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STRONGERTOGETHER
#IBC2021
ADAPTING AND PROTECTING: THE FUTURE FOR BROADCASTERS
Glodina Lostanlen, chief sales officer, Imagine Communications
Traditional broadcasters are under greater pressure than ever, not least from streaming services. New entrants to the market are investing very heavily in content and are moving into the broadcaster’s heartland with live events and premium sports rights. To stay competitive and relevant to audiences,
broadcasters have to deliver content to a converged TV audience. They have to adopt the digital-first streamers’ personalised engagement with the audience, and their ability to dynamically place commercials, all while retaining the broadcast expectations of quality and seamless delivery. The solution is to take a unified approach to origination and monetisation, and to aggregate content more than ever. That means a single, agile system that will plan, schedule and deliver content across the whole range of platforms – live and on demand.
It also means taking an audience-first approach to advertising sales and fulfilment. To maximise revenues, broadcasters have to regard advertising slots on broadcast and digital as a single inventory, planning campaigns across all platforms. The new approach is to sell commercials not as spots in a particular programme, but on audience reach.
Advertisers buy a specific size of a targeted audience which the unified platform will deliver, combining broadcast and connected TV placements.
“Broadcasters need to be more agile than ever in their use of technology to ensure they can maximise engagement and optimise revenues”
This really is a win-win: advertisers get a proven guarantee that they are reaching the eyeballs they want, while broadcasters optimise the use of the inventory, with the potential to release slots for further revenue opportunities. Technology is critical to this. To make it work, you need a tightly integrated platform which allows ad sales up to the very last moment. That means having advertising servers alongside the content distribution path, with seamless dynamic links to traffic and playlist scheduling. This technology exists today. However, broadcasters have always had the ‘comfort blanket’ that legacy systems were so specific to television that no-one bothered to try to
break in. The concern is now that the whole sales and playout chain looks like a data centre, it may be at risk of malevolent actors. It is right to be concerned. Denial of service attacks and ransomware must be regarded as real threats today. Add to that the realisation over the past couple of years that there may be more disasters than disaster recovery plans cover – like the need to move all staff out of master control and have them work from home. At Imagine we are regularly asked for advice on
security, and a comprehensive business continuity plan should be part of every major implementation. One way to provide a ready backup should disaster strike is to use the cloud. We have a number of customers for whom we have built disaster recovery in the cloud, even providing real-time live event playout completely remotely. Again, this is today’s technology. All the research suggests that broadcasters still have a place in the media landscape, but they have to be more agile to maximise engagement and optimise revenues, drawing on new – but proven – technologies.
www.imaginecommunications.com
IT’S MOOD INDIGO FOR NATIVE ST-211 INTERFACE Cobalt Digital
CREATE & PRODUCE BY DAVID DAVIES
Cobalt Digital recently launched the Indigo 2110-DC-01. It brings a native ST-2110 interface to the company’s 9904-UDX-4K and 9905-MPx audio/video processor OpenGear cards.
The enhancement is claimed to bring a cost-effective and easy-to-manage way to avoid the need for multiple and expensive devices in the data path. Indigo 2110-DC-01 includes multiple 25G Ethernet interfaces to
Indigo adds a native ST-2110 option for Cobalt’s 9904-UDX-4K and 9905-MPx cards
support uncompressed 4K, while support for ST-2022-7 seamless redundancy switching is incorporated for improved network reliability as well as
IS-04/IS-05 NMOS for automatic discovery and configuration. This included support makes interfacing to an existing network very straightforward as
the devices are auto-discovered by the network management. The advanced audio/video
processing engines of Cobalt’s 9904 and 9905 cards are capable
of up/down/cross conversion, audio routing, colour correction and 3D-LUT processing. Additionally, the 9904 platform has support for Advanced HDR by Technicolor. Now, with the Indigo 2110-DC-01 option, Cobalt claims “the door is open” for the advanced processing in these cards to be available with IP inputs and outputs, eliminating the need for any external gateways. When the two cards are combined into a single package, users have a solution that is capable of natively processing HD, 3G and 4K IP streams without compromising quality.
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