IBC Issue September 2015
Innovation Awards Shortlist, cont'd.
Digital Center 2: ESPN
Technical Partners: Arista Networks, Evertz, VizRT
ESPN is also looking to the IP future, and has opened the first large-scale, fully ethernet connected production facility in the world. Digital Center 2 is home to five studios, 16 edit suites, six control rooms and some of the most popular sports television in the USA.
Film Soundtrack Adaptation: SBS Broadcasting
Technical Partners: NUGEN Audio, Delta Sigma Consultancy. Minnetonka Audio
Set to be the finalist with the shortest journey to the ceremony, SBS Broadcasting in Amsterdam has been looking at ways to improve the viewer experience of its films and drama series. It recognised that maintaining dramatic, high contrast audio was key, but it needed to be achieved with the best loudness practices, particularly on channels with commercial breaks. Finally, it had to do it all in a highly efficient, automated workflow. The result was an anchor-based loudness normalisation workflow.
Content Delivery
IP for Live Sports Production: Pac-12 Networks
Technical Partners: Internet2, T-VIPS, Nevion
Pac-12 Networks – the broadcast arm of the conference of 12 west coast universities – offers an incredible 850 live televised sports events a year. To manage all of this, it uses commodity internet connections to link a basic crew at the event with its three central control rooms in San Francisco. The remarkable technology allows talkback, telemetry and telemetric data to travel to and from sports venues as much as 2500 km away with less than a frame delay.
Regionalising TV Channels: Sundance Channel Global
Technical Partners: Amagi Media Labs Pvt. Ltd.
AMC Networks International transmits popular television channels into Latin America. It recently faced the challenge of the need to tailor the content for Portuguese-speaking Brazil, differentiating it from the largely Spanish-speaking rest of the content. Rather than face the expense of a separate Brazil feed when only some of the content needed replacing, it developed a sophisticated system which stored replacement content in the cloud, triggering it using watermarked break bumpers. It allows a seamless workflow between AMC in New York, playout partner Telefonica in Spain and local satellite distributor Sky Brazil.
DAB+ Towards FM Shut Off: Norkring
While many nations have gone through the analogue television switch-off process, few are even close to achieving it in radio. Norway is the exception: in 2017 it will shut off its FM radio network, replacing it with a DAB+ service that reaches 99.5% of the population. The country’s broadcast transmission provider Norkring is leading the project on behalf of broadcasters Digitalradio Norge, NRK, P4 Radio Hele Norge and SBS Discovery. Technology came from 2WCom, Aldena, Cisco, GatesAir, Kathrein-Werke, NEC, NetCom, Net Insight, Relacom, Site Service, SmartGrid, Spinner, Telenor Satellite Broadcasting and Telmec Broadcasting.
The winners will be announced during the IBC Awards Ceremony, at 18:30 on Sunday 13 September. All IBC visitors are invited to attend the ceremony, which is held in the RAI Auditorium and is free to all.
BROADCAST BEAT MAGAZINE
26