As another IBC draws to a close and I try to analyze the blur that is the past 5 days, I can’t help think of the tag line for the latest iPhone advertisement: “The only thing that’s changed is everything.” OK, the tense might be a little off – perhaps “changing” or “will change” would be more accurate, but the announcements and discussions of this show have clearly indicated that we are on the threshold of a new era in broadcasting, media and entertainment.
Last Thursday, Dalet launched xN – you can read all about that here. Dalet xN represents our vision of how cloud and virtualization will enable new business and technological opportunities in the creation, management and distribution of media. To put that another way, rather than doing what we’ve always done but “in the cloud,” we are exploiting the turn-on-and-off as you go, a la carte nature of virtualized infrastructure to enable us to do new things – such as the “pop-up” newsroom we built on Amazon Web Services to enable a team of journalism students to come to IBC and cover news at the show – more on that in a later blog.
Video-over-IP, now implemented in our Dalet Brio video server, similarly promises to change production, acquisition and distribution workflows, but again, a simple replication of what we do today with SDI is unlikely to provide any real benefit. However, IP fundamentally decouples the format and the transport, meaning that the same infrastructure could potentially be used for all resolutions and formats – taking advantage of which requires a rethinking of how we provision production and playout properties.
Grabbing less headlines, but proving to be a frequent topic of conversations, was caption and subtitle workflows. Now considered a core asset, as well as a useful source of dynamic descriptive metadata, increasingly timed text is becoming a critical element of all types of media workflow. Having announced our cross-platform strategy for the capture, extraction, manipulation, management, insertion and distribution, it was great to be able to talk to customers and technology partners alike on helping them simplify their workflows and remove their caption headaches.
My last observation of IBC this year, not only on the Dalet booth but around the whole show, is how “now” technology at the show is. While a glimpse of the future is always intriguing, the absence of “smoke and mirrors” was surprisingly refreshing!
