KitPlus | Articles

AoIP Solutions at Sky TV

Sky UK has recently moved the whole of its Sky News operation into new, state-of-the-art facilities in the Sky Studios building on the Sky TV campus in Osterley, West London. Described as being both the most sustainable broadcast facility of its kind in Europe as well as the most technologically advanced, the Sky Studios project is set to completel...

Submitted by Tom Pidsey

Published 18 July 2018

G-Teching Storage to another level

That heart-dropping, cold-sweat evoking moment your external hard drive fails to connect to the computer and you realise the precious project you’ve been working on for weeks is lost for good (unless you want to spank hundreds on a recovery service that may or may not retrieve some of the mangled data!)Ah, the fun of video storage - it may not be t...

Submitted by Phil Vinter

Published 18 July 2018

Twenty Years of Transcription

In 1998 Dom Bourne dropped out of university and started a business providing transcriptions to production companies. The company operated from his childhood bedroom and Dom hoped it would keep him in beer money for a year or two before he decided what he really wanted to do with his life. Twenty years later and, this year, Take 1 celebrates two de...

Submitted by Dom Bourne

Published 18 July 2018

Cellular Network Congestion at the Royal Wedding

As with all major events, planning for the Royal Wedding and surveying potential broadcast locations and securing reliable connectivity for video over IP workflows was top of mind for Canada’s Global TV. For major live broadcasts, in particular, when the entire world is watching, an extremely high degree of confidence is crucial because the live fe...

Submitted by Rob Waters

Published 18 July 2018

Will we soon be paying our respects to PayTV

Recent reports show pay TV in the US peaked in 2012 and will keep dropping over the next five years. Digital TV Research’s North America Pay TV Forecasts state the US will see a 20% drop between 2012 and 2023. Should the UK be readying for a similar change in consumer viewing, or is something different happening here?Looking at UK pay TV revenues,...

Submitted by Malcolm Harland

Published 18 July 2018

Artificial Intelligence and Economics

It’s May, so it seems inevitable that this month’s column should be a bit of a reflection on NAB. And it will, in due course. But first, some news which I think is interesting. Cisco, the IT giant, is selling off its video software solutions business. It is being bought by an as-yet unnamed new company, backed by venture capitalist Permira Funds. T...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 07 June 2018

Opting In or Opting Out

Peter Savage, CEO of Azule, explains whether you should opt in or opt out of the current red tape nightmare facing businesses large and small. No, this isn’t another Brexit referendum but I doubt whether any of you reading this are not affected, in some way, by the new European General Data Protection Regulation, commonly known as GDPR or, as I li...

Submitted by Peter Savage 2

Published 07 June 2018

Security, Identity and Privacy

Put your hand up if you have more than one online-identity. Keep your hand up if the adverts for your latest online purchase follow you between identities as you surf the web. You can now let your hand fall into your lap because adverts that follow you indicate algorithms that have merged your multiple identities into the one and only you. Why does...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin - new

Published 07 June 2018

Informed Disruption

The industry is currently going through an enormous amount of disruption, and while many are charging in to embrace the changes, others are wringing their hands with indecision. In 1990 during a time of disruption, Boxer was founded to help companies make sense of the changes and provide independent counsel that would steer its clients through the...

Submitted by Marc Risby

Published 07 June 2018

Why is ST2110 important

Presenting to a capacity audience at a joint meeting of the RTS Thames Valley Centre and SMPTE in Reading, research engineer and industry commentator Tony Orme opened the evening with the assertion - “SMPTE’s ST2110 is the most important development to hit broadcast television since John Logie Baird went head to head with EMI-Marconi at the 1936 BB...

Submitted by Penny Westlake

Published 07 June 2018

What is Serial Communication

Don’t get me wrong - the advent of IP technology has done wonders for the broadcasting universe, especially here in Special Cams land where changing a setting could have involved a rather long walk and climb to a remote camera location! Nevertheless, this said, I still feel that serial communication is a huge contender - not only just in the realm...

Submitted by Mike Colyer

Published 07 June 2018

Moving to an IP Platform Considerations

Audio transport methods have remained virtually unchanged in the broadcast industry for more than half a century. Common approaches to routing audio around large broadcast facilities have closely followed methodology employed in telco central offices, with the use of X-Y crossbar or crosspoint switching. This began to change with the arrival of sol...

Submitted by Stephen Brownsill

Published 07 June 2018

Listening to the needs of audio engineers

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

The Pitfalls of Online File Sharing and Sending Services

Easy-to-use, readily-accessible, and consumer-oriented, online file sharing platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive are, to end users, a pleasant replacement to older file transfer methods such as FTP. FTP is complex to use and requires IT intervention to make almost any change. The pain associated with FTP, which was developed in the 1970s, is...

Submitted by Mike Nash

Published 07 June 2018

Delivering on the 4k Promise

It’s happened. Consumers are demanding 4K UHD content. They have the TVs, smartphones, tablets and other devices they need, and with much of Netflix and Amazon original content in 4K, as well as sports coverage from BT and Sky, consumers have tasted the future of content quality and are hungry for more. But broadcasters need not worry if their cust...

Submitted by Lorna Garrett

Published 07 June 2018