Our Old Friend IBC... (Part 1)

The emergence of an IP network studio of the future: This will be one of many key technology avenues at an IBC that will pay back the cost of attending many times over – with knowledge you can cash in on for years to come. George Jarrett points to a few of the gems, and previews some of the products promised.

On one level IBC is an old friend. The one thing I resent is that it long ago replaced birthdays as the measure of how fast life passes.
This one will give us the chance to see how all the Spring time acquisitions have panned out: has your favourite little company and the product you loved so much just vanished, or is it sustaining inside a bigger fish and looking better for it? It will also give us the latest chapter in the spectrum wars – terrestrial broadcasters versus the mobile broadband companies – and the hunt for an IP-based solution for network operations in studio environments. SDI is surely due to go. 4K is possible terrestrially, but may be delivered via broadband first. HEVC is the miracle we expected, but not a miracle cure. And in a market that needs so many new standards, but cannot keep pace with the perpetual development of software to create the time required, FIMS is not 'fimished'.
FIMS 1.1 is released with the new repository interface to manage local and remote/cloud storage. There is a spec showing how to do it in SOAP and REST, but the market seems to prefer REST. At IBC you will see the work on quality analysis/control with EBU QC. Expect a first advanced spec and a sighting of automatic metadata extraction, and good work on timecode to deal with partial content. Booth discussions (EBU) will be about what it means to support live IP streaming.
This taste of standards work can be extended by a look at the FIMS YouTube channel, which emphasises that users want different things from standards, but no longer want to stomach proprietary technologies. We must thank the people that give their time to create appropriate standards, and understand that software develops so fast it is almost impossible to keep track. Just pop by the SMTE booth and ask how it is modernising to accommodate software standardisation.
If there is one thing the market owes IBC, it is better support for the conference program. The keynote sessions stand out as attractive as they will feature Professor Brian Cox OBE, Neelie Kroes, the VP of the EU, Matt Brittin, the president of Google Europe, David Abraham, CEO of C4, and Tim Davie, the CEO of BBC Worldwide.
The sessions are neatly segmented into five categories, and on the Thursday (11th) two stand out as stunning catch up opportunities. First is the keynote Assessing The Health of Broadcast TV, chaired by Ray Snoddy and featuring Abraham, Bruce Tuchman, the president of Sundance Global and of MGM Channel Global, and Charlie Vogt, the CEO of Imagine Communications and Gates Air. The Great Spectrum Debate will only run for an hour under the chairmanship of Informitiv CEO William Cooper, but it will set the agenda for so many discussions around the show.
On Friday three sessions stand out. The Death of SDI: The Promise of Complete IP Based Production looks like a must attend, as does The Cloud and Broadcast TV. IBC has tried to get Neelie Kroes to attend and speak for several years, so her keynote on The Challenges Ahead should expose a lot of EU thinking about mobile broadband and many other areas.
On the Saturday, one of the commercial sessions that stands out is the Red Digital Cinema occupation – the best chance to assess the 6K Red Dragon. The other two that standout are the Brian Cox keynote on Television's Expanding Universe and the SMPTE supported session Go With UHD-1 or Wait for UHD-2? This promises a lot with Hans Hoffmann in the chair.
On Sunday there is a real gem in prospect, in part because the presentation format will be nothing like standard IBC gig mode. Interactive Entertainment – You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet is the brainchild of Ken Blakeslee of Webmobility, and it will be a free, totally inclusive discovery session with lots of people saying "I didn’t know that." On Monday, an old concept returns with an IBC wrap up session titled The Outlook for Broadcast. If this is terrestrial broadcast it means hanging onto 600 and 500 MHz for another 15 years at least. IBC is a new friend, but some of the soap operas continue to play out.

Imagine Communications (7.G20) will concentrate on IP, software-defined networks and workflows, virtualisation and TV Everywhere.
Expect to find demos of play out in the Cloud, advanced advertising, software-defined networking, signal processing and compression, software-defined workflows, and kitting out the concept of TV Everywhere.
The Cloud focus will feature innovations that redefine how video content will be originated, managed, stored and delivered.
The MultiService software-defined networking framework simplifies network architectures operating in hybrid baseband and IP environments by enabling the video bit flow to be software-mapped.
The commercials element will build on Imagines' MediaCentral framework, appearing as advances to the Landmark platform. These are the campaign management of impression-based, dynamic ad insertion for streamed and nonlinear content, faster, intelligent decision-making and smarter advertising around available inventory across all consumer platforms.
Digital Rapids' user base will see how Imagine has exploited what it bought in. Look for the Xenio workflow management foundation – a software engine that enables the design, deployment and management of software-defined workflows.
Fronting the TV Everywhere demo will be the ability to efficiently process and deliver content at scale for multi-screen viewing.
The product connections are the SelenioNext adaptive bit rate transcoder, the SelenioFlex software-based media processing tools and the SelenioEdge delivery network software. The processing and compression demo will focus on the Selenio X100 (path to IP and UHD) and new modules for the Selenio MCP.

Jünger Audio (10.A49) will major on the D*AP4 VAP voice processor, designed for radio station, film ADR and TV voice over engineering applications. At the core of this product is Jünger's proprietary Spectral Signature dynamic EQ, which gives users automatic and dynamic EQ control to balance spectral differences in real-time. By analys­­­­ing incoming audio and comparing its spectrum with individually predetermined voice 'fingerprints', the D*AP4 will automatically apply dynamic EQ corrections to produce a consistent sound.

Eyeheight (8.B97) will introduce its BroadcastSafe V1.5 compliance plug-ins for Avid's Media Composer and Adobe's Premiere Pro post-production software. Look for the new Broadcast Evaluate display indicating which parts of any video image require adjustment in order to be fully broadcast compliant.
Editor-pleasing non-compliant content elements are displayed in a user-definable colour with the option of manual or automatic correction.
The BroadcastSafeMC and BroadcastSafePP systems get BroadcastSafeArea, which allows a wide range of safe-area markers to be superimposed over the video monitor display. This supports a multitude of standards including SMPTE, EBU and DPP, in 525/625 standard definition, 720/1080 high definition and 2K line formats.

George's article is also available to read in BFV online.

(IT/JP)