Industry News

On Thursday (6/17), television industry executives will once again be gathering in a virtual manner. While COVID-19 pandemic concerns are rapidly melting away, the organizers of the annual Kagan Media Summit opted to forego traveling to New York just yet. The comfort level of participants will undoubtedly be higher, as the 2020 affair was a digital one, too.

With the Radio + Television Business Report again the official media partner for the summit, same-day coverage of key Kagan events produced by the S&P Global Market Intelligence group will be delivered to RBR+TVBR subscribers at RBR.com. What can participants expect this year?

S&P Global Market Intelligence Senior Research Analyst Justin Nielson spoke with RBR+TVBR Editor-in-Chief Adam R Jacobson to offer a preview of the event, and you can listen to what he says in the latest InFOCUS Podcast, presented by dot.FM.

Listen to “RBR+TVBR InFOCUS Podcast: Justin Nielson” on Spreaker.

The media technology industry is facing a shortage of industry components.

Factory shutdowns during the pandemic caused shortages across the electronic components industry, affecting automakers, mobile device manufacturers as well as broadcast and media technology companies. To try to determine how widespread the problem is, the IABM, an international trade association for broadcast and media technology, recently conducted a survey across its membership of media technology suppliers asking for their direct experience with potential shortages of electronic components.

The survey yielded 130 responses from companies both within the U.S. and internationally and found that 40% of its member companies reported severe shortages while 45% were facing moderate shortages. Only 15% of respondents said they were seeing mild issues.

The IABM took this to mean that every company that responded said they are experiencing some level of problems in obtaining components.

“The worldwide shortage of electronic components … is also having a significant impact on the broadcast, media and entertainment technology industry,” said Lorenzo Zanni, head of knowledge at IABM. “We undertook this international survey because some of our members indicated that they were having problems sourcing components; these survey results, which were given to us by members in every geography, clearly show that this is an international problem.”

The survey revealed that 43% of those who responded said they were struggling to obtain chips in particular. Broken down between logic chips and memory chips, 13% of those respondents said memory chips were the specific item they were unable to obtain while 11% said they were looking for field-programmable gate arrays or FPGAs. Other items that were in demand included assemblies and subassemblies — including workstations, motherboards and printed circuit boards — followed by oscillators, GPUs, CPUs and small-form factor pluggable transceivers or SFPs. Fifty-six percent of all respondents reported shortages across most of these component categories.

The survey also found that geography is playing a role. Twenty-six percent of the respondents identified Asian Pacific countries as the source of supply trouble — although a majority saw this shortage as an international problem with supply issues appearing nearly everywhere components are manufactured.

What next? The survey asked respondents what steps they were taking to mitigate the effects of these shortages; 40% said they are finding alternative suppliers or spreading orders across several manufacturers with 31% either ordering large stocks of supplies or paying more for components. Of those surveyed, 19% say they are managing customer expectations successfully and 10% are simply waiting for the market to improve.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy fix for this issue, Zanni said. “[G]iven the difficulty in obtaining some of the rare raw materials and the fact that you can’t suddenly switch up production to meet demand, [this problem] looks likely to be with us for some time to come.”

One solution proposed by the IABM is the BaM Stock Exchange, a database that will allow IABM member companies to search for and find high-demand components. The goal is to help IABM members to obtain the parts they need or reduce their unused stock overhead.

The exchange is searchable and filterable in an effort to help a company connect with a company with extra stock. Most media technology companies do hold some stock of components, including those that they may no longer use, said Peter White, IABM CEO. “Since many components are common across broadcast and media tech suppliers, it makes compelling sense to use the industry’s independent, international organization as an exchange,” he said, adding that idea came from a conversation with Grass Valley CEO Tim Shoulders.

“IABM is committed to building and sustaining a thriving global media tech community and this kind of initiative plays perfectly with that mission,” White said.

The post Media Companies Beginning to Feel Pinch from Component Shortage appeared first on Radio World.

A major television brand has surpassed a major milestone in the rollout of addressable televisions across the U.S. — bring more screens to life that are enabled with dynamic ad insertion technology.

The news from VIZIO comes on the heels of numerous successful ad campaigns from America’s top TV networks.

The number represents a significant milestone for members of Project OAR, the addressable advertising consortium founded by VIZIO and America’s top TV media companies.

How so? By expanding the footprint, programmers are able to deliver and manage addressable TV ad inventory inside of linear programming broadcast to homes across America.

“Addressable TV advertising has arrived,” said Adam Gaynor, VP Network Partnerships and Head of Addressable for VIZIO and OAR. “Today’s milestone pushes the consortium beyond a ‘Project’ and into an addressable business. We have worked to put standards in place in collaboration with top networks to deliver addressable campaigns at scale and enhance the TV experience for viewers at home. With the infrastructure in place and more campaigns going live in the market, we are making it possible to deploy, manage and sell dynamic ads for local and national inventory.”

The consortium, which is composed of America’s leading television networks and operators and VIZIO, “have worked hard to create open standards that anyone in the ecosystem can use to increase the relevancy of advertising and improve linear viewing for consumers,” the TV set manufacturer noted.

AMC Networks, FOX and WarnerMedia are among several of the companies that have executed national addressable campaigns using the OAR standard.

“WarnerMedia has run national addressable campaigns across linear and VOD since 2020, while expanding our capacity and footprint through direct integrations with multiple distributors, and partnering with brands across an array of categories,” said JP Colaco, head of advertising sales at WarnerMedia. “As pioneers in the addressable industry for nearly a decade with DirecTV, we are excited to collaborate with other industry leaders like OAR to continue to drive awareness, education and enablement, while advocating for standards, in addressable TV.”

Colaco was the President of Radio Disney from 1998-2006. He would go on to serve as SVP of Advertising Sales and Operations at Hulu, from 2007-2013.

CHICAGO — A broadcast technology integration firm that’s gaining national recognition for its efforts has added a Partner as it prepares to welcome a Systems Engineer to their team.

Taking up a leadership position at Inrush Broadcast Services is Shaun Dolan.

He was formerly a Product Manager at Telos Alliance, where Dolan’s team developed and launched Telos VXs, a virtual voice over IP talk show system. He also managed the Telos VX product family of broadcast telephony systems.

Meanwhile, Sam Reiman takes the engineering role following a tenure at Weigel Broadcasting, which is based in Chicago.

Brian Sapp (pictured), a Partner at Inrush, saluted Reiman for his “deep knowledge of media workflows, paired with his innate ability to take a deep dive into new topics and become a subject matter expert in short order.”

The NBC Sports Group’s Olympics arm has selected Telestream to provide media capture and automated processing workflows for its production of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad, which remain on schedule for July 23-August 8 in Tokyo.

NBC Olympics will use Telestream’s Lightspeed Live Capture and Vantage media processing platform to perform a unique, mixed HDR/SDR workflow.

The Lightspeed Live Capture systems will receive 1080p59.94 HDR signals from the events and create media simultaneously to two different formats.

As the 1080p59.94 HDR is recorded in XAVC Class 100 HDR (Hybrid Log Gamma or HLG) format, Telestream’s Vantage software, running on an array of Lightspeed G6 servers will process the media as it is growing. SDR versions will be created in XDCAMHD 422 at 1080i59.94. The HDR to SDR conversion will be done through a new advanced color processing pipeline in Vantage utilizing color processing Look Up Table filters (LUTs) that translate HDR (HLG) to SDR (Rec. 709). In real time, while Lightspeed Live Capture is under record, Vantage will check both HDR and SDR assets into Avid Interplay. The Vantage system provides frame chase editing capabilities of both the HDR and SDR product, allowing Avid operators to edit on the fly from the live files as they are being recorded.

The HDR/SDR workflow takes advantage of Avid’s new cross-rate dynamic relink capability. Avid operators focus on editing the 1080i59.94 SDR-based content, which will be consumed by the majority of viewers, and then simply re-link/conform to the HDR assets to finish edits against the 1080p59.94 HDR product.

The complexity of producing Olympic Games coverage requires testing and monitoring solutions with the highest level of performance and reliability to ensure high-quality content is being delivered to viewers. To handle this task, NBC Olympics will leverage the complete suite of UHD/4K Waveform Monitors from Telestream’s Tektronix Video product family supporting UHD/HDR formats and ITU-R BT.2020 wide color gamut (WCG), Master Sync and Master Clock Reference Generators, and more to support its coverage.

The equipment, along with Sentry OTT monitoring solutions from Telestream, will be used to monitor and test the quality of video and audio content used in NBC Olympics’ production, post production, transmission, and distribution workflows in NBC Olympics’ facilities supporting a record level of content.

Chicago-based broadcast services and integrator Inrush Broadcast Services has announced the hiring of Shaun Dolan and Sam Reiman.

[Visit Radio World’s People News Page]

Dolan was previously with The Telos Alliance as a product developer and manager specializing in the VX family of VoIP telephone products. He will be a partner with the company.

Reiman most recently was a broadcast systems engineer for Weigel Broadcasting. He will be a systems engineer for Inrush

Send news of engineering and executive personnel changes to radioworld@futurenet.com.

The post Dolan and Reiman Join Inrush Broadcast Services appeared first on Radio World.

SANTA MONICA, CALIF. —In addition to serving as the Los Angeles home for HC2 Holdings-owned Spanish-language broadcast television network Azteca America, KJLA-TV owns and operates two greenscreen stages and production studios at its westside L.A. facility.

With growing demand from its studio rental clients for higher-resolution video acquisition and production, KJLA purchased four SK-UHD4000 cameras from Hitachi Kokusai Electric America, Ltd. (Hitachi Kokusai) to meet these requests and set the stage for future growth.

KJLA rents its studios to premium media and entertainment clientele for projects ranging from network TV shows and motion pictures to music videos and corporate video productions. Clients can use the studios’ in-house equipment or choose to bring in their own gear. KJLA also uses the studios to produce its own original content for its sister company LATV Networks, a bilingual media enterprise.

KJLA was equipped with 1080i HDTV camera systems but received increasing requests for 1080p “full HD” production, and also saw growing client interest in 4K acquisition.

“We considered upgrading to 1080p cameras, but looking forward, that would only buy us a couple of years before we would need to go all the way to 4K,” said Tony Solano, chief engineer at KJLA-TV. “People were already starting to ask for 4K, so we decided to upgrade all the way.”

KJLA took delivery of the SK-UHD4000s at the beginning of February. Three of the cameras are deployed on Cartoni pedestals, with the fourth on a Jimmy Jib Triangle.

“The quality of the Z-HD6000s was great but the SK-UHD4000s are even better, even when we’re using them to shoot HD,” Solano said. “I also love the depth of picture controls that we have access to, not only through the controller but also through the cameras’ integration with the Ross Dashboard software.”

While KJLA often provides camera operators with their full-service studio and equipment rentals, other times clients bring their own crew and simply use KJLA’s gear and space. Solano notes that both their own operators and client users have found it simple to get up to speed with the new 4K cameras. “The learning curve on the SK-UHD4000s is very quick,” he said. “While our clients’ crews are professionals, the cameras are so easy that I feel like almost anybody could use them.”

The exceptional sensitivity of the SK-UHD4000s has also been beneficial for productions’ lighting requirements. “The stage manager for our LATV Networks productions noted that they don’t need to do as much lighting as they previously did,” Solano explained.

Overall, the Hitachi 4K cameras have positioned KJLA to meet the evolving needs of themselves and their clients both today and in the future. “The upgrade was very smooth, and it has been a great experience,” Solano summarized. “The SK-UHD4000s let us better serve our existing clients, while giving us the ability to take on a greater breadth of new customers and projects.”

— RBR+TVBR West Coast Bureau, with reporting by Brian Galante

Sinclair Broadcast Group continues to lead the industry’s transition to the future of television, developing innovative solutions to meet its requirements for channel playout and live broadcasting.

These include a new 25,000-square-foot, SMPTE ST 2110 media operations center for Sinclair’s regional sports networks (RSNs) with cloud-hosted disaster recovery channels, and a large-scale ST 2110 production facility for its Tennis Channel featuring a cloud-based environment for pop-up live special events.

All were built around Imagine Communications infrastructure and playout platforms.

Don Roberts, VP of sports engineering and production systems at Sinclair Broadcast Group, makes the point that both business and technical requirements are driving Sinclair’s transition to IP connectivity and software-defined architectures ― and particularly cloud deployment. “This transition cannot be a simple lift and shift of legacy systems; it is the opportunity to take a fresh look at the way a broadcaster operates,” Roberts said. “We have to start from good user engagement, to understand what will change at each step. The transition to IP and the cloud is transformative. We can’t just flip a switch ― we have to redefine how the business works. This is change management as much as technology.”

A powerful advocate of the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards, Sinclair has a long history in collaborating with Imagine Communications to develop IP playout and production systems. Following its 2019 acquisition of regional sports networks from Fox/Disney, Sinclair had to quickly develop a new playout strategy and decided to build an IP-based facility from the ground up to serve as a future-proof hub for the new RSNs.

“Armed with our experience with IP and our strong technical relationship with Imagine, we decided that our first step was to develop an on-premises solution for the RSNs,” Roberts said. “We also developed options to put some functionality ― like the archive and disaster recovery playout ― into the cloud. This enables us to use the Atlanta facility as a stepping-stone, continually refining the workflows and business cases that will help us transition to a hybrid approach that balances capability and cost.”

At the same time, Sinclair was developing a platform for its Tennis Channel, a service that features comprehensive coverage of the top 100 tournaments in the sport and more. The channel has a master control center in Santa Monica, Calif., which uses the flexible Versio platform, both on-premises for primary origination with Imagine’s ADC automation, and as software instances hosted in the AWS cloud for pop-up special events under the control of the cloud-optimized Version Automation system. IP connectivity allows simplification of the hardware architecture, for instance, through use of the virtual re-entry software features of Imagine’s Magellan SDNO to create virtual patch panels, router paths and workflows.

The Tennis Channel project presented Sinclair with a new set of technical, operational, and business challenges.  “Tennis is live and unpredictable, so we need our playout capabilities to be agile and responsive,” Roberts explained. “Software solutions like Versio give us that agility ― the ability to make a decision and have it on air virtually instantly. And because it can be hosted in the cloud, we simply spin it up at the beginning of each tournament and close the software when it ends.”

Central to the architecture at the Santa Monica center is Imagine’s Selenio Network Processor, which Roberts defines as “a broadcast Swiss Army Knife ― if you have a problem with a signal, throw an SNP at it.” Each 1RU SNP device hosts four independent, software-defined processing channels.  At the Tennis Channel facility, the SNPs act as IP gateways and support format conversion, which allows the facility to be primarily 1080p, but accommodate 4K and HDR UHD when needed, such as for the French Open Tennis from Roland Garros in Paris. The facility also uses the new SNP-MV multiviewer personality, allowing for tactical multiview displays to be quickly established wherever they are needed in the workflow.

The new Tennis Channel ST 2110 infrastructure debuted in December 2020. Sinclair then went live to and from the cloud during coverage of the 2021 Miami Open in March, marking the first time that any broadcaster had supported such a high-profile live sporting event via live cloud playout. The innovative combination of cloud playout and on-the-ground master control provided a solution that was particularly powerful in a time of COVID, which has challenged media companies to continue producing quality broadcasts, while ensuring a safe work environment for operational staff. The unique capabilities and integration of Imagine’s IP-enabled playout and core infrastructure products created a cutting-edge architecture and workflow that helped make this possible.

Digital Nirvana, a provider of media-monitoring and metadata generation services, has brought to market Trance 3.2, the latest version of its cloud-based application for closed captioning and transcription.

Trance 3.2 has several new features that the company says ‘will enable faster, more efficient production of publishable closed captions and translations.”

New features include upgrades to the tool’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities that make it possible to identify grammar and style regulations and configure Trance to follow them. And thanks to advancements in machine learning, there are improvements to the machine translation model that satisfy captioners’ increased need for localization in multiple languages, quickly translating the content frame by frame while retaining the entire context.

“Our latest changes to Trance add a new level of completeness to the product in terms of covering the entire caption generation and localization workflow. Trance not only brings large-scale efficiency to each part of the process, but it also provides a platform where users can do everything related to transcription, captioning, and text localization in just about every imaginable use case,” said Russell Vijayan, director of business development at Digital Nirvana. “There’s no need for users to review the entire set of content in order to adhere to strict grammar and style guidelines. Instead, now grammar rules can be set as a standard instruction to the system. A 90-minute piece of content can now be captioned in a couple of hours versus a week or so.”

Trance is designed to use machine learning and AI capabilities to enhance the process of generating transcripts, closed captions, and translations for media content. Production houses, OTT platforms, broadcast networks, closed captioning companies, and any content producer that publishes content over broadcast outlets or the internet with closed captions and translations enabled will benefit from the following major improvements:

• The transcription window now uses an advanced speech-to-text engine that generates accurate, machine-transcribed text, which is displayed in a user-friendly UI through which users can quickly make changes.
• Users can now export the transcript, if required, and the time-coded transcripts can be used as metadata to make the video content readable by machines.
• While previous versions of Trance allowed users to input various parameters to tell the system how to split transcripts and present them in the captioning window, the latest update also uses NLP technology to enable transcript splitting based on grammar rules and styles. Every streaming platform has its own, ever-evolving grammar and captioning style, and adhering to those rules has been a challenge for captioners. The new change ensures users spend less time correcting things when splitting the transcripts for generating captions/subtitles.
• Now, all users with permission can upload media from their logins instead of waiting for administrators to do it.
• Workflow enhancements ensure users can access jobs directly from the list of available work items in their dashboard.

Trance can be a critical tool in a variety of use cases, such as generating transcripts for audio content, importing an existing transcript and syncing it with video, or importing existing captions and opting for a caption QC service that compares the captions against streaming-platform guidelines and flags any nonconformance. Users can generate machine translations after the captioning process is done. They can also import an existing-caption sidecar file, retain the timecodes, and generate a high-quality machine translation that would help with the localization process. Trance also makes it possible to change the frame rate, apply timecode references, and export sidecar outputs in various formats.

Because Trance is a cloud-based application, the upgrades are available to Trance users immediately.

Low-power FM is creating some interest in Washington this week.

We told you a few days ago about a fresh proposal to allow LPFMs to increase power to 250 watts. That proposal, from REC Networks, remains open for comment.

But meanwhile the Federal Communications Commission seems poised to approve an order in a separate matter that would “affirm” the maximum power level at 100 watts. And comments by the acting chairwoman about seeking “finality” in the rules would seem to cast doubt on the prospects of a power increase anytime soon.

The draft Order on Reconsideration being considered for Thursday’s FCC meeting would affirm a maximum power of 100 watts in order to “maintain simplicity and consistency with past actions regarding the service.”

In 2020 the commission modified its low-power FM engineering rules to improve LPFM reception and options for station relocation, but at the time it rejected a request to allow 250 watts.

In the order to be voted on Thursday, the agency writes that it considered two petitions seeking reconsideration of those technical rules.

Todd Urick of Common Frequency and Paul Bame of the Prometheus Radio Project claimed the FCC had failed to adequately explain its rejection of a power increase; they also asked the commission to eliminate the rule requiring LPFMs to use transmitters certified for that use by an outside lab, a measure intended to avoid interference problems on the FM dial. The draft order leaves that requirement unchanged.

In addition, the draft says that the FCC will require LPFM stations to submit engineering test measurements to prove that their antennas are performing properly. The commission last year approved the use of directional antennas for LPFMs. The new measurement rule only applies to LPFM applications not yet acted upon, according to the FCC.

Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote in advance of Thursday’s meeting that last year’s technical order “maintained core LPFM goals of simplicity, diversity and localism” and she hopes this week’s actions “will provide clarity and finality to the rules.” Whether that means the fresh REC Networks proposal would be dead in the water is unclear.

Rosenworcel also said that this order will “bring us one step closer to opening an application window for new LPFM stations.”

Legal experts will be watching the meeting for hints on the timing of that window. The FCC has indicated that it would follow on the heels of its new noncommercial FM window scheduled for November. The previous LPFM filing window was in 2013.

According to the latest FCC data, there are just over 2,100 licensed LPFM broadcast stations in the United States.

[In other regulatory news: FCC Throws Lifeline to an FM6 Station]

The post FCC Seems Set to Affirm 100-Watt LPFM Limit appeared first on Radio World.