KitPlus | Articles

What Virtual Dreams Are Made Of

As you might expect, virtualisation is now a very common topic in terms of the questions we get from customers and partners and it also appears in almost all RFPs that we take part in. Basically, customers want to know what we\'re doing with the cloud, but often when they say this, they are talking about private clouds. The tendency is that people...

Submitted by Mike Jacobs - new

Published 04 April 2017

A Software Based Approach to Video Monitoring

Real-time content monitoring is a mission-critical operation for broadcasters, telecom, and satellite operators. Traditionally, service providers have used monitoring systems based on specialized hardware with a dedicated, fixed interface designed to monitor a specific number of video feeds. Yet, bespoke hardware solutions require a substantial amo...

Submitted by Anupama Anantharaman - new

Published 04 April 2017

A transformation in aquisition technology

KitPlus spoke with Malcolm Harland of Garland Partners to find out how the requirements and capabilities of acquisition technologies have changed since the early 2000s and what the state of play now is. Back in 2004, when you launched Garland Partners, the market was focused on SD and ASI. Since then the pace of change has been immense. Is growth d...

Submitted by Malcolm Harland

Published 15 March 2017

Consumer of the shelf technology is coming

I had the privilege last week of sitting in a strategy session of the Digital Production Partnership where we were concerned with predicting the future. As Niels Bohr once famously said, "Predictions are really hard - especially when predicting the future". One of the attendees made a comment about camera technology and I instantly thought about th...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 15 March 2017

The Transistion in Audio Monitoring

As signal chains have become increasingly complex, the challenges involved in managing and monitoring these paths have multiplied exponentially. Over the past few decades, we\'ve migrated from handling a single channel of content using composite video and analog audio pairs, to elaborate multi-channel facilities routing HD video with embedded audio...

Submitted by Shane Toven

Published 15 March 2017

What are the challenges of AoIP

At the setup of a recent Outside Broadcast (OB), I was privy to an attempt to pass a signal across two independent Audio over IP (AoIP) enabled trucks. In an SDI world, this bridge would have been as simple as coupling two BNC cables together, but here the engineers quipped about the additional and sometimes challenging processes of connecting one...

Submitted by Craig Newbury

Published 15 March 2017

Mr MXF thinks the future is made of components

The recent SMPTE IMF plugfest that was kindly hosted by Fox in Burbank gave the vendors, users and content owners a chance to discuss the fine details of the IMF standard and to get excited about where it will take the Post Production community. If you haven\'t heard of IMF then you have not been standing within 500ft of me for the past year. IMF i...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 15 February 2017

Smarter Branding

The past decade of multi-channel digital broadcasting has created a paradox. The addition of OTT, VoD and other online services only serves to add to it. On the one hand, the more channels there are, the more you need to market yours if it is to win and retain a healthy audience. On the other hand, the more channels there are, the more the total re...

Submitted by James Gilbert

Published 15 February 2017

Dick finds the truth out there

The Oxford English Dictionary has determined that its word of the year for 2016 was "post-truth". We\'ll skip over the fact that it is, clearly, two words. Post-truth is, according to the world\'s best lexicographers, "an adjective defined as \'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opi...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 15 February 2017

The secret to global Gogglebox success

People all over the world love watching other people watch TV. What many of us thought was a ridiculous notion when Gogglebox first aired in the UK in 2013, has since become a worldwide phenomenon. \'Gogglebox is held up by the global industry and broadcast community as an example of excellence in audience engagement and production innovation, and...

Submitted by Chris Cooper

Published 15 February 2017

MAM needs to adapt or die

The media landscape has shifted dramatically over recent years. Content providers are under increasing pressure to deliver compelling content to multiple platforms. Also, the production and distribution of video is no longer limited to traditional broadcasters, which face rising competition from a range of media providers. We are also seeing a mass...

Submitted by Tim Child

Published 15 February 2017

Live streaming and the power of your own channel

We\'ve just celebrated 80 years of television. And it\'s been quite a journey from the birth of television to where we are now. Only a small percentage of UK households had television sets when the BBC began broadcasting in 1936, and of course the Second World War temporarily suspended any television viewing shortly after that for the duration of t...

Submitted by Liam Laminman

Published 13 January 2017

Social streaming and broadcast

We are witnessing a growing trend from broadcasters looking to complement TV content with social streaming. When done well, it can really help increase consumer engagement on a huge scale and we have seen some great examples of it over recent months. At the recent Kit Plus Show, I talked about the marriage between broadcast and social streaming, wh...

Submitted by Craig Moehl

Published 13 January 2017

Rethinking standards in the media world

It\'s actually a more difficult question than you think. When I ask the majority of engineers this question, I will get a technical answer. It will be something like "to be sure we meet the specification\" or "to be sure we don\'t put bad signals on air\" or "so that I don\'t get fired for getting loudness wrong\" The reality of course is that moni...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 07 December 2016

The value of an industry placement

"Do a placement after the second year of your degree they said, it\'ll be fun they said!\" You know what, they were right! Hello there, my name is Abbie Smith and I have just returned from my placement year to conclude my third and final year studying BA Film and Television Studies. Undertaking a placement within your university degree is heavily p...

Submitted by Abbie Smith

Published 07 December 2016