IBC 2002 - DAILY UPDATES

Tuesday September 17

IBC SPRINGS BACK

At the close of IBC2002 the final registration count reached 40,400. "Looking at a breakdown of this headline figure, it is interesting to record that exhibitors have sent less staff, whilst the number of visitors is up," said Michael Crimp, IBC Corporate Affairs Director.

IBC President John Wilson commented, "The attendance is better than many pundits had forecast, but it is important to remember that IBC is about delivering a targeted, focused and high-quality audience as well as growing numbers. We achieved that both on the show floor and in the many memorable conference sessions. I would like to thank everyone who has worked so hard on making this show such a huge success. Planning for next year is well underway, and I look forward to welcoming you all back here at the RAI for IBC2003 from 11-16 September."

A constant stream of happy exhibitors are signing up for next year. Michael Crimp concluded by saying, "The visitor demographics will be on the website in the next few days. In the meantime the exhibitor endorsements, Daily News stories and TV News online, are strong evidence of a busy, vibrant and successful event."

Monday September 16

PIXELMETRIX ANNOUNCES A MAJOR SALE OF DVSTATION-FAMILY MONITORING SYSTEMS TO THEIR UK DISTRIBUTOR DIGI-BOX.

Following rave reviews from visitors to the stand at IBC, Pixelmetrix received the order from Digi-Box for ten DVStation-Pods and DVStation-Remotes for immediate delivery to prominent UK customers.

Pixelmetrix augmented its flagship DVStation? product at IBC with new form factors adding portability while maintaining its uncompromised performance. DVStation-Remote and DVStation-Pod provide an economical way for operators, Systems Integrators, Integration Engineers and Maintenance Engineers to monitor digital television networks without resorting to expensive R&D equipment. The Digi-Box deal includes multiple DVStation-Pods which cover COFDM, QPSK, ASI, and ATM physical transport technologies.

“The customer feedback is clear. The cross platform compatibility between the DVStation-Pod and the flagship DVStation™ high-end modular system is a compelling solution at an affordable price. We are committed to offer market leading technology”, commented Jon Philips, Managing Director of Digi-Box. “Pixelmetrix have again illustrated their ability to produce MPEG solutions that meet the current and future market requirements”.

“The launch of DVStation-Pod and DVStation-Remote at IBC has not only generated overwhelming interest and excitement from our existing customer base but has also opened many new areas - including installation and integration of DVB applications.” Said Reto Brader Europe-Middle East-Africa General (EMEA) Manager for Pixelmetrix.

DIGITAL VOODOO/BLUEFISH444 PARTNERS WITH LINUX

Australian company Digital Voodoo/Bluefish444 and Linux Media Arts, Inc. announced that the OPENCUBE HD Film & Video System will utilize the HD & SD-601 uncompressed video cards from Digital Voodoo/Bluefish444 on Linux Media Arts' CINTERRA media production system. Linux Media Arts is developing the driver set for the full line of uncompressed Digital Voodoo/Bluefish444 video I/O cards.

OPENCUBE HD supports both standard definition and high definition video formats, as well as 2K format and DV and DVCPRO codecs. Up to 6 AES/EBU audio channels are supported and file formats in MXF, GXF, RAW, DPX, TIFF, or BMP.

OPENCUBE HD enables the display and playback of up to 90 minutes of uncompressed HDTV material in real time, using native formats without the need to import, transform or compress the video. This saves the user time and eases workflow particularly in post-production NAS or SAN studio architectures. Its open software framework allows the addition of new components to be added quickly to meet the needs of any specific application. OPEN CUBE HD is plug-in ready; treatments or effects can be added on the fly providing the freedom to experiment.

OPENCUBE HD works directly with the standard Linux file system that enables it to map directly to a network or distant storage. It doesn't need any import process, like common video servers. OPENCUBE HD (r) was developed to support the new video exchange format, MXF, natively, enabling interoperability. The user can keep a history of modifications in a parallel metadata stream because MXF can wrap any metadata and video formats.

IBC SEES IP VIDEO STREAMING OVER MOBILE DVB NETWORK

Visitors to IBC 2002 have been able to see the world's first demonstration of Microsoft's Windows Media 9 Series being delivered over a DVB-T mobile network to moving vehicles in Amsterdam. The technology demonstration is being mounted by NTL Broadcast and TANDBERG Television, in conjunction with Microsoft Corp. and a number of technology specialists including SkyStream Networks, to create an end-to-end DVB broadcast system that features both file transfer and live streaming of real-time broadcast quality video over satellite and terrestrial networks.

The demonstration follows the recent joint announcement between Microsoft and TANDBERG Television regarding the two companies' collaboration to offer professional broadcast solutions supporting Windows Media 9 Series for the telco and professional broadcast industries. TANDBERG Television is developing a dedicated real-time hardware-based encoding platform for Windows Media, based on Windows Media Audio and Video 9 Series. TANDBERG Television and Microsoft also are collaborating at a number of levels, including engineering and sales and marketing.

Two types of video content received in the demonstration vehicles travelling around Amsterdam are being delivered using the standard DVB-T platform, with the content being encoded and decoded using the new generation Windows Media 9 Series. ITN news stories are fed via update-detection software from Gee Broadcast to a TANDBERG Television Format Transcoder. The resulting Windows Media 9 Series files are transferred by fibre to the Crawley Court satellite teleport into the NTL Broadcast 'store and forward' system. This consists of a SkyStream Networks zBand content delivery platform, used to deliver IP data and streaming services, and a SkyStream Source Media Router (SMR), which efficiently encapsulates IP into MPEG-2 packets for broadcast over the DVB-T network. Together, zBand and SMR handle the delivery of the stories - as files rather than as a stream - to hard disks in receivers.

British Eurosport 'live' video originates at NTL's Digital Media Centre near London and is available at the teleport as SDI embedded audio and video. The pictures are encoded in real-time by TANDBERG Television's adaptation of the Windows Media 9 Series video and audio encoder.

Both services are IP-encapsulated by the SkyStream SMR and fed into a DVB-standard multiplexer before being transmitted by Eutelsat satellite to Amsterdam using the DVB-S standard. At the Nozema transmission tower near the RAI exhibition centre, a TANDBERG DVB-S receiver presents the baseband transport stream to a TANDBERG DVB-T modulator and then in turn to a digital terrestrial TV transmitter. Diversity reception in the demonstration vehicles ensures a reliable IP stream for an on-board PC equipped with client software for both live video decoding and file transfer, without the need for a return path. The end-to-end system was integrated by NTL Broadcast.

Sunday September 15, 2002

SINGTEL TAKES TALIA

Singapore telco, Singtel, has selected the Australian-made Talia Kondor routing switcher for its Singapore satellite operations center. Announced at IBC, the installation will see Singtel use the Kondor (which features a 1.5Gbps matrix) to switch video and audio signals throughout the region.

LINK RESEARCH WINS IABM AWARD

UK company Link Research has won the Peter Wayne Award for its wireless camera system. The system has seen use in Australia at various sporting events. Runner-up awards went to Dremedia for its E-M Production Suite and to Sony for its e-VTR.

DTS, LEITCH PETITION DVB

Digital Theater Systems (DTS) is looking to have its Coherent Acoustics compression/decompression algorithm (DTS Digital Surround) included in the DVB specification.

The company has been working with Leitch to develop that company's Diamond Audio compression system which is designed to provide broadcasters with DTS Digital Surround multichannel audio throughout the production chain.

DISCREET BURNS IBC

Discreet has announced burn - a new Linux-based background rendering software for Discreet's visual effects systems customers. Shown for the first time in public at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, burn is Discreet's first Linux-based software solution designed to increase productivity and reduce time to project completion by allowing customers to utilise PC-based render stations for processing effects.

Burn users will be able to initiate background rendering tasks from within the Batch module of inferno 5, flame 8 or flint 8.

The initiated request is submitted to backburner-Discreet's render management software, currently used in both Discreet's 3ds max 5 software and combustion 2 desktop compositing software. backburner-which is installed on PC workstations running Windows 2000-is responsible for receiving rendering requests, prioritizing them, splitting them between available resources for faster execution, and then dispatching them to all available burn systems. backburner also maintains and relays the status of each request to the user.

BERLIN GOES DVB-T

The Berlin region will be the first in Germany to launch digital terrestrial TV services in August 2003 with Rohde & Schwarz installing new and upgraded transmission equipment.
Berlin viewers will have access to 30 TV channels (the current number is 12) with all existing broadcasters taking part. Because spectrum is tight inn the German capital, simultaneous digital/analog transmissions are planned for a relatively short period.

Saturday September 14, 2002

QUANTEL DETAILS SEVEN DOCKLANDS

Quantel's IBC press conference has seen the company at last able to release details of its involvement in Phase 1 of the Seven Network's new Broadcast Centre in Melbourne's Docklands. The entire centralization of Seven's broadcast center is estimated at approximately AUD$40 million in technical infrastructure.
The News Operation is centred around a 14-port Quantel server, with 100 hours of 50Mbit MPEG-2 storage. There are five Quantel server edit seats, allowing editors to work with material directly on the server, and a further standalone edit system. Ingest automation is by Ibis, as is the parallel browse server, which supports 20 journalists, and is integrated with the stations iNEWS system. Decisions made on the journalists' desktops are instantly mirrored at full resolution in the Quantel server, ready for immediate playout to air. On-air playout is controlled by Flash Intercart and the iNEWS broadcast control system.

The Presentation Operation services Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth with programmes and commercials. Also based in the new Melbourne Broadcast Centre, this is built around five Quantel servers. Server One is a 14-port, 100 hour MPEG-2 system, with three edit seats which is used to prepare material for broadcast and also provides redundancy. The four remaining servers each have eight ports and 75 hours of MPEG-2 storage. Five ports on each of these servers are dedicated to playout (one per region), three to the ingest of new material. The servers operate as two pairs - Servers 2 and 3 providing programme playout and back-up, with Servers 4 and 5 commercials playout and back-up. Each server is capable of storing 10,000 clips.
The Melbourne Broadcast Centre also houses a Quantel HD server, which provides storage and on-air playout of high definition programming.

The Phase 1 installation also includes two 50Mbit MPEG-2 servers with 75 hours storage at Seven Sydney which act as a back-up for the Melbourne facility.

KHUSHU TAKES TUCKER

This year's IBC John Tucker Award has gone to one of Asia's longest serving and most respected broadcasters, Om Khushu for his outstanding technical knowledge of the international broadcasting community in the Asia-Pacific region and his contribution to world broadcasting technology and values.
Originally born in Srinigar, India, Om Khushu studied at the University of Jammu and Kashmir and then gained a post-graduate diploma in Electronics from the Madras Institute of Technology. He joined All India Radio in 1960 as an assistant engineer and remained there for over 27 years eventually becoming director of engineering and then chief engineer.

Towards the end of this period Khushu represented the interests of both Indian radio and television organisations on the technical advisory group for the INSAT satellite system, contributing to numerous design reviews which were conducted in the USA.

In 1987, Khushu transferred to the Indian national television network - Doordarshan as chief engineer. In 1990, Khushu transferred to the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) as its technical department chief. He announced his retirement this year.

STREAM CLUSTERING TECHNOLOGY

Kasenna Inc., has introduced a new, patent-pending Stream Clustering technology now available with the company's MediaBase XMP video content management, distribution and delivery software. Stream Clustering allows a number of video servers running MediaBase XMP to be grouped together to act as a single logical entity and provide linear scalability.

Stream Clustering allows stream and storage capacity to be added to VOD systems granularly, as demand rises. This ability allows operators deploying VOD services to invest incrementally as their business grows, rather than tie-up their capital on high-cost, proprietary servers with unused capacity.

Some of the key inventions embodied in Stream Clustering are Predictive Hot-Spot Management, which anticipates rise in demand and uses available system resources to dynamically replicate content between video server caches. Stream Load Balancing distributes the load evenly among servers in the cluster to eliminate a single point of failure and increase the availability of the system. Load balancing is achieved by exchanging system metadata information using a Digest Exchange Protocol between servers in the cluster. The Digest contains metadata that describes assets currently available on servers, availability of system resources to serve real-time requests, node health status, etc., and is used to make the system self-managing.

ISMA AND M4IF INTEROPERABILITY PROGRAM

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) and the MPEG-4 Industry Forum (M4IF) are to engage in joint interoperability testing, starting with a joint interoperability-testing event of ISMA v1.0 -based products and services in October.

Both organizations are dedicated to the promotion and/or development of products and technologies that adhere to industry standards, but this is the first time their combined membership, over 120 companies, will be able to exchange encoded content and interconnect streaming equipment in real-time, in one world-wide event.
The ISMA v1.0 specification defines an end-to-end, implementation agreement for streaming ISO-compliant MPEG-4 video and audio over Internet Protocols (IP).

ISMA's interoperability program has held over ten (10) "Plug Fests" where any one event generally involves around 20 to 30 of ISMA's member companies testing and refining their ISMA v1.0 implementation. M4IF's growing interoperability program, now in its 4th round, has over 30 participants who have exchanged MPEG-4 content for over a year. These events help member companies get interoperable products to market quicker, one of the many benefits of membership in ISMA and M4IF.

INSCRIBER TAKES ACCOM HARDWARE

Inscriber announced at IBC that it has entered into an agreement to incorporate Accom's newly developed digital video hardware in Inscriber's next generation of digital broadcast solutions. Inscriber's line of open system based character generators will integrate Accom's Serial Digital I/O boards.

Inscriber's new solutions will incorporate Accom's PCI 64/66 video I/O card with ultra-fast PCI access and Native Serial Digital signal processing. The integration with Accom hardware in new Inscriber solutions will make a new level of features and capabilities available. Inscriber's next generation of digital broadcast solutions will be available as a bundled board and software solution or in an array of rack mount and desktop systems for creating stunning video titles and motion effects quickly and easily.

S-A EXPANDS HEADENDS

Scientific-Atlanta has used IBC to release two new Continuum DVP(TM) MPEG-2 encoders which are designed to offer space-saving, affordable digital encoding solutions for converting analog feeds to compressed digital, and for encoding local advertising for inclusion in the digital tier.

The Models D9030 and D9020 will support a wide range of global standards, including MPEG-2, DVB and ATSC audio for operation in headends around the world. While both encoders will provide broadcast-quality video, the model D9030 will offer expanded video pre-processing and video analysis features.

In addition to the encoders, the Continuum DVP family includes a Dense QAM Array specifically designed for use in other suppliers' digital systems. For these systems, it provides a cost- and space-efficient solution for cable operators' on-demand rollouts by combining several features, including transport stream processing, QAM modulation and up-conversion, in one product.

The Continuum DVP Model D9020 encoder is expected to be available for shipment in the fourth quarter of 2002. The Model D9030 is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2003.

TANDBERG LAUNCHES NCOMPASS

Tandberg Television has used this year's IBC to launch its integrated control and monitoring system, nCompass. The system is aimed at customers such as telcos and specialists in content exchange, as well as broadcasters and operators, to enable them to deploy an integrated control and monitoring system to maximise Quality of Service (QoS) levels while maintaining operational flexibility.

New features include:
* Fully controllable timeline scheduling for changes in broadcast operation. This can be triggered automatically by preset inputs, or can be handled manually
* Integrated graphical control developed in the field over eight years of experience working with some of the world's largest broadcasters, as well as some of the world's finest niche broadcasters
* Automatic generation and re-generation of PSI & SI information. This is particularly crucial for operators taking bouquet feeds from other operators, where information regarding changes to channel configurations may be either undesirable or un-timely
* Fully flexible redundancy switching to spare equipment, including automatic and manual operation.

The nCompass monitoring solutions include the following modules:
* nCompass Network Monitor that provides top-level alarm monitoring for the entire network, allowing early visibility of network problems and the ability to pinpoint the source of any problems
* nCompass Service Monitor moves monitoring from the traditional network view to service orientated management on an enterprise-wide basis
* nCompass IT Monitor which provides a management solution to ensure the availability of optimal of management platforms. Administrators are notified of performance problems before they become critical, allowing pro-active control of multiple systems.

PIXEL POWER ANNOUNCES CLARITY2

Pixel Power announced the introduction Clarity2, its new hardware platform for broadcast graphics.
James Gilbert, Commercial Director of Pixel Power, said, "The introduction of the Clarity2 platform brings together disparate pieces of presentation equipment - the traditional DVE, character generator, clip and still store and downstream keyer - into one easily automated device, which enables broadcasters to deliver exciting on-air graphics and reduce overhead and capital costs."

Based upon the Clarity range, Clarity2 features dual AMD Athlon MP2000+ processors and multiple pixel processors for rapid delivery of on-air graphics. Clarity2 SD is a dual-channel standard-definition character generator featuring two channels of 2D DVE for live squeezebacks and two streams of uncompressed video and key clip playback. Multiple graphic layers are supported, including full frame cell animations, complex text animations and animated bugs. Each channel can be automated independently and includes an independently controlled downstream keyer.

Clarity2 is also available in a high definition configuration supporting one or two channels in all common HiDef formats including 1080p/sf. Each high definition channel includes dual frame buffers with independent transition effects, mask plane and real time text animations as well as a 10 bit downstream keyer. For flexibility in post-production and broadcast 2 SD channels and 1 HD channel can be combined within the 5RU frame. There is a full upgrade path from Clarity2 SD to the high definition configurations.

ASTON TURNS GREEN WITH EGO

Aston announced the introduction of its new cross-platform captioning and graphics family, with the launch of EGO and GREEN on Stand 11.511. Complementing the RED and BLUE systems, GREEN is a cost-effective entry level character generator while EGO brings template-based page creation capabilities for offline preparation on a PC platform.

GREEN is a fully-featured compact character generator which also offers stills and graphics retouching capability. With continuous crawl as standard, it's the ideal solution for information channels where tickers are required, and a wide range of interfaces to newsroom and station automation systems further broadens its appeal across the broadcast sector. Supplied in a compact 2u frame with a custom-designed keyboard, GREEN delivers rugged reliability to the broadcast user with a comprehensive upgrade path to suit their evolving requirements.
Aston EGO, a new offline graphics preparation tool, is also launched at the show. EGO takes advantage of Aston's powerful templating capabilities to enable offline text entry into pre-formatted fields, preserving the integrity of the graphics look, and making simple caption creation accessible to all. Based on Microsoft's .NET platform, EGO delivers a more flexible way of working to the broadcast user, enabling the creation of static, roll, crawl and animated captions using an intuitive interface.

CINTEL AND 5D DELIVER NEW DATA PIPELINES

Cintel and post-production solutions developer 5D have announced the integration of their technologies to create highly efficient data pipelines for 2K and 4K digital intermediate post-production.

As part of the joint initiative Cintel's C-Reality telecine and DSX film scanner has been integrated with 5D Commander, 5D's data portal and playback system for digital dailies.

Demonstrated at IBC, these new advances mean that 5D Commander can control the C-Reality and DSX devices to capture 10-bit log data via an HSDL link.

In a digital intermediate environment, 5D Commander could then be used to view and check materials, before distribution between a range of film compositing and colour grading solutions.

MEDIA 100 EMBRACES AAF, OMF

Media 100 Inc used IBC to announce a broad-based strategic initiative to adopt and implement Avid Technology's OMF and the open, industry-standard AAF media interchange formats. The implementation of these de facto industry standards will be offered in stages with the first step being the simultaneous announcement of OMF compatibility for the 844/X editing system and Media 100 i, the digital video solution for the Mac OS X platform. With this capability, editors using Media 100 i, Avid Media Composer, and Apple Final Cut Pro will be able to share program-level information with 844/X for unlimited-layer compositing and 10-bit uncompressed finishing.

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