feature live news and sport
News and sport are often intertwined. Just ask anyone covering recent revelations in professional cycling. News and sport have in common an inherent drama and immediacy that resonates most when experienced in the moment. Jim Hurwitz of Telecast Fiber Systems reports.
The ‘copper marathon’ nears the end
he legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow may not have foreseen that the title of his 1950s news and documentary programme - See it Now - would become a literal requirement for those charged with covering news and sport. The competitive pressures to be first-to-air have never been greater, exacerbated by the advent of social media, which only adds to the need for speed and immediacy.
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Miranda recently launched LUMO, a new high-density fiber converter series that provides 36 I/Os in a 1RU frame.
Fortunately, many technology developers and manufacturers have, for the most part, risen to the task to provide new and compelling means of getting information where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, including over multiple platforms.
Contemporary technologies exist that can give news and sport crews a demonstrable competitive advantage and, for our part, it’s an elegant one. Here, in a single example, is what I mean.
Telecast’s CopperHead.
Imagine two sprinters of equal ability lined up for a gold medal race - but the competition has been amended. The goal is not just to be first across the finish line, but to deploy 400 feet (approximately 122 metres for our European friends) of cable along the way for the benefit of their respective broadcast sponsors. On a coin toss, one is given a 400-foot reel of copper coax, the other 400 feet of fiber optic cable. The copper cable, excluding reel, weighs ninety-three pounds. The fiber cable weighs six. Let’s not get silly. We know who finishes first, but there’s more. The coax sprinter will reach the finish line utterly spent. Done. Unable to take another step. The fiber sprinter, on the other hand, could happily carry on - without losing speed or even breaking a sweat - for another 12 miles (nearly 20 kilometres).
40 l ibe l november/december 2012 l
www.ibeweb.com
What I’m saying is that for those who need that extra step, that extra speed, the ability to get closer to the action than ever before and cover a story now at far greater distances than had ever been thought possible, there’s simply no competition between copper and fiber. We ought to know. At Telecast Fiber Systems, now happily part of the Miranda family, we have been pioneering the development and deployment of fiber cable for the best part of 20 years. Not only is fiber easier to deploy, its throughput is much, much faster. Moreover, despite being much smaller than coax, it’s a much fatter pipe, able to carry far more bandwidth and bilateral communications of any type. Those practical advantages aside (for the moment) the overwhelming trend in news gathering and sports applications today is to be able to move uncompressed HD from the camera to the truck without being limited by distance. Fiber allows this, enabling personnel to get a far more intimate story and deliver the video and audio information they capture with levels of reliability and quality that copper cable can never hope to match.
Fiber, despite a wholly false perception of fragility by its inclusion of glass strands, is much, much tougher than copper coax. In fact, fiber cable was originally developed to
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