Euromedia November | Page 5

flannel_flannel 27/11/2014 11:14 Page 1 EUROMEDIA DIGITAL MEDIA INTELLIGENCE PUBLISHER AND EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Nick Snow [email protected] MANAGING EDITOR Colin Mann [email protected] CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Chris Forrester [email protected] PUBLISHING ASSISTANT Nik Roseveare [email protected] ART EDITOR Steve Overbury [email protected] COLUMNISTS Vivek Couto Larry Gerbrandt Steve Gold CONTRIBUTORS Robert Briel - Amsterdam Dieter Brockmeyer - Frankfurt Gail Chiasson - Toronto David del Valle - Madrid Chris Dziadul Pascale Paoli-Lebailly - Paris Philip Hunter Joe O’Halloran Farah Jifri Branislav Pekic - Rome SALES DIRECTOR Sanjeev Bhavnani [email protected] PUBLISHED BY Advanced Television Limited Bondway Commercial Centre 4th Floor, Unit 4.01 71 Bondway London SW8 1SQ Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] www.advanced-television.com PRINTED BY Headley Brothers Ltd The Invicta Press Queens Road Ashford Kent TN24 8HH, UK Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] [email protected] © Advanced Television Limited 2014. All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is prohibited. This issue contains our annual survey of the test and measurement sector. This is a field that has grown and changed as the means of media delivery have shifted. Today its task is tougher than ever as it deals, in the phrase, with more known unknowns and more unknown unknowns, then ever. Everyone agrees that pretty much everything is going to IP – though there is plenty of debate about how fast that will, or should, happen. It brings lots of benefits; ubiquity, flexibility and pace of innovation. But it also brings major challenges, as one of our respondents points out TV is just not all that well suited to this best efforts means of transport. In broadcast, there’s a clean and planned path from transmission to reception. The method of the signals journey is stipulated in international standards and is well understood across broadcasters and equipment vendors. The same can be said, more or less, for managed fixed networks like cable. But not OTT, oh no. A data packet sent out over the open Internet is on its own, never quite certain what restrictions it will encounter or what company it will be keeping. The measurement people – whose job is ultimately to contribute to customer satisfaction – help by watching over it and reporting back if it gets in trouble; suffers a breakdown, or gets squeezed out or overwhelmed by other traffic. Can the packet be repaired or replaced before the viewer notices the hole? That’s the $64,000 question being asked millions of times a minute over every channel playing out anywhere in the world over unmanaged networks. Most of the time – nearly all the time – the answer is yes. But the same question will only get tougher as online video continues its growth and bandwidth heavy services like 4K are introduced. More compression and better monitoring are part of the answer, but no one interviewed in this issue will want to provide those services for free. So who should pay; the network provider or the content provider (when they are a different entity)? It’s that other $64,000 to the power 10 question again, Net Neutrality, or put another way ‘just whose tab is this?’ ISSN 1477-8092 EUROMEDIA 5