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The way forward in a changing world

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The broadcast and media industries are evolving in all areas to adapt to the challenges of competition from OTT, changing user viewing habits, technological advances in image resolution, dynamic range and colour rendition as well as embracing new video over IP infrastructures. Test and measurement equipment manufacturers also have to evolve to supp...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 21 March 2019

Test, Measurement and Standards

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Who are AIMS?The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), is a non-profit trade alliance that fosters the adoption of one set of common, ubiquitous, standards-based protocols for interoperability over IP in the media and entertainment, and professional audio/video industries. The members of AIMS are a group of like-minded industry manufacturers who...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 25 January 2019

Managing Technological Change

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Continual technological change in the broadcast and media industries can make it difficult to plan for the mid to long term. Typically, broadcasters and media organisation are still implementing the last set of changes to working practices when the next changes come along. Display manufacturers and viewer expectation help drive the different techno...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 08 September 2018

Listening to the needs of audio engineers

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Monitoring SDI video content within an installation is and has always been straight forwards. If you have a monitor, and you can see the image correctly, all is well. This is not necessarily the case for metadata and especially not for audio. Assuming a SMPTE 352 payload packet is present on the SDI signal, this metadata determines how the video co...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 07 June 2018

Technological advances in the broadcast industry

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Since it is Omnitek’s 20th anniversary this year, I thought it would be interesting to look back over the technological advances in the broadcast industry over the last few decades and look at the similarities between then and now. When I started work in the Broadcast television industry in 1975, video was analogue (with only 3 of 4 formats to worr...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 26 March 2018

Supporting broadcast quality control

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With the ever-increasing number of program channels and range of different program distribution formats, the process of ensuring program quality has become a complex one for contribution/capture, production, post production, server ingest and content distribution. Add to this the complexities of HDR and WCG gamut, it is essential to ensure that the...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 02 November 2017

Peace of mind in a complicated world

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For many in the broadcast industry these are challenging times. With competition coming from all angles and different technological camps advocating different approaches to infrastructure and the way forwards. With the number of different variables increasing, the choices of whether to use SDI or IP infrastructures, and the choices around HDR and W...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 19 October 2017

The importance of a low noise floor

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The Noise Floor of a piece of T&M equipment is the inherent noise (or intrinsic jitter) introduced by the equipment itself. The level of inherent noise affects the accuracy and repeatability of jitter measurements that can be made, especially when measuring low levels of jitter. With the permitted 100KHz jitter on a 12G-SDI signal being only 0.3UI,...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 07 December 2016

Staying within a recognisable landscape

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by Alan Wheable Issue 110 - February 2016 2015 saw the maturing development of UHDTV 4K signal technologies and a growing agreement that both SDI and IP will exist in their respective strong application areas, as a solid engineering solution to the differing requirements of live signal handling and programme contribution. While the apparent panacea...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 16 March 2016

Monitoring Image and Signal Degradation

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by Peter LampelIssue 79 - July 2013 OmniTeks latest waveform analysis software focused on assessing the degradation in video and audio quality and timing suffered by images as they are transmitted or stored. What approach has OmniTek taken to measuring these effects? In an ideal world, all broadcasters would love to have a piece of equipment that s...

Submitted by Mike Hodson

Published 01 August 2013

Whats new in broadcast test and measurement

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The test and measurement product category continues to expand as the broadcast business itself diversifies. Notable recent developments include higher resolution displays and a gradually increasing number of analysers which, having detected a fault, endeavour to fix it. No sign at NAB 2011 of any tablet-based test and measurement equipment but perh...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 July 2011

Ask the experts. Eye & Jitter

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Why should TV broadcast engineers be interested in adding Eye and Jitter measurement to their T & M facilities?The call for Eye and Jitter as part of overall video test and measurement lies in the widespread adoption of serial digital interface (SDI) standards for broadcast. Unlike analog transmission in which the image quality gradually degrades a...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 September 2009

Eye to Eye. Whats new in test and measurement 2009

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The transition from analogue to digital programme production, storage and delivery lulled some innocent folk into anticipating a world without need for test equipment. If required at all, so the thinking went, all signal analysis would be performed in software. Maybe someday. For now, the T&M sector remains alive and well. The following summary out...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 May 2009