KitPlus | Articles

Who really benefits from the Cloud?

The transition to "the cloud\" in our industry has been challenging. Why is it so important to have cloud technologies? What do customers really expect? The term "cloud\" has been used to such an extent that it has diminished the real and actual importance of what\'s really going on - off-premise compute power. With typical cloud adjectives still a...

Submitted by Jayson Tomlin - new

Published 04 April 2017

Challenges for MAM with varying production types

Many media asset management platforms are designed to handle the immense number of assets needed for today\'s fast-moving, content-heavy productions. Since every production is unique, each has its own set of asset management requirements and workflow needs. While the unique workflows vary, a common necessity for an easy-to-use interface with the ab...

Submitted by Jonathan Aroesty

Published 15 February 2017

Diversify or Die

This headline of this article is a simple fact, diversify or die! It is necessary for survival as well as interest of mind to do this within business. "If a farmer can no longer produce crops because no-one wants them he must diversify or die.\" Caravans, glamping, corporate days in the country with hunting, fishing and shooting; these are just som...

Submitted by Steffan Hewitt

Published 13 January 2017

Trends in IP based broadcast

The momentum behind moving media operations to IP-based environments is unstoppable and to stay ahead of the competition these days, companies need to be migrating operations away from rigid, single-purpose components and towards software-based common computing resources. The good news is a well-architected IP-based production facility is now able...

Submitted by Glodina Lostanlen

Published 13 January 2017

Cause and effect of jitter in an operational IP video net...

What are the advantages of moving to an IP infrastructure? The most commonly cited advantage of deploying IP Video networks in production and other operational applications is the ability to use Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) IT-based infrastructure, which takes advantage of the economies of scale of the IT industry when compared with the relative...

Submitted by Paul Robinson

Published 07 December 2016

Taking a hybrid approach to the SDI/IP transistion

Broadcasters are not newcomers to technological transitions. As an industry, we\'ve survived analogue to digital, baseband to file-based workflows, SDTV to HDTV and now 4KUHD resolution, not to mention weathering a barrage of new compression formats. Today, we\'re facing one of the most dramatic transformations we\'ve ever undergone: SDI to IP. Unl...

Submitted by Matthew Coleman

Published 07 December 2016

Space lights and a man called Bill

The Space Light has become one of those universally used fixtures which inhabit many film sound stages, as well as finding employment within studio-based broadcast productions. Its history, not completely lost in the sands of time, is very much part of the evolution of the British film industry, whilst its use extends now to Hollywood and beyond. F...

Submitted by Ian Muir

Published 07 December 2016

Hacking Hell

There was a really scary story in the news a week or two ago. In the words of Yves Bigot, director-general of TV5 Monde, "we were a couple of hours from having the whole station gone for good". What happened to this highly respected broadcaster was that malicious hackers set out to destroy the network\'s systems. That has to be an alarm call for al...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 07 December 2016

TVFutures - The Battle of the Flowers

Studying on the BSc Television and Broadcasting course at the University of Portsmouth had given me some experience working as a camera operator, but this summer I had the chance to put what I\'d learned over the last two years into practice. Back home in the sunny island of Jersey, in what newsrooms would usually call the \'silly season\', an even...

Submitted by Alex Watson

Published 10 November 2016

Sadies 7 top tips for getting stuff done

Up until 3rd August 2016 Kevin Roberts was the chairman of Saatchi and Saatchi, one of the largest and most high profile companies in the world. For those of you that were already on a sun lounger by then reading a John Grisham or you skipped over it because you thought it didn't matter to you here is a quick re-cap. In an article in Business Insid...

Submitted by Sadie Groom

Published 26 September 2016

Tips on how to reduce your exposure to business crime

Business Crime is growing in popularity and is cunning, smart, and very convincing. It is being spurred on by the very technology that is supposed to help media and other businesses improve performance. One of the trending frauds is \'Social Engineering\' where criminals can make use technology, and trickery to exploite our human nature. Here we ou...

Submitted by Phil Bower

Published 25 August 2016

Realising the ideal

On 26 July 1916 there was a public meeting in New York. It was called by a group led by Charles Francis Jenkins (and more on him in a moment). But the guest speaker was Henry D Hubbard, at the time the secretary of the US National Bureau of Standards. This is some of what he said: "Interchangeability of parts is an important principle of standardis...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 24 August 2016

The future of timing and timecode

It is SMPTE\'s 100th anniversary! I hope that all readers have had a chance to view the Centennial Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN2yYrEFMFQ) and to contemplate that 100 years ago we were in the dawn of the cinema era, where different equipment used different frame rates, different sprocket sizes, different frame sizes and the concept of d...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 24 August 2016

Females In The Broadcasting Industry

by Emma Clifford Issue 113 - May 2016 You\'re hiring. You\'re reviewing CVs.You\'re not bothered about names are you?What matters are skills, experience and the competencies of the candidates, right?Wrong! You probably have unconscious bias. A recent US study used 100 STEM professors (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) to review CVs. But h...

Submitted by Emma Clifford

Published 13 May 2016

Females In The Broadcasting Industry

by Samantha Arlow Issue 112 - April 2016 Everyone has heard of the FBI right? The US Federal Bureau of Investigation that inspires images of hard talking detectives in dark suits and sunglasses. But if you work in Broadcast, there\'s another FBI you should know about. This FBI, as the name spells out, is an organisation specifically geared towards...

Submitted by Samantha Arlow

Published 25 April 2016