KitPlus | Articles

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

Run Leaner, More Agile and Scalable OTT Operations

The migration to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for media processing is underway and growing as broadcasters and content service providers explore new ways to increase agility and operational efficiencies. With media processing SaaS, content and service providers can quickly and easily deploy new channels, deliver a better quality of experience (QoE)...

Submitted by Olivier Karra

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

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

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

Betting Industry Transformed by Video Technology

In the betting and gaming industry, the streaming of live sports from across the globe is a big business. It’s proven that revenues increase when bettors are able to watch the event that they have placed a bet on, providing a far more engaging experience. At Sports Information Services (SIS), we transmit in excess of 620,000 hours of live sports co...

Submitted by chris thornton

Published 07 June 2018

What is Next for Broadcast

The Broadcast industry is always chasing new technology. Some of that technology is further than it appears to be, and some of it is closer to adoption than it seems. In part, early adopted technology is accelerated because of customer or business demands, and in the case of IP based environments, the driving factors are speed, cost reduction, and...

Submitted by David Schleifer

Published 07 June 2018

State of the Nation

I sometimes think I pay too much to get my hair cut. On the most recent occasion I was trimmed, my hairdresser had just returned from a holiday in Hawaii. Where she thought she was going to die. She thought this because the state’s emergency alert system was triggered, sending messages across all available platforms, for 38 minutes, that a ballisti...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 26 March 2018

Technological advances in the broadcast industry

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

Six steps for award winning sound design with Jungle Stud...

Few can argue that great sound design is one of the most important elements to any moving picture. Mute most horrors, and the difference in fear factor will be enormous. Visualize Jaws or Star Wars, and John Williams’s iconic score will instantly come to mind. As for me, my own personal passion for music first came as a teenager. I started out as a...

Submitted by chris turner

Published 26 March 2018