In August 2019, MTV hosted its 36th Annual Video Music Awards at the Prudential Center in Newark, USA. The awards saw performances from some of the biggest names in the modern music including Taylor Swift, Shawn Mendes, Missy Elliot, and Miley Cyrus to name but a few. Broadcast globally, the show saw an audience of over 1.5million tune in to watch the show.

The show featured an eye-popping array of video elements throughout the show with used during performances and for stage design and text listings of performers and presenters. Entertainment design firm Visual Noise Creative LLC deployed ten disguise gx 2 media servers to facilitate the video intensive environment.

Jesse Ignjatovic, Co-Founder of the live entertainment production company Den of Thieves, executive produced this year’s show and helped spearhead the use of impressive visuals for the VMAs.

“MTV and Viacom continues to push the limits on television production year over year, and for us that means new scenery with massive amounts of integrated video,” says Trevor Burk, Creative Director and Screens Producer at Visual Noise Creative. “The set that Julio Himede designed this year was no exception and was almost entirely made of video. We needed a platform that enabled us to be creative, flexible and fast enough to get this monster of a show on its feet in a short amount of time.”

Puthiya Thalaimurai TV, part of New Gen Media Corporation, are using the Quicklink TX on their 24x7 live news channel to interview important bureaucrats, politicians and independent journalists worldwide.

Launched in 2011, Puthiya Thalaimurai TV has become extremely popular in India and abroad due to its independent editorial stance. The channel looks at issues through the eyes of the regular person and serves as a platform that airs people’s views and opinions.

Using the Quicklink TX, Puthiya Thalaimurai TV can introduce guests into their discussions using any Skype enabled device. As the Quicklink TX can receive from and send to any Skype user it provides Puthiya Thalaimurai TV with unrivalled global access to millions of Skype users in order to broadcast the calls in HD quality.

“We are greatly enthusiastic having used the Quicklink TX. It has a big advantage to us, allowing our guests to see their own feedback video as well as the guest/anchor available in the studio. This facility is not available in DSNG broadcasting and cellular broadcasting technologies. It allows us to introduce a guest from anywhere in the world for a debate show or interview.” – Sundarapandian Rajakannu, Technical-Head at New Gen Media Corporation (Puthiya Thalaimurai TV)

Pixel Artworks, the award-winning specialists in light and pixel technology, have designed and delivered The Garden of Light, a unique multi-sensory installation for McArthurGlenDesigner Outlet Ashford.

The Garden of Light uses the latest LED pixel lighting and immersive audio technology to create a stunning 360 degree virtual garden environment and is part of the expansion of McArthurGlenDesigner Outlet, Ashford. In tribute to Kent’s status as the ‘Garden of England’, The Garden of Light provides shoppers with a multi-dimensional walkthrough experience designed to stimulate the senses and reflect on visitors’ connection with nature. The experience will also feature Europe’s largest living wall installation, made up of more than 120,000 leafy green plants, and although the experience is free, visitors are encouraged to donate money towards building a sensory garden for the William Harvey Hospital.

Light is the key factor of the installation, and the immersive and interactive experience offers shoppers a journey into a lush secret garden through projection and LED, with elements of the four seasons accompanying their journey; Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn.

Brightline, a leading manufacturer of energy efficient lighting systems, today announced Open Signal: Portland Community Media Center, a nonprofit media arts and broadcast center in Portland, Ore., has upgraded the lighting grid in its 2,000-square-foot main studio with 30 Brightline L1.2 SeriesONE LED fixtures. The new lighting was installed in July.

Noah Dorsey, media services manager, said the upgrade in Studio A was prompted by the fan noise of previous lighting fixtures in the studio. “We want the studio environment to be as silent as possible,” he explained. “That was something that had been requested by a lot of producers.”

The new 5600K L1.2 lights are controlled through a DMX console. Open Signal contracted Brightline’s premier Pacific Northwest systems integrator, Advanced Broadcast Solutions (ABS), a division of Key Code Media, to supply the new lighting. Dorsey said the lighting “looks dynamic but not so stylized that it can’t be applied to multiple shows.”

Bruce Aleksander, a lighting director hired by ABS for the Open Signal project, said the decision to use soft lights throughout Studio A was based on the need for versatility and accessibility for the wide variety of producers who use the space. Though some productions use an ellipsoidal light for show-specific gobo projection accents, the main lighting is generally not altered.

Broadpeak®, a leading provider of content delivery network (CDN) and video streaming solutions for content providers and pay-TV operators worldwide, today announced that its nanoCDN™ multicast ABR and umbrellaCDN™ CDN selection solutions are gaining significant momentum in the Android TV environment. As the popularity of Android TV dramatically grows, with 99.2 million devices expected to be shipped by 2022 and more than 140 pay-TV operators using Android TV, Broadpeak's video delivery solutions are empowering content providers and pay-TV operators around the world to offer better-quality television experiences on Android TV screens.

"Android TV is the fastest-growing platform in the digital TV market, used by tens of millions of consumers and hundreds of operators," said Jacques Le Mancq, CEO at Broadpeak. "By integrating several of Broadpeak's video delivery solutions into the Android TV framework, we're enabling content providers and operators to take full advantage of the environment, offering support for ultra-low-latency live streaming, server-side ad insertion and replacement, advanced video analytics, cloud PVR, and the ability to deliver an exceptional UHD and HDR broadcast-quality experience."

Broadpeak will demonstrate its solutions for Android TV during the APAC Android TV Summit, Nov. 12-14, in Bangkok, Thailand at The Berkeley Hotel Pratunam in Suite 13304. Key highlights will include:

nanoCDN™ multicast ABR for Android TV operator tier: Deployed on more than 100 devices, Broadpeak's nanoCDN multicast ABR solution enables pay-TV operators to deliver content on an Android TV operator-tier set-top box (STB), using multicast to carry ABR formats (e.g., CMAF) and solving the issues of scalability and latency raised by ABR distribution.

Iconic American rock band KISS are currently playing their last ever shows with the ‘End of the Road’ World tour. The band, who’s musical career spans over 40 years, opened the tour in January in Vancouver and will wrap up in Nagoya, Japan at the end of 2019, playing 112 dates in between.

True to the legacy of KISS, the larger-than-life tour is a massive production featuring lasers, floating drum kits, fire, pyrotechnics and more. disguise gx 2 media servers are powering a key part of the large-scale video for the tour, which features 17 LED video pods above the stage that move in and out via automated winches, a massive upstage LED video wall, and two side screens.

“KISS has an incredible visual legacy spanning multiple decades and multiple generations of fans,” says Danny Firpo, CEO of All of it Now. “Both Robert Long and Sooner Routhier from the SRAE team were incredible in their level of knowledge of the band’s catalogue on both a musical and visual level, and they spent days going through footage of the band from 1973 to the present. As a farewell tour, the content serves as a nostalgic retrospective, an environmental backdrop or as a dynamic lighting element while still being modular enough to make changes on the road to account for new songs and new content.”

Danny notes that, “What SRAE wanted to do with this show was use the content as an extension of the band’s stage presence without overshadowing them. This is why IMAG is such an important part of the show – because without all the bells and whistles, the band still puts on a pretty incredible show all by themselves.”

disguise’s gx 2 server was chosen for its Notch integration capabilities, Danny reports. “We’re not using a lot of video outputs for the show, but we have a lot of moments in the show where video needs to respond to audio, video or lighting data. The gx 2 gives us the graphics firepower we need to render some pretty complex 3D environments in real-time. The system was able to render out Notch IMAG effects effortlessly, and the linking of camera feeds to Notch scenes in disguise is simple and intuitive.”

Appear TV, a leading provider of next-generation high-quality video processing platforms for broadcast and streaming, has launched Zixi input and output support on the X platform.

The Appear TV X platform is a dedicated solution for high speed video networking, enhanced IP security, video distribution and contribution. Designed for near limitless capacity, extensive video awareness, enhanced security, operational simplicity and exceptionally high reliability, the platform redefines video delivery.

“We see an increased demand for modular video transport solutions over IP, providing the flexibility broadcasters and operators require, whilst maintaining ease of use, power efficiency and density,” says Thomas Lind, product management director, Appear TV. “Our partnership with Zixi allows our customers to tap into the Zixi cloud service for broadcast-quality video delivery over public IP networks, presenting a natural extension to our X platform.”

The X platform consists of a compact 1RU - X10 as well as a capacious 2RU - X20 option. The products can both be fitted with a range of input, processing and output modules that enable bridging between commonly used legacy video platforms and an all-IP infrastructure. With support for MPEG TS multiplexing, DVB scrambling/descrambling and high-density/low-latency AVC/HEVC encoding/decoding, the X platform is ideal for video processing in legacy DVB network such as cable, satellite, terrestrial and IPTV, as well as OTT. The dual IP IO modules provide native 10G uni- and bi-directional port connectivity, and the software-defined hardware allows for a variety of software features to run on identical hardware modules. All modules, power supplies and fans are of course hot-swappable.

NEP UK, the leading provider of outside broadcasting, fixed rig, remote production and media workflow solutions, reveals that is has played a critical role as key technical partner for a second year for the largescale production of Studio Lambert’s social media reality TV series, The Circle, for Channel 4.

The Circle returned to Channel 4 for its second series this autumn, with NEP UK remaining its’ trusted partner since the show’s inception in 2018, refining its talented team and adapting the equipment used to ensure it can meet the evolving requirements of the huge reality production.

Over 135 cameras cover a total of 18 apartments and breakout rooms, the largest number of cameras NEP has deployed on a single production to date, allowing up to 36 video streams to be recorded simultaneously, and editing is undertaken on an EVS backbone with a 25-minute turnaround. One of NEP’s key workflow innovations, and one that distinguishes it from previous reality show successes for the company, such as its long running support of Big Brother, is the use of 10 mini galleries in the production each using a bespoke NEP camera control platform and router setup Each of these galleries in turn feeds into a Master Gallery which stitches all the elements together.