KitPlus | Articles

The Outlook for 2018

January has arrived…and the New Year promises great opportunities for those prepared to seek them out, with the one certainty that change is constant. Let’s start with London studio space, and the lack thereof. The issue is finally being addressed with fortuitous timing (or maybe some expert planning) as Riverside Studios in Hammersmith opens its s...

Submitted by Duncan Payne

Published 12 February 2018

Cellular, Satellite or Fixed Link - how do you choose

Having a choice is a good thing. Take apples, for example. While one may look pretty much the same as the next, we know that the subtle differences between varieties can make a huge difference in how we choose to use them some are best for pies, some better for cider, and others just perfect for eating from the tree. Similarly, the subtleties betwe...

Submitted by Lorna Garrett

Published 19 October 2017

Remote Production - Speed, Control, Infrastructure

i Remote production gives broadcasters the ability to capture a wider range of live events, such as regional sports, news or music festivals, and mix them in a remote facility hundreds or thousands of miles away. Many of these events might be of restricted interest, and may be broadcast to a narrow audience demographic. They may be regional news ev...

Submitted by Ian Cookson - new

Published 01 August 2017

Controlling the Chaos of Remote Uplinks

For Satellite Broadcasters, consumer needs have never been so varied. Audiences are increasingly accustomed to personalisation in every type of content they consume. They now demand, or rather expect to receive breaking news from a scene, content specific to their regions and access to live sporting events held thousands of miles away. As a result,...

Submitted by Roger Franklin

Published 19 May 2017

You can have your OTT and IP IT too

It has taken a long time, for a variety of reasons, but the rising tide of pushing mainstream content over IP is now commonplace. Looking back a few years, some manufacturers, who were early to recognise the advantages, were keen to implement IP based interconnectivity, even though some of their customers remained, and are still, somewhat reluctant...

Submitted by Peter Blanchford

Published 13 January 2017

Television is dead, long live television

After decades of operating within the same fundamental model, the walls around our world - what was the broadcast world, or "vertical", in marketing terms - are crumbling. NAB 2016 clearly showed this and IBC 2016 took it one step further: momentum is strengthening as we push towards an IP future. The TVB2020 conference earlier this year also refle...

Submitted by Ephraim Barrett

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

The FAQs on automated quality assurance

The transition from tape-based to file-based video and audio recording allowed a completely new approach to the business of checking that programmes and interstitials conform to broad-cast industry standards prior to transmission. The Vidcheck team designed the world\'s first au-tomated broadcast quality control product. We have been working on fil...

Submitted by Thomas Dove

Published 25 August 2016

FBI Interview

This issue we chat with Ann Charles, a freelance Broadcast Technology and radio production consultant. Give us your elevator pitch. Who are you and what do you do?Hello, I'm Ann Charles and I'm a Radio Production and Technology Consultant. I help individuals and companies get the most out of their station's technology so they can make the best prog...

Submitted by Ann Charles

Published 22 July 2016

High throughput satellite meets the challenge of IP media

For some time, many people in the media industry have been wondering how much longer satellite could remain a major player now that the era of 4K is upon us and there is such a rapid proliferation of channels. There just isn't the throughput for these new services on the current generation of satellites, so the argument goes, and the costs per giga...

Submitted by Simen Frostad

Published 22 July 2016

Broadcast Playout Over IP and in The Cloud

with Don Ash Issue 109 - January 2016 Simon Tillyer: Before we get heavy about IP and the cloud, what is the current state of the broadcast playout business? Don Ash: The transition to server-based systems in recent years has made the entire process of broadcast playout much easier to operate and automate than the tape-based equipment which precede...

Submitted by Don Ash

Published 21 January 2016

Juggling with Broadcast Graphics

by Paul Vanlint Issue 109 - January 2016 If it were just about designing stunning looking titles, life would be simple and Adobe After Effects would probably have the market sewn up. But todays broadcasters and even AV producers have so many factors to juggle with, that anything other than a professional graphics solution is unthinkable. On the one...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 21 January 2016

Virtually there - media monitoring goes beyond hardware

by Simen Frostad Issue 108 - December 2015 Being a hardware manufacturer is a great thing. It allows you to design the totality of the product and the users experience of it, to create a plug-and-play appliance that is uniquely fitted to its task. And there are plenty of tasks that are best done with the help of a piece of dedicated hardware, for m...

Submitted by Simen Frostad

Published 15 December 2015

Distribution in the UHD Era

by Paul Briscoe Issue 103 - July 2015 Once upon a time, there were few broadcast TV standards. Each used its own regional image formats, color encoding scheme and sound and vision modulation standards. High-power over-the-air (OTA) transmitters broadcast the signal on internationally coordinated and regionally allocated radio frequency (RF) channel...

Submitted by Paul Briscoe

Published 01 August 2015

From newspaper to broadcaster: VG (Norway) and LiveU

by Ronen Artman Issue 100 - April 2015 VG is a tabloid-format newspaper established in Oslo in 1945. Faced with the challenges that all newspapers face in the age of the video and the internet - fresh competition for readership and rapidly changing viewer expectations of what news is and how it\'s delivered - VG began using video online as early as...

Submitted by Ronen Artman

Published 01 May 2015