olympics everywhere supplement
special report
We lead ever busier lives. We work longer hours, we spend more time in traffic jams and trains, and we don’t always get home in time to watch our favourite TV programmes or live sporting events. Even if we do make it home in time we are usually too tired to fully enjoy the content. It’s good, then, that being home and on time are no longer prerequisites for ensuring that we don’t miss any of the action! Consumers had become accustomed to arranging their lives around their favourite TV shows, but no longer. Today, content comes to us wherever we are, appearing when we want it and how we need it. The concept of broadcasting has been turned on its head with the ability to broadly communicate one-to-one with every consumer rather than relying upon the traditional one- to-many scenario. James Caselton, head of product & partner marketing, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Dolby Laboratories, reports.
Sound travels S
o how will major global events benefit from this evolution in technology? 2012 will see the first truly global sporting events enjoyed by people across
different devices and consumption screens. This is because the traditional TV screen in the living room has now been complemented by three new screens: the personal computer, the tablet and the smart phone. Of course, it has been possible for
some time now to take a DVD on your laptop and watch it on a bus or on a plane but this experience has been isolated to the movie itself and has
For Dolby the consumer is where the story begins and ends. It believes that everyone involved in content delivery, no matter now embedded, must consider the consumer.
not normally been very convenient in terms of portability. Nowadays, consumers are not only watching the same content using different devices depending on their current location and viewing circumstances, but they are contributing to it via social media - live and connected to the Internet and, therefore, the world. With advances in audio and video
technologies, the consumer is now able to enjoy a much richer experience across different devices (screens) whether they are trying to escape from the daily commute or killing time in a cafe. Although most of the focus over the past couple of years has been on video quality it must be noted that audio has itself evolved. For some time consumers have been forced to listen to heavily compressed audio which loses a lot of sonic detail like, for example, AAC or MP3. Relatively recently more expensive headphones and lower cost but higher quality home theatre systems have become available. It is critically important to remember, however, that if you have a higher quality audio source then you can extract a much richer experience. So if you are listening through higher quality headphones it is even more important that you select the right audio technology to enjoy the richest possible experience. The demands on audio have never
28 l ibe l olympics everywhere supplement november/december 2011 l
www.ibeweb.com Making it all possible
At Dolby we have been working as the audio partner to the broadcast, online and mobile communities for some time. We have seen these industries begin to overlap to a point where we refer more to content delivery than broadcast owing to the arrival of IP, non-linear content and
been higher. Audio must be carried efficiently, reliably and with complete control to ensure that it can scale across the many different devices that consumers now use to view (and listen to) content. Audio streams must contain information which not only governs their loudness and dynamic range but also optimises multi- channel 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound to work with virtualised headphones or downmixed to stereo speakers. For international events, it is essential that the audio is delivered in many different languages accompanied by special services like audio description for those of us who require assistance when enjoying content (the main audio stream must know when to ‘duck’ its volume to allows the audio description track to come through clearly). All these elements must be synchronised to the video content whilst being on-demand and working through multiple distribution systems and varying bandwidths!
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