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Introducing Emma and her commentaries

My name’s Emma, and I am currently in my first year working as a freelance production assistant. In these commentaries I’ll be sharing with you what I get up to, the n00by mistakes I’ll inevitably make, but hopefully some successes!This month I was fortunate enough to be a part of the Tony Hawk Twitter Hunt. If only the life of a production assista...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2011

Either meet your listeners halfway, or get them to come t...

In TV Bay’s IPTV & Online issue, I spoke about how streaming video online enabled content owners to share their work with the world a lot more effectively, so although the end result is the same, what technical procedures are different for streaming pure audio content?The pace of technical advancements have now established distinct requirements for...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 June 2011

What are the most important opportunities and challenges...

What are the most important opportunities and challenges facing the TV industry today?To answer this question we need to look more broadly at consumer behaviour and the changing way people are consuming content. Viewers no longer solely want a passive experience with a TV programme in their front room. They want to watch catch-up TV on a laptop, do...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

Will Youview and IPTV change the face of TV Broadcasting

Youview, and the evolution of Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), are set to have a major impact on the UK broadcasting industry. Youview is the latest evolution of Freeview and Freesat, the Set Top Boxes (STB) that give access to additional channels without a monthly subscription. Freeview gives viewers access to terrestrial broadcasts, while Freesat ena...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

Where is the real source of digital creativity

The summit of Live music has always been dominated by large bands, filling arenas consisting of high production values, funded by record labels and advertisers looking to attain a huge audience. The opposite end of the music spectrum however, still holds a colossal circuit of unsigned bands, desperately promoting on the streets to get the crowds th...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

The #BVEXPO Great Experiment

NAB, IBC and Broadcast Video Expo share one thing - they play to a global audience for TV and film production, post-production and distribution. It’s not practical to get along to all the shows so there is an increasing trend to report for that global audience. BV Expo is currently the only show without a dedicated multimedia channel. With somethin...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

Watching Television

The pictures on this page give you a small insight into my life. The first is a picture of the television in my living room. At the time of taking the picture I was watching the English cricket team losing in high definition. The second picture is of my desk. Again you will see that it is dominated by a large screen (I’m afraid I still have a sneak...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Eye to eye: The changing face of video displays

Video display technology is progressing so fast that the phrase 'More revolutions than a banana republic' inevitably comes to mind. No offence intended if you have just taken over as president. From the 1930s to the present century, television display was dominated almost entirely by cathode ray tubes. Competition then arrived in the form of plasma...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Camp, ash, irritation and embarrassment

I am writing these words in the last days of December and you are reading them in the first days of January, so it seems like a good opportunity to look back on 2010 and see what we toilers in television have learnt. Against the odds there were some good programmes on the box. Astoundingly, ITV delivered a drama series that was just like the good o...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Launching Call of Duty Black Ops

So, how do you get the feed from 8 full HD camera's, games console screen captures, and a remote camera feed from 6 miles away to over 180,000 live game junkies all waiting to see the release of what is likely to be the world’s fastest selling and most anticipated Console/PC Game to date?That was the question posed to us at Mediakinetic by the digi...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 January 2011

Safekeeping for the Future

A CIRENCESTER audio archival engineering company has just finished working on a set of African recordings that are more than a century old. Paul Turney, of Sirensound Digital, was commissioned to digitize the wax cylinders for future safekeeping of the audio. Wax cylinders were patented by Thomas Edison and were one of the earliest form of sound re...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

Looking back, and forward to the next decade of media pro...

The year 2000 doesn’t seem that long ago – and what’s for certain is that as you get older ten years is a very short space of time. A decade is a long time in technology though. In 1999 most people didn’t have a mobile phone and weren’t even on the internet at home, painfully slow dial-up was the only option for most. A decade on, the internet is a...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

Screen and Music Travel

What do Screen and Music Travel do?Screen and Music Travel are specialist travel agents to the television and film industries. We move film crews (many of whom are probably your readers) to destinations all over the world. We have many deals in place with a number of airlines, for discounts on excess baggage charges, for passengers travelling with...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2008

Dont Drink from the Mainstream.

Here’s the note pinned on the studio door of Undercurrents productions in South Wales. To do list for 20081) Make 10 new video series on topics ranging from Woodland skills to Technology reviews and from Political news to investigative documentaries. 2) Develop a desktop video player application based upon the open source software. 3) Launch an Int...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 August 2008

A Cinematographers Companion, through hell and high water...

Miller Camera Support has never been more thoroughly tested than by Australian Cinematographer Wade Fairley, through Antarctic winters and summers, floods in Tuvalu, swamps in the Solomon Islands and the outback deserts of Australia. The most outstanding project of recent times for Wade was the trip for the BBC Natural History Unit, shooting footag...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 March 2008