54 TVBEurope Forum Channel in a Box Even more boxes
With Channel-in-a-Box continuing to occupy a great many broadcasting minds, we felt a second Forum was needed this year. Philip Stevens moderates
CHANNEL-IN-A-BOX (CiaB) acceptance has now reached the stage where the benefits — especially in terms of capital and operating expenditure, and space demands — far outweigh the perceived downsides. Nevertheless, questions still remain in some minds, around 4K and second screens, for example. The panellists discussing these and other issues in this month’s Forum are (in alphabetical order) Don Ash, managing director, PlayBox Technology; Mark Errington, CEO, BroadStream Solutions; James Gilbert, CEO, Pixel Power; Karl Mehring,
We last looked at CiaB earlier this year. What are the latest developments since that time?
Ash: The first half of 2014 has proved extremely dynamic and successful. CiaB is now recognised right across the industry as being fully complementary to traditional high-end systems, as well as being ideal for emerging markets and low-budget installations. We have recently been working with Toronto-based Masstech Group which offers some of the world’s most advanced asset management and archiving systems. The combined skills of the two companies have proved so powerful that we plan for Masstech to acquire the products and technology of PlayBox. Our software designers and their Masstech colleagues have been cooperating very closely to achieve the tightest possibly convergence between
our CiaB technology, centred on AirBox, and Masstech’s MassStore technology and the Masstech for Enterprise solution. The goal is to create a seamless, end-to-end file- based broadcast environment where playout and graphics are fully integrated with the asset management system. Errington: Having determined that a standard IT server can handle a fully-featured channel, and that these servers can handle increased channel count and complexity of secondary events, there is an interesting divergence of direction going on with regard to vendor offerings in CiaB. Some are creating hardware-specific edge devices, which is not significantly different from a standard server running as an
senior product manager, TV Everywhere at Snell; Scott Rose, director of product management, Grass Valley; Mat Shell, proposals and solutions manager, Pebble Beach Systems; Stephen Smith, product line manager, Imagine Communications; Bruce Straight, vice president sales and marketing, ToolsOnAir; Andy Warman, director of product management, media servers and storage, Harmonic; Jan Weigner, managing director and CTO, Cinegy; and Goce Zdravkoski, managing director, Stryme.
Don Ash, PlayBox Technology
edge device (which has been around for many years), some are looking more to end-to-end IP solutions, and in some cases those are combined with ‘cloud’ architecture – whether private or public. These models are still evolving and I believe a hybrid of hardware-specific and IT
James Gilbert, Pixel PowerSolutions
solutions will exist for some time to come as broadcasters sweat some of their legacy equipment before fully embracing an all-IP solution. Gilbert: What I see as the important development in this market is that it is diverging. The mechanics of
Channel-in-a-Box are pretty well established, and each vendor now has to put a distinctive spin on it. At Pixel Power, we see broadcasters and content owners wanting to migrate more of their channels to simple, low impact technology. The key issue, though, is that they do not want to lose any functionality or, more important, quality. So our solution is focused on the real requirements of broadcasters today. In particular, we start with the branding and work back from there. Our central graphics platform, Clarity, already has all the video processing needed for a channel playout, like video servers, realtime effects and, of course, multiple layers of 3D graphics — all the things you need in a premium playout suite. So, we built ChannelMaster from the Clarity graphics platform, rather than take an off-the- shelf PC and try to make it do things it is not very good at achieving. In conjunction with either our own Gallium software or any other playout and asset management tool, ChannelMaster really does do all you need for a true Channel-in-a-Box — including advanced functionality like automated menu and promo production, complex 3D graphics and squeezebacks. Mehring: At Snell, our focus has been on giving broadcasters more functionality, flexibility, and creativity with advanced CiaB technology. This includes taking the ‘box’ out of CiaB and focusing on software. We do this by taking rule-based approaches to common problems — such as ‘now and next’ menus, and auto population that removes
www.tvbeurope.com August 2014
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