room with almost no impact will make the decision to invest much easier. The adoption by existing broadcasters of this solution will bring demanding new requirements with regards to interoperability with existing corporate systems such as traffic, billing, logging, reporting, monitoring, signalling, etc. The low price at which one
Alex Fraser: 2013 will bring more complex channel-in-a-few-boxes solutions to market A new generation
Alex Fraser, chief technical officer, wTVision, shares his predictions for Channel in a Box developments in 2013
CHANNEL IN a Box solutions are rapidly evolving and have been gaining a lot of attention from the broadcast industry. 2013 will bring to the market a new generation of more mature solutions that will expand the broadcast market in several directions.
Initial Channel in a Box solutions were focused on the difficult task of cramming into a single system all major components of a master control room. The quality of each component was not the concern and such systems offered very basic functionality in each of its
parts. User interface was basic and buggy, graphics capability rudimentary, and their designers even more basic. This type of solution
appealed to only the most budget-restricted entrant into the market and not so much to existing players. With the last generation of systems, major brands have realised the simplification power of such systems and have made an effort to bring quality and robustness into this market segment. 2013 should see a
continuation of this trend.
Systems should evolve to Channel in a Box solutions using embedded realtime 3D graphics engines. This will narrow the quality gap between traditional channels and in-a- box solutions. Price will continue to be the major driver for this market, but simplicity will also attract existing broadcasters to extend their network lineups with alternative channels to reuse their existing content and attract more viewers while keeping operational costs down. The ability to add a new channel to an existing control-
can produce a new channel is also very appealing to content distributors who are willing to support a big slice of the costs to make exclusive deals with existing content producers to guarantee a differentiated
channel line-up. This trend will likely continue and 2013 may see an explosion of alternative channels per distributor because of this. Channel in a Box is not
however an elegant solution for existing broadcasters. There is a clear lack of seating space for existing organisations to work. Existing broadcasters have specialised their staff to perform different tasks in the channel’s workflow — and asking a single operator to Ingest, Trim, Segment, Sequence and Monitor Playout is not a good proposition for these companies.
ChannelMaker consists of a suite of applications that work together to provide optimised workflows for each channel’s requirements
For that reason, 2013 will bring more complex channel-in-a-few-boxes solutions to market that, while keeping the automation workflow simple and contained, will provide enough computers to allow for a more stable and reliable and less crammed solution which will ultimately benefit all market segments. A further evolution of this system is the Main/Backup architecture. An extra layer of complexity will need to be solved to provide simple but connected systems for redundancy. An even greater challenge will be the N systems with M backups for distribution scenarios where an idle channel may serve as a backup to any channel that fails or needs maintenance. All these engineering solutions are just in their infancy and the next few years will definitely narrow the gap between reliability and quality of in-a-box solutions to their traditional older brothers of broadcasting.