IT dominant at NAB

At the National Association of Broadcasters convention held in Las Vega last week, and attended by more than 105,000 broadcast and video production/post professionals, traditional broadcast equipment was overshadowed by what has been termed “IT-centric” or by Grass Valley as “IT immersed”.

Broadcasters at NAB were presented with more open software-based architectures to select from for the ingest of a raw video signal, which could be converted to data for processing and then converted back to SDI signal for distribution to terrestrial receivers or to cable or satellite TV. This could then go simultaneously to the web as a stream of Internet Protocol (IP) packets that can easily be seen on PCs.

Companies which all offered new software-based processing were Avid – Interplay collaborative workgroup system; Omneon Video Networks – MediaGrid system; OmniBus Systems – its master control system; and Snell & Wilcox – Hyperion signal analysis system and Helios integrated signal conversion platform. All these systems are apparently far less expensive than hardware systems which achieved the same results.

There were also a myriad different systems for sending video to mobile phones. Understandably broadcasters tended to be marginally interested in this development. Their interest lay with standard- and high definition pictures, cameras, switchers, routers, servers and graphics.

IT was also very much part of developments with companies like Ikegami, – EdditCam; Panasonic – P2 solid-state recording system (new HDX-900 and HVX-200) and Sony – XDCAM HD format and Hitachi – new MediaPac removable hard drive system.