blackmagic Design workflow, featuring Blackmagic URSA Broadcast and ATEM Constellation 8K.

Held at the Cloof Wine Estate in Cape Town and incorporating comedy, music, art and film, Rocking the Daisies (RTD) is one of the country’s biggest festivals. Live production for the three day event’s diverse international lineup, which included The 1975, Russ, Tash Sultana and Nasty C, was delivered by production company Bad Weather.

The main stage featured three central LED screens, making up one canvas, the middle being a 6 x 6 meter square and each outer screen 3.6 x 6 meter high. There were two 5.4 meter wide by 8.4 meter high IMAGs stage left and right. “With both side screens essentially being portrait, we had to be careful with how we framed our shots, making sure that everything was centered,” reveals live director Simon Wilkes.

“We used the URSA Broadcast for acquisition; front of house we had a single camera with a very long lens and a supplementary Micro Studio Camera 4K locked off just next to the sound desk,” he explains. “In front of the stage we had a jib mounted URSA Broadcast, and another on a dolly. On stage was a roaming camera op and a handful of the micro cameras positioned in key positions for additional cutaways.”

Bad Weather’s Jonathan Bandli adds: “The image quality of these cameras was something that the festival had never experienced before; good in low light and they handled the dynamic range of a large stage with heavy contrast so elegantly. Our solution just completely changed the perception of the festival organizer’s previous experience with live camera systems.”

Four-fifths (80%) of broadcasters are considering implementing ads tailored to the consumer but are increasingly falling behind streaming services due to hesitance around adopting cloud technologies, according to research carried out on behalf of ATEME, the emerging leader in video delivery solutions for broadcast, cable, DTH, IPTV and OTT.

The survey of those in middle management positions or above within the realms of TV and broadcast also found that 96% of broadcasters feel there is a demand from customers for more personalized services. As over a third (34%) of broadcasters currently generate revenue through adverts, offering personalized adverts could help them increase this revenue. Consequently, over a quarter (26%) are currently looking into how to offer these services to customers.

“Our research found that more than half (58%) of broadcasters are investing up to 20% of their budget in trialing new customer content or services as they prioritize personalization to offer customers enhanced viewing experiences,” said Remi Beaudouin, Chief Strategy Officer, ATEME. “By using technology and the data available to them to tap into this trend, traditional broadcasters will be able to create a tailor-made viewing experience and potentially open up new revenue streams,” he added.

The 80s … who doesn’t like remembering that decade? From a fashion perspective, it may not have sparkled, but musically the 80s undoubtedly had a lot to offer. 

Thomas Gottschalk, who once again gathered a who's who of 80's cult stars at the TUI Arena in Hannover for Gottschalk's Big 80s Show, also clearly thinks that. Performances by Kim Wilde, Paul Young, Thomas Anders, Marc Almond and many more could be experienced on the set's four show stages, with the concert broadcast by ZDF.

Lighting cameraman / gaffer for the production was Michael Donecker. Frank Hofmann — better known as FH — from Scan Design Berlin was responsible for the show lighting design of a production that lasted for several hours. FH, who developed a penchant for lighting design early in life, today works predominantly for TV productions. He was clear from the outset exactly what requirements this special show would place on the production lighting design. "As the name implies, this was about the 80s and everything that made this time so exciting,” he said. “Therefore, I wanted to imitate the looks of those days but using modern technology."

Statistical Multiplexing (Statmux) is now available with AWS Elemental MediaLive, Statmux is a technology used in live broadcast workflows that allocates bits in real time among multiple live video channels. It instantaneously adjusts the bitrate of each channel in the statmux pool to make the best use of total available bandwidth and combines the encoded outputs into a single transport stream. This maximizes network efficiency by optimizing picture quality for a group of channels within a fixed total bandwidth.

Using AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux, customers can now deploy linear video processing and playout in the AWS Cloud for broadcast, cable, or terrestrial distribution.

Media companies, such as national broadcasters, originate live content and simultaneously share that content with their distribution partners. Traditionally, this has been accomplished by preparing channels for distribution using purpose-built, on-premises hardware encoders. These systems can take months to procure and configure, require extensive engineering to operate reliably, and cannot be repurposed once deployed. AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux lets broadcasters and content providers build and manage broadcast video workflows on fully managed AWS services and gain flexibility, reduce hardware and management costs, and deliver excellent picture quality with built-in reliability.

Key benefits of AWS Elemental MediaLive with Statmux include:

• Cloud flexibility—Add, remove, or update live channels based on evolving audience and business needs, easily introduce new codecs, prioritize resources on a per-channel basis, and take advantage of multiple codecs and resolutions.
• Built-in resiliency—Resources are automatically allocated across multiple availability zones for high availability and fully managed failover.
• High video quality—Statmux for MediaLive lets you maximize video quality while optimizing for fixed satellite or cable distribution bandwidth. And, you can tune quality settings on a per-channel basis without disruption to assure that the highest-priority channels maintain the highest quality.
• Operational efficiency—Build broadcast distribution workloads in minutes, without on-premises hardware, and deliver channels more efficiently over fixed network bandwidth.
• Monitoring and metrics—Integrated Amazon CloudWatch monitoring enables real-time views of video metrics and multiplexer performance.
• Unified headend—For content providers that distribute traditional broadcast video as well as multiscreen linear video, Statmux for MediaLive can deliver both through a single architecture. With the increasing importance of OTT delivery, having one system to manage all encoding can dramatically simplify operations.

Learn more about how customers are saving time, reducing overhead, maximizing low-cost cloud resources, and maintaining optimized picture quality with AWS Elemental MediaLive and Statmux here: https://aws.amazon.com/medialive/features/statmux.

Nevion, award-winning provider of virtualized media production solutions, announced today that Riot Games, the publisher of the most-played PC game in the world and the organization behind League of Legends Esports, used Nevion’s software-defined media node Virtuoso as part of its remote production of the recent League of Legends World Championship Final. In doing so, Riot Games became one of the very first organizations in the world to leverage the ground-breaking JPEG XS encoding technology. 

The League of Legends World Championship has been described as one of the biggest events in esports history, with the 2018 World Championship Final garnering an unprecedented 99.6 million unique viewers. This year’s event, which took place in Paris (France) on November 10, 2019, involved two remote (or at-home) production sites: the English language show was produced at Riot’s European headquarters facility in Berlin (over 1,000 km or 620 miles from Paris), while the world feed was produced in Los Angeles (around 9,000 km or 5,600 miles away). JPEG XS achieves high-quality compression with ratios up to 10:1 at sub-millisecond latency, i.e. a fraction of a video frame– allowing gaming fans and players watching at home to see the action faster.