Inbroadcast - The Show Must Go On

A review of technologies enabling production companies and broadcasters to deliver high quality content to viewers while optimising costs, resources, and eliminating travel.

Adrian Pennington, Inbroadcast

Published: April 14, 2020

Whilst the world grapples with the emergency outbreak of the coronavirus, we are seeing not only how people modify their behavior but will see how businesses must modify theirs. Events being canceled, travel being scaled back and replaced with teleconferencing. Many corporations have sent staff home to work where it is possible to do so.

This is all made possible because we as a society have already have much of the technology to facilitate flexible working. Give your office-based staff a laptop and access to the internet, and they are ready to sit in their home office or at their kitchen table.

What has changed in the last few weeks is that working remotely is no longer a work-life balance argument, or a nice-to-have, it is now a question of business continuity, says Jan Weigner, CEO, Cinegy. The crisis is forcing companies to reevaluate their ways of working and finally act upon it. The technological infrastructure is in place and we have the tools ready to go - from acquisition over production to distribution, all can be handled remotely and / or in the cloud.

With bases in the UK, mainland Europe, Middle East, Australia and North America, Never.no's teams are able to service regional customers without the risk of the virus affecting workflows or production needs. Bee-On is its cloud-based audience engagement platform runs on AWS for access anywhere with a web browser and internet connection, so there is no need for production teams to be managed under one roof, CEO Scott Davies says.

Individual projects can be pre-planned and packaged with audience generated content and dynamic visualisations prior to delivery / broadcast of live or pre-recorded content. Viewers continue to watch, more-so during a crisis, so content producers need to continue programming and deliver captivating content, with audience engagement a priority - Bee-On can help deliver this.

He adds, We're seeing a need for packaged end-to-end solutions that utilise cloud-production and seamlessly integrates off-the-shelf' graphics and compatibility with native broadcast graphics for a wide range of programming, such as news, live events and popular chat shows. Gone are the days where production is managed and delivered from one hub.

Demand for Quicklink's video call management system has never been higher, according to CEO Richard Rees. The firm is releasing a completely browser-based cloud supported workflow with automated Panasonic PTZ camera and lighting.

A journalist could sit at home and interview someone located elsewhere live to air while a colleague edits the video online (in Adobe Premiere) and in realtime, says CEO Richard Rees. That edit could be passed to a control room for wider channel distribution. The whole environment is now virtualised. We believe this is the future.

VSN has added new capabilities for remote interoperability to its VSN NewsConnect web plugin for news production. This were on the cards for a NAB release but recent events have made them more relevant.

VSN NewsConnect, which brings together a number of third party tools required for news production, now enables users to control multiple studios in different locations, even if the systems used in the studios are different.

What this means is that a journalist can simply send a news item to any studio and NewsConnect will automatically ensure that the delivered content matches the format requirements of the receiving devices, said Patricia Corral, marketing director. This remote interoperability is very useful in enabling news to be repurposed to the requirements of local broadcasters without worrying about technical compatibility.

Pixel Power's work is currently mainly based around large projects for refurbishment or replacement of playout and production infrastructure; projects with long timescales, so the current viral outbreak isn't yet causing any major changes in demand.

Our technology can be virtualized and deployed in data centre or public cloud, with remote access operation from anywhere in the world, explains James Gilbert, CEO. This is not something that can be done as an impulse reaction to the current situation - this capability has to be architected and designed into the product from the beginning.

Once the outbreak subsides, the evolution of remote, decentralised working practices is likely to accelerate. The industry is already moving towards remote, decentralised working practices because of the ecological and economic benefits, Gilbert says. The ability of staff to work from any location is core to that concept and whilst it is an obvious advantage during the current outbreak where staff may be required to, or choose to, work from home, I do not feel the pace of change will be accelerated - there are already enough drivers for it.

Collaborative workflows with someone sitting next to you or on the opposite side of the world is in the DNA of storage solutions specialist GB Labs.

We've fostered cloud integration for years and therefore, have always offered a remote workflow, says Dominic Harland, CEO/CTO. Obviously, there will be many other challenges with this ongoing situation, but GB Labs is confident that accessing content securely and quickly will not be one of them.

He thinks current events will accelerate solutions to enable a faster response to any future crisis. The next two/three months is not long enough to develop, test and bring to market anything exceptional, but we are definitely looking at developing new products and new solutions. Whether this becomes a real-world advantage that the customer will want to bu

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