[opendtv] Re: TV Technology: IP for Broadcast: The Time Is Now
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 07:03:30 -0400
On Apr 21, 2015, at 9:34 PM, Manfredi, Albert E
<albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This article primarily makes the case for using IP in production, but also
mentions IP in delivery. Here's a telling couple of sentences:
"Consumers and electronics manufacturers are now driving the technology.
Companies like Netflix are positioning themselves to take advantage of this
and the utilize IP technology to supply direct to screen delivery for
everything from small screens to 4K. With the technology now accessible to
broadcasters as well, they won't have to pin their future solely on ATSC 3.0."
Although as I read it, ATSC 3.0 is heavily IP-reliant too. The broadcast
aspects should predictably become steadily less important, over time, IMO.
The other thing is this comment:
"Meyer said that people continue to underestimate the shear power of
Ethernet. 'It's an amazing technology that is designed to be scalable,' he
said, adding that such scalability will provide broadcasters a platform that
will more easily grow and change with their needs."
Thanks for putting up this article Bert. The more than anything confirms just
how far we have come since the early '90s when we worked with broadcasters to
complete the ATSC standard. I worked with some of the people mentioned in this
article, not to mention Grass Valley, which was very much locked in to the
legacy thinking behind ATSC and the HD transition.
At one of the last NAB's I attended, I remember talking to the owners of
companies that built video routers, master control and SDI distribution gear
about how they could deal with Ethernet touting in TV facilities - none of them
saw this technology replacing the dedicated synchronous plants that
broadcasters had been using for decades.
The biggest issue during the run up to the ATSC standard was routing and
switching synchronous streams throughout the plant up through the master
control switcher, which fed the MPEG-2 encoder, creating the MPEG transport
stream that fed the transmitter. They were still concerned about blanking
intervals, and other legacy issues from the world of analog TV. Not to mention
59.94 and interlace...
Now the entire notion of a standardized video frame seems quaint and outdated.
We kept telling the "vidiots" that formats are irrelevant in the digital world
we were enabling. All that mattered was the raster size (horizontal and
vertical resolution), the aspect ratio (to deal with non square sample
geometries), the frame rate, and the color space used for the samples.
The production paradigm was even more outdated. Production switchers (video
mixers) dealt with each visual object as a complete synchronous video raster,
rather than visual objects made up of arbitrary groups of samples.
Who knew that we would be shooting and editing HD on our smartphone and
tablets, and sending digital video around the world via LTE cellular networks?
We did!
But the video industry could not see the future we described...and built.
Regards
Craig
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