By Tim Felstead, head of Sales & Marketing, ATG Broadcast
ATG Broadcast celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The greater part of those two decades included successfully pioneering the transition to digital content management for broadcasters around the world. ATG’s first large-scale nonlinear
production and playout system was designed for Swedish broadcaster TV4 and integrated 15 years ago into its Stockholm headquarters. That was based on the groundbreaking Tektronix/Grass Valley Profile video servers for online storage in conjunction with a near-online data-tape archive. This mode of working set the
pattern which the entire industry has since widely adopted and continues to develop into workflow engines and services oriented software architectures. Since then, ATG has continuously and steadily tracked the changes in technology, installing an increasingly large number of IP network oriented systems up to and including the fifth largest ENPS newsroom installation in the world at SABC. The following areas are where
ATG sees technological developments occurring over the next seven years, towards 2020. We believe these will have a direct impact on systems design, purchasing choices and our services to clients.
The ‘factory’ concept will be further developed in live production and post production, already adopted in repeated format game shows and other genres. As the volume of content produced worldwide has massively increased, those with the capacity to produce large volumes, error free (don’t stop the production line) and with high quality (a product that sells) will be the market leaders. Energy consumption will continue to be a factor but more as a function of efficient workflows and its impact on the cost of production than for any call to save the planet (albeit a very useful side effect). Measuring costs against a particular piece of media and its associated workflows will become more and more critical. Media asset management systems will become complete lifecycle managers starting at the ideation phase and finishing … well, never if the value in the rights never runs out! The concept of a news ‘slug’ has been running for many years — this concept will be extended into the main items on media systems and link to workflows driving such
a scheduled and pre-sold programme. Software architectures and the skills required for deep and fully functional integration will be crucial. Business and production software systems will become far more tightly integrated. File formats will never be settled; just as tape always caused format wars so we will never be free of the pain of incompatibility in the tapeless world. However, sensible media management companies will have as many agreements in place as they can to fix media formats between partners, will have an intelligently chosen ‘mezzanine’ format in house, and will choose Quality Control (QC) processes with care to ensure their ‘factory’ is always running at optimum efficiency. The image resolution for acquisition will continue to be determined by the ultimate sales purpose of the programme and not necessarily ‘highest and best always’. Realistic understandings of the value of content and commercial opportunities for repurposing or re-sale will determine the bandwidth available (and cost) for its initial production. This will drive the choice of camera, sensor, recording and post production systems used towards an enormously wide choice, already evidenced by newsworthy phone recordings of world events broadcast on a regular basis. Synchronous and non-
synchronous signals will remain important in the future. If mixing live signals at an event then all sources need to be in time with each other. Hence the need for genlock over broadcast cables will continue until the point it can be replaced with an IP derived signal. SMPTE 1588 v2 is a proposed standard for the replacement of Genlock over IP systems; it may also be able to replace our current frame labeling timecode. I believe it will happen over this time period and will have deep impact on systems design. Playout as a function will cover both linear and nonlinear as a matter of course. The integration of media management software and hardware for both areas will by necessity become one and the same. The future of media is, above all,
about greater consumer choice and the monetisation of media through whichever choice the consumer makes; whether audio, video, 2D or 3D, big-screen, small screen, close-up or surround. For systems integrators, the future is about working in partnership with clients and suppliers to deliver reliable, cost- efficient and versatile solutions.