TV Tech 491 - Nov 2023

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contents

November 2023 volumn 41, issue 11

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Staying Ahead of the Hackers While content piracy can’t be entirely defeated, companies are adapting to increased threats

By Kevin Hilton

Going Vertical: Resistance Is Futile

Filmmakers learn to adjust to increasing demands for portrait video

By Phil Rhodes

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Vendors ‘Walking the Talk’ Towards Sustainability

New products, campaigns to reduce carbon footprint gain in popularity

By James Careless

20 2023 Product Innovation

22 Immersive Sound - Front,

equipment guide

Forward, Above and Beyond It’s time to push the sound envelope

By Dennis Baxter

24 Monitoring Over-the-Air

Broadcasts Is Now as Easy as Pi

The most complicated part of this project was getting all the pieces working together

By Doug Lung

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user reports test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors

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• Blackmagic Design • JVC

in the news

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eye on tech

34

people

Awards

TV Tech congratulates this year’s winners

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editor’s note

LG’s 3.0 ‘Red Flag’

Vol. 41 No. 11 | November 2023 FOLLOW US

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The transition to ATSC 3.0 has up until now been fairly slow but steady with reasonable goals in terms of deployments. Currently the industry appears to be on track to make NextGen TV available to 70% of U.S. households, especially with last month’s launch in New York.

But the transition appears to be taking a brief detour that could seriously threaten the future of the standard with LG’s announcement last month that its 2024 TV models would not include support for ATSC 3.0 because it lost a patent infringement lawsuit against Constellation Designs LLC. The court recommended that the consumer electronics giant compensate the patent holder in the amount of $1.68 million.

In a statement to the FCC, LG said that “this challenging and uncertain patent landscape has forced LG to make the difficult decision to suspend the inclusion of ATSC 3.0-compatibility in its 2024 television line-up for the United States,” and also recommended that the FCC open an investigation.

While the FCC does not normally get involved in such matters, there is precedent for the commission to take steps to make it easier for companies the commission regulates to navigate the cutthroat patent licensing environment.

That policy is known as the “RAND”, (reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing requirement for patent holders, which the commission imposed in the early days of the transition to 1.0.

Whether the commission will take such steps with 3.0 is in question, but as newamerica.org said on the matter, “the FCC has a detailed record of protecting competitive markets in the industries it oversees through RAND licensing requirements before ATSC 3.0.”

And the ATSC certainly takes this into account. In an interview with TV Tech last month, ATSC President Madeleine Noland said that “ATSC’s patent policy requires all the participants to disclose their patents and to either agree to RAND or that they don’t agree to RAND and disclose that. That gives the ATSC membership and board of directors an opportunity to decide whether or not a given technology should or should not be in the system.”

It is still not known how this will impact the other manufacturers that support ATSC 3.0, including Sony, Samsung and Hisense; nevertheless, this issue is a huge red flag that the ATSC doesn’t need right now.

How will the commission handle this? Certainly this is an issue ripe for resolution within its “Future of Television” initiative announced last spring at the NAB Show. It hasn’t found much support however from NAB, which urged the commission to “refrain from further action at this time, as the market for ATSC 3.0 receivers remains strong,” adding that “there is no basis for Commission authority over the patent marketplace, and Commission action would not solve any apparent problem.”

The fact that LG has a long history of support for the development of ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 is not lost on observers. As it told the FCC, its decision to suspend support “was not made lightly, because LG has been a vocal ATSC 3.0 advocate, a strong support of local broadcasters, and a leading developer of television products with the latest NextGen TV technologies.”

And yet, as our sister brand TechRadar surmised, “to have one of the key supporters of ATSC stop supporting it does feel like an ultimatum—nice broadcast industry you’ve got here, it’d be a shame to lose it.”

Tom Butts Content Director tom.butts@futurenet.com

CONTENT Content Director Tom Butts, tom.butts@futurenet.com Content Manager Terry Scutt, terry.scutt@futurenet.com Senior Content Producer George Winslow, george.winslow@futurenet.com Contributors: Gary Arlen, Susan Ashworth, James Careless, Kevin Hilton, Craig Johnston, Bob Kovacs and Mark R. Smith Production Managers: Heather Tatrow, Nicole Schilling Managing Design Director: Nicole Cobban Art Directors: Andy McGregor, Anthony Wuillaume ADVERTISING SALES Managing Vice President of Sales, B2B Tech Adam Goldstein, adam.goldstein@futurenet.com SUBSCRIBER CUSTOMER SERVICE To subscribe, change your address, or check on your current account status, go to www.tvtechnology.com and click on About Us, email futureplc@computerfulfillment.com, call 888-266-5828, or write P.O. Box 8692, Lowell, MA 01853.

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in the news NextGen TV Comes to New York City NextGen TV broadcasts were launched in New York City last month, making ATSC 3.0 signals available in the nation’s largest TV market for the first time.

As part of the Oct. 16th launch, public TV's WLIW21 of The WNET Group converted to 3.0 and is hosting NextGen TV broadcasts for six local channels.

The launch means that viewers in the #1 television market in the country will be able to receive NextGen TV from WCBS (2), WLIW (21), WMBQ-CD (46), WNBC (NBC 4), WNET (13), and WNJU (Telemundo 47) WLIW21 is simulcasting the signals but they will appear on their originally assigned local station lineups on all NextGen TV receivers.

“WLIW21 is the first full power station to convert to NextGen TV in the largest television market in the U.S. — this is broadcast television history in the making,” said Neal Shapiro, president and CEO of The WNET Group. “We welcome the opportunity to collaborate with WNBC, WNJU and WCBS on ATSC 3 as we navigate the challenges and opportunities of this digital evolution.

I’m confident this partnership will ensure the best possible outcome for our New York area viewers.”

The WNET Group says it was uniquely positioned to become the host or “lighthouse” in this commercial/non-commercial station partnership as the local operator of two full-power signals because it had moved

WLIW21 to One World Trade Center in 2019 in anticipation of the deployment of 3.0.

As part of the launch, The WNET Group said that datacasting and location services are being explored to support mission-driven public television programming for educational and underserved audiences.

Heartland Video Systems was the project consultant and integrator for The WNET Group.

George Winslow

NBC Sports Next Launches Streaming Service for Youth & Amateur Sports In a bid to tap into the large market for youth sports, NBC Sports Next is launching SportsEngine Play, which it is billing as a first-ofits-kind subscription streaming service for capturing and viewing live and on-demand video of youth and amateur sporting events.

The new service—which has both free and subscription tiers—is designed to enable organizations, leagues, coaches and parents to view games and access a host of other resources that will help them become more involved in youth sports.

SportsEngine Play builds on NBC Sports' expertise in sports and the August 2021

launch of NBC Sports Next, which focuses on driving sports tech innovation and creating new immersive experiences in such areas as youth recreational sports, golf, sports

betting, gaming and emerging media.

SportsEngine Play uses technology from Rapid Replay, a provider of video streaming solutions NBC Sports Next acquired in 2022.

SportsEngine Play offers live and on-demand streaming of youth and amateur sporting events on a variety of devices and also provides video editing tools so teams can capture important game moments and athletes can create their own highlight reels.

NBC Sports Next says it plans to plans to launch a SportsEngine Play connected TV streaming app in 2024.

George Winslow

Survey: YouTube Viewing Surpasses Netflix Among Teens Piper Sandler’s 46th semi-annual “Taking Stock With Teens” survey finds that teens spent 29.1% of their daily video consumption on YouTube (+100 basis points vs. spring 2023) beating out Netflix, which accounted for 28.7% of their daily video consumption (–220 basis points vs. spring 2023).

The survey was done in partnership with DECA. The survey of 9,193 teens conducted Sept.

4–27 also found that TikTok improved slightly as the favorite social platform (38% share) by 80 basis points (bps) vs. spring 2023. SNAP was No. 2 with 28% share, followed by Instagram (23%).

Another key finding was a slowdown in teen spending amid economic concerns.

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The researchers reported that teen “self-reported” spending was down 1% year-overyear to $2,316 and that their data has not shown a spending decrease seen since before the Covid pandemic.

Inflation is now the number two social concern, coming in at 9% among teens.

“Our survey points to initial signs of a slowdown in teen spending. Inflation reached its highest mindshare in terms of political and social issues, right behind the environment,” said Edward Yruma, senior research analyst.

In the mobile arena, the iPhone continues to reign as 87% of teens own one and 88% expect the iPhone to be their next mobile device.

George Winslow

in the news OPINION

He’s No Sisyphus John Lawson takes the commercial path to 3.0 advanced emergency alerting

I

recently asked John Lawson, “By and large, the broadcasters executive director of the have not lived up to the promises Advanced Warning and that many of them made to the Response Network (AWARN) FCC in 2017 to stand up advanced Alliance, what it’s been like alerting if the commission trying to get ATSC 3.0 advanced approved a voluntary transition emergency alerting off the ground. to ATSC 3.0,” he said, adding that “We’ve been pushing a rock Capitol Broadcasting Company up a hill,” he said with a bit of in Raleigh, N.C., and Sinclair weariness in his voice.

Broadcast Group are notable Why? It could be the fact that exceptions.

Phil Kurz Pearl TV, which includes some While the remaining AWARN of the nation’s largest station groups, Fox Alliance members recently voted to continue Television and News-Press and Gazette as an organization with Lawson as its leader, have left the alliance. Perhaps, it’s because a he’s no Sisyphus. corporate tech member from Japan has bailed With the membership’s blessing, Lawson out. Or, it might be a lack of support from the is preparing to push that rock up the hill one FCC. more time. But unlike the mythical Sisyphus, Each has proven to be a challenge for Lawson is taking a new route up—one he Lawson. But his biggest disappointment— believes that will take advanced emergency the thing that may have added the tinge alerting where it needs to go. of exasperation to his voice, is how the This time, Lawson is taking the forbroadcast industry overall has dropped the profit, commercial approach. His plan is ball when it comes to advanced emergency twofold. Working with a partner like tech alerting. manufacturer 6G-Datacast.tv, Lawson hopes to see mobile 3.0 receivers with battery backup power and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities in the homes and cars of millions

confirm or find more information on their smartphones.

That phenomenon is tied directly to the 360-character limitation of WEA messages. In contrast 3.0 advanced emergency messages have no such character limits and can, in fact, include rich media like maps with escape routes, other graphics, video and audio from official sources like local emergency managers and more.

Plus, there’s the problem of electrical service to cell towers going down in severe storms and hurricanes, a comparatively rare occurrence at TV transmitter sites hardened with backup generators and days of fuel.

The other piece of the puzzle, Lawson said, is a 24/7 disaster reality channel, something he described as “C-SPAN meets the Weather Channel.” The idea is to use artificial intelligence to scrape public sources of emergency alerts to retrieve the 2,800 or so issued every day. Then using a model similar to Alert FM, which has proven to be a success, deliver the alerts and accompanying rich media from official sources to TV station subscribers via satellite or other means.

Lawson would outfit emergency managers and public safety officials with the tools to

"By and large, the broadcasters have not lived up to the promises that many of them made to the FCC in 2017 to stand up advanced alerting if the commission approved a voluntary transition to ATSC 3.0."

John Lawson

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of people around the country. The idea is the units will receive 3.0 advanced emergency messages and data and rebroadcast them to other devices in the home if the users so choose.

To naysayers who argue Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) messages and cell phones can do the same thing, Lawson points out that rather than helping, the combo can hurt when a fast response on the part of the public is required. When people receive these alerts, they tend to mill about, unnecessarily delaying their response, while they seek to twitter.com/tvtechnology

aggregate rich media and the means to transmit that content along with alerts to station clients. On the station side, the alerts and rich media would be received and automatically trigger delivery to the public via 3.0.

While he is at the beginning of this journey, Lawson is encouraged after attending Disaster Expo USA 2023 at the Anaheim Convention Center in September where the ideas were well received. Of course, there will be many challenges along the way, but at least he’s had years of experience learning to live with the pain of pushing a rock up a hill.

content security

Staying Ahead of the Hackers While content piracy can’t be entirely defeated, companies are adapting to increased threats EARLY MOVES

Credit: Getty Images, Yuichiro Chino

By Kevin Hilton

The media and entertainment business is built on what it offers its viewers: programming, sports, news and other live events.

While language purists may balk at the current use of the word “assets” instead of “programs,” it does convey the value of the material—both creative and commercial—shown on TV channels and streaming services. They are valuable commodities and have always needed to be protected. Unfortunately, the move to file-based production, with everything on computer servers and network or cloud access, has left assets—and their owners—extremely vulnerable.

This was starkly illustrated by the 2014 hack of files and data from Sony Pictures, which included staff details, emails, corporate information and copies of at-the-time unreleased films. Calls for heightened security in the aftermath of the breach ultimately led to the creation in 2018 of the Trusted Partner Network (TPN) by the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Content Delivery and Security Association (CDSA), with the MPA taking full control of TPN in 2021.

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The MPA issued its first best practice guidelines for content security in 2009, in collaboration with member companies and consultancy Deloitte. Updates and revisions followed between 2011 and 2018, with authorship moving exclusively to the MPA and its membership.

Deloitte published its own report on the

John Footen, managing director, Deloitte Consulting

twitter.com/tvtechnology

subject in 2018, highlighting the digital transformation of content in all its forms. Among its recommendations for securing material were digital fingerprinting, encryption, blockchain (a digital ledger for recording transactions and events), watermarking and plugging the “analog hole,” where programs are copied from legacy sources.

John Footen, managing director of Deloitte Consulting, acknowledges that the situation continues to evolve but says new technologies are now being used with established practices to further tighten security.

“Automation can reduce the effort to maintain a consistent security posture in large-scale systems and to recover after an attack,” he explains. “We’re also seeing greater integration of media technology with enterprise security systems. More products can work with single sign-on in zero-trust environments, for example. At Deloitte, we’re applying AI for cyber defense, not only for well-established uses such as detecting anomalous behavior and interdicting threats but also for assessment and visualization.”

The changing nature of the threat— hackers developing new viruses and ways of infiltrating systems—calls for content owners to

content security be ever vigilant. This is reflected in the MPA/ TPN Best Practice Guidelines, which have been updated on an annual basis (sometimes twice in a year) since 2018. The most recent revision appeared in August this year, with new guidance on working from home and remote access to data centers, plus minor updates to cloud specific controls.

The recommendations from Crystal Pham, vice president of operations and product management for TPN are fairly universal no matter the process: Ensuring that content owners and facilities have secure connections— including not logging into applications from unsecured networks; keeping applications updated and patched; using strong passwords and authentication mechanisms; not sharing accounts or credentials; always installing applications from trusted sources; and adhering to MPA Best Practices, as well as completing an annual TPN assessment.

Pham characterizes the security issue in M&E as “always evolving” and can be influenced by new technologies, the shortening of release windows and emerging threats.

“Change is a constant,” she says. “I do think there’s more awareness about security, with better understanding of the constant change and the need to get ahead of it when possible. I believe it’s becoming more embedded in the process of creating, distributing and consuming content. It’s also becoming more ingrained in our culture.”

NEW METHODS NEEDED The ever-shifting landscape is summed up by Asaf Ashkenazi, chief executive of Verimatrix, who observes that as technology advances, so do the techniques used by pirates to illegally obtain, distribute and monetize content.

“By increasing costs beyond potential profits, the motivation for piracy diminishes.”

—ASAF ASHKENAZI, VERIMETRIX

“DRM and other traditional security methods are no longer as effective against today’s savvy hackers,” he says. “New real-time detection and prevention systems that are layered on traditional protection methods are needed to combat modern piracy efforts—especially those that leverage AI/ML and cloud infrastructure to exploit at scale.”

To counter such threats, Verimatrix has developed Streamkeeper, which combines multiDRM, forensic watermarking and “Counterspy,” which Ashkenazi describes as a “motion sensor” or “alarm” that detects piracy as it happens.

“The goal, however, should not be to completely eliminate piracy but to disrupt the pirates’ business models,” he comments. “By increasing costs beyond potential profits, the motivation for piracy diminishes. Real-time detection, prevention and rapid response are key.”

Among the ways of disrupting the activities of pirates is to track down purloined programming to the sites where it is being offered illegally and shut them down. Another company providing such monitoring enforcement services is Friend MTS, which does this using both fingerprinting and watermarking technologies.

“A customer will give us a clean reference feed of their playout and we fingerprint that,” explains Nik Forman, vice president of marketing for the U.K.-based company. “This allows us to uniquely identify that clip of video. If the monitoring systems— which are all automated and crawling the web—then find a suspicious web site is playing that content, we fingerprint it so we can compare them.

“If they match, we know it is an illicit player and the client can send an enforcement notice or a takedown order,” Forman continues.

“If they also take our watermarking services, the content is marked invisibly and basically sits like a QR code in the actual video. When we find the illicit content and we identify it, we match it with a fingerprint and can then say it is one of our watermarks and we extract that payload of subscriber information.”

‘NEVER TRUST, ALWAYS VERIFY’ Asaf Ashkenazi, CEO of Verimetrix

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While the Sony hack made the M&E sector painfully aware of its vulnerabilities, the threats have only increased since then due to otherwise twitter.com/tvtechnology

innocent technological developments. The threat landscape has evolved with emergent technologies such as the Internet of Things, 5G connectivity and advanced generative AI capabilities, according to Eric Elbaz, principal strategic engagement manager at Akamai.

“We’ve also seen state-sponsored attacks become more brazen,” he said. “Nation-state actors are believed to be behind some of the most sophisticated and persistent threats seen to date.”

Eric Elbaz, principal strategic engagement manager at Akamai

This was the suspicion surrounding the attack on the supply chain of software company SolarWinds in 2020, while, as Elbaz points out, ransomware attacks have increased “dramatically.”

A recent example of this is the breach of MGM Resorts’ systems in Las Vegas, which reportedly cost the company approximately $100 million. But Elbaz does see progress in dealing with the threats: “On the defensive side, we’ve seen major strides being made across threat intelligence, a paradigm shift from ‘trust but verify’ to ‘never trust always verify’ architectures, which is zero-trust security. Deeper public-private sector collaboration and information sharing, as well as a catch up in privacy laws, regulations, and standards are also helping.”

The threat shows no signs of going away and future attacks are likely to be even more cunning and sophisticated. According to “Variety,” in 2022, hacking of popular entertainment content rose 18% YOY compared with 2021, with the U.S. having the largest share of film and TV demand (i.e., illicit streams, downloads and the like), with more than 13.5 billion visits to piracy sites.

But the tools to combat it are there and, when it comes down to it, the greatest weapons are probably vigilance and common sense. l

new formats

Going Vertical: Resistance Is Futile Filmmakers learn to adjust to increasing demands for portrait video

While social media is still the main drive for vertical video, the format is also making its way into TV and film.

by Phil Rhodes

‘JUST FOR SOCIAL?’

At 22 Frith Street in London there’s a plaque commemorating the first demonstration of moving images not involving film. A purist might point out that John Logie Baird’s television system was a mechanical monstrosity which could never have achieved even standard definition. Either way, those early experiments produced a dim, low-resolution image which was updated at less than ten frames per second—and was portrait in aspect ratio.

So, the fascination with tall, thin movies on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat might seem less like a new idea than a reincarnation of a very old one. The demand for material which works in those portrait frames isn’t really new, although a lot of what’s been released in portrait formats has been repurposed, sometimes rather approximately, from conventional landscape pictures.

It’s perhaps inevitable in 2023 that AI has been pressed into service to automate conversions. When new material is being shot, meanwhile, it’s increasingly normal to target a portrait frame—or even derive both tall and wide frames from a single camera.

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Leonidas Jaramillo is a DP and creative director with a background in camera and the allied trades of real-time interactive simulation for entertainment and virtual production. Jaramillo’s experience dates back to an experiment—not followed up—for Marvel in 2012.

“There was a movie called ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and we were going to make living portraits for the movie posters,” Jaramillo explained. “The plan was to have all these TVs flipped vertically in the little windows you have in front of movie theaters.

Leonidas Jaramillo

twitter.com/tvtechnology

I came from photography, and I was an IATSE member as well, and they enlisted me. I created movie posters of each of the characters, moving in the frame.”

Jaramillo quickly realized that the demand for sheer picture quality might not be much less than that facing the main unit of a major motion picture.

“We couldn't shoot it 16:9 and then hope to crop in… I didn't know how big the poster displays were... there are displays inside theaters too,” he said. “At the time we were shooting 4K, 6K maybe, so I had to mount everything sideways and that was difficult because our tripods are not meant to take weight that way.” Since then, Jaramillo goes on, things have become “a little bit easier. Cameras are a little bit smaller and more modular. You can use an [Alexa] LF and crop out the 9:16 versions from that.”

Budget-conscious producers might wince at such thoroughbred equipment on a job that’s often described, Jaramillo recalls with chagrin, as “just for social. I could come back and say: Because it's for social, if you're not using an LF or an 8K Venice where you can dig into the resolution, I'd recommend a C300 mounted sideways.

new formats

“The filmmakers of the 70s and 80s had to deal with pan and scan, things going to TV—‘oh man, don’t even look at it like that!’—and we have to deal with this.”

— LEONIDAS JARAMILLO

photons do you have.”

“These mechanics are often lost on someone,” Jaramillo reflects. “You'll have a producer say ‘it’s only for social!’ There are a lot of regions of the Venn diagram where I'm going to fail, and the one we want is the one where it’s going to cost a lot of money. So much is riding on it. If Harrison Ford looks off of what people think he looks like, you get in trouble… you're saying ‘it's for social.’ That's our battle. The filmmakers of the 70s and 80s had to deal with pan and scan, things going to TV—‘oh man, don’t even look at it like that!’— and we have to deal with this.”

The latest was Shoreditch Ski Club; another was for Augustinus Bader.”

It’s a situation that inevitably involves compromise, so Gudbrands emphasizes collaboration. “If I see a challenge come up, I ask the client or the director which one really is the hero… and the decision is made on the spot—but I've never really had any problems with it, it's just a need to communicate well.”

Modern conveniences are helpful, but Gudbrands is careful to keep both frames in mind.

“Most of the time I operate my own stuff, and

DUAL FRAMING “I did a commercial [and] we had three [RED] Dragons all on custom made L-brackets,” he continued. “Sometimes they want to do both 9:16 and 16:9 and sharpness is an issue… you can't compose someone on a third in a vertical format and hope they can compose it in a 16:9 as well. However they chop it up, you'll end up having them in the feather of the focus, which means you have to shoot deeper to get out of that, an f/5.6 or an 8. Now you're fighting light, how many

Someone who’s become particularly used to dealing with it is Anna Gudbrands, a London-based cinematographer whose work includes short-form pieces for Relentless, Wonderbra and Zegna’s campaign with Jose Mourinho. Gudbrands’ recent projects have, she says, heavily involved dual framing.

“I've been doing a lot of fashion and skincare in the summer... almost every single job I do now, they want an option for 9:16 which is Instagram, but they want the hero to be 16:9.

Anna Gudbrands

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new formats I put up framelines in camera so I'm always aware of what's going on in the portrait format. I have the two brains and I go between them, always looking at my framelines for both. You do have to be a little bit wider— super-closeups can work well, but you have to keep in mind your lens choice. You want there to be some breathing space. You can do some close-ups, but not for the whole thing or it becomes confusing. It kind of becomes second nature.”

Gudbrands concurs with Jaramillo in that shooting for both portrait and landscape inevitably means creating a landscape image for later cropping. “If you lock the camera sideways you have the full frame but you won't have the [landscape]. Most of the time people want both,” she said.

At the same time, working in the knowledge that someone else will decide the frame makes the post experience particularly

useful, according to Gudbrands.

“I don't sit in on edits, but I have experience of edits, so I know what cuts and what doesn't,” she said. “It's really helpful. But once you come on board, you know what the deal is. You and the director both know there's the two cut-downs, it's not a surprise.”

ENTER AI For the uncountable hours of material already in the archives, there’s artificial intelligence. Systems such as Videoverse’s Magnifi are built not only to produce a highlights reel of sports games, but also to re-frame the picture to suit any of several aspect ratios which might all be required.

Doing either of those things by hand might be hopelessly labor-intensive; doing both without human intervention is genuinely disruptive, making new use of material that might otherwise have stayed dormant for no

better reason than that it was difficult to use.

Meanwhile, consider broadcast camera operators. There’s not so much portrait here, but anyone capable of following a golf ball in flight is one of the more skilled people to lay hands on a moving-picture capture device.

AI is emerging here, too, although it’s currently only mildly alarming to those people, possibly because AI cameras are mainly being deployed at events which might not otherwise have been covered at all. Pixellot’s camera system, for instance, has created whole new businesses by collapsing the cost of producing school sports for the small screen.

Still, for the time being there seems no immediate threat to the livelihoods of people who rely on their ability to keep a person, a ball, or an attractively-lit branded item inside a nicely-composed frame—no matter what shape that frame is. l

Samsung’s Sero TV: ‘A solution in search of a problem’ Samsung debuted its Sero TV at CES2020, and while the company doesn’t reveal sales figures for the product, the fact that others have not followed in their footsteps probably confirms early doubts that the display—which rotates between vertical and horizontal viewing—(priced around $1,500) is a “gimmick” at best.

Although the Sero TV did make Times’ “Best Inventions of 2020” list, others were not as impressed with the feature. Here’s a look at some of the mixed early reviews:

The Sero feels like a solution in search of a problem, and basically unnecessary whether you’re big on social media (a flagship smartphone might be better), or not (in which case you don’t need the Sero at all).

TechRadar

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Overall, although this TV’s novelty feature might not be to everyone’s liking, it undoubtedly turns heads.

RTNGS.com I was surprised at just how good the majority of TikTok clips looked on this larger screen, a testament to Samsung’s Quantum Processor 4K. As a regular TikTok user, I was absolutely sold on this bigger portrait presentation.

Tech Advisor For now, the Sero is an impressive feat of design and engineering that not many people will buy, and in a tech landscape bursting with uninspiring cookie-cutter designs, that’s OK. Though maybe not for Samsung.

Wired

environmental concerns

Vendors ‘Walking the Talk’ Towards Sustainability New products, campaigns to reduce carbon footprint gain in popularity

By James Careless

For many companies in media & entertainment, sustainability is more than a word: It’s a mission for these manufacturers who are taking serious steps to become more sustainable and environmentally responsible in their business practices. Here are some views of how the industry is doing in attaining sustainability, from some of the people making it happen.

THE BIG PICTURE The drive towards sustainability in television touches upon two key areas: The

production and distribution of TV content via broadcasting, streaming, and other delivery systems. The other is the various consumer devices that access and display this content.

Let’s start with TV content production and distribution. Thanks to framework organizations such as WeAreAlbert, (an environmental organization aiming to encourage the television and film production industry to reduce waste and its carbon footprint), or consultancies like Mrs. GreenFilm, the industry is seeing more productions taking steps to promote and impose sustainable practices on set, according to François Polarczyk, sustainability director for Accedo.

“Connecting directly to the grid, hiring

local crew to avoid travel, and promoting the ‘Reduce, Reuse, Recycle’ loop in costumes and set buildings are the top criteria to me,” he said.

Polarczyk points to the Responsible Media Forum (RBF) as one of the leading organizations promoting sustainability in media, with members such as the BBC, Bauer Media Group, NBCUniversal, Sky, Virgin Media, and Warner Brothers Universal backing its efforts. The RBF’s sustainability initiatives include DIMPACT (an online tool for calculating the carbon emissions of digital content’s downstream value chain) and media sustainability conferences such as “Mirrors or Movers.”

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environmental concerns to force behavior.”

It's not just television production and distribution that needs to become more sustainable, but the influence that this industry exerts on society as a whole.

For instance, “advertising and monetization from a wider perspective needs to be taken into account,” Polarczyk observed. “It is not only producing and delivering advertising that has a huge impact in terms of carbon emissions; the content of advertising also needs to be taken into account. For example, seeing an advert for New Zealand tourism if you’re based in London will have another impact, compared to seeing promotions around local farms to visit.”

INDIVIDUAL EFFORTS Accedo recently launched its Sustainable Marketplace to help vendors build their video applications leveraging sustainable vendors and products.

“The streaming industry is responsible for 3–4% of global CO2 emissions,” he said.

“DIMPACT is looking at providing a methodology to assess and reduce energy consumption of the media chain.”

“There are more and more initiatives that have started and aim to shine a light on being more responsible with the resources our planet offers,” agreed Chris Brähler, vice president of product for SDVI. “For example, the DPP [Digital Production Partnership] has been leading the way with their ‘Committed to Sustainability’ campaign, while other bodies like the NAB Show recently introduced sustainability-focused awards to increase visibility.”

V-Nova is a member of the Greening of Streaming group and the chair of its compression working group, which is working with Low Energy Sustainable Streaming (LESS) Accord recommendations to help streaming services reduce end-to-end energy consumption.

In order to become more sustainable, the streaming industry should first focus on ways to reduce the utilization of existing systems, said Sam Orton-Jay, V-Nova’s vice president of product.

“One possibility is rolling out better encoding technologies to reduce transcoding power requirements and the amount of data we deliver, to enable some reduction in required storage and delivery infrastructure over time” he said. “Secondly, a major part of the discussions so far on the LESS Accord has been the idea of a ‘Good enough’ quality of service that considers energy usage rather than simply

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prioritizing quality at all costs. Try to evaluate if you are delivering higher resolutions to certain devices than they really need. Finally, start asking key sustainability questions both of internal teams and external vendors alike.

It is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal at this stage.”

FROM THE CONSUMER SIDE As for consumer products such as Smart TVs and other devices, and their impact on the environment as new models are purchased and older models that end up in landfills?

“Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of the impact of their purchasing decisions, and so are many manufacturers who are choosing to offer more sustainable goods, build out ESG (environment, social, and governance) strategies and report on their environmental efforts,” replied Patty Minichiello, global brand experience manager for TMT Insights.

As well, “consumer brands are making strides in reducing packaging and plastics in their product and some offer buyback programs for old tech, such as Apple,“ V-Nova’s Brähler added. “But a lot more can and has to be done in this area, with different countries looking at legislation

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Each of these companies have publicly committed themselves to pursuing sustainable business practices in the TV industry.

Such sustainability commitments are prominently posted on their respective websites, and typically spelled out in very clear detail.

Case in point: “At Accedo, we recently launched our ‘Sustainable Marketplace’ to help vendors build their video applications Patty Minichiello, global brand experience manager for TMT Insights

environmental concerns leveraging sustainable vendors and products,” said Polarczyk. “It enables video service providers to make buying decisions based not only on product features, but also on sustainable KPIs (key performance indicators) to cover carbon emissions reduction, audience influence, and community impact.

“We also released a new study, which looked at the energy usage of various streaming devices and a number of popular streaming applications. It uncovered some key areas of actions and guidelines to reduce energy usage of video devices.”

ATEME is another company that has taken a proactive approach. In 2021 it launched its Green Delivery solution, an integrated end-to-end tool designed to allow OTT and DTH operators to reduce their video delivery carbon footprint. Green Delivery brings together carbon-efficient components to reduce hardware requirements, bandwidth usage and energy consumption.

SDVI’s sustainability efforts are largely centered around saving power, which means better utilization of the infrastructure used for content processing, according to Brähler.

“This can firstly be done by using the public cloud, as sharing compute and storage resources inherently means using less energy,” he said. “If I don’t process something on that machine, someone else is, and it‘s not just sitting there idle but still using energy. If I then optimize my supply chain and eliminate duplicate work and more efficiently use the resources at hand, I save even more energy.

Lastly, choose a vendor that uses data centers and cloud providers that invest in green energy, so that even when I use less energy because even after I optimize my operations, the little energy I do use is created carbon free.”

V-Nova’s commitment to sustainability is inherent in their MPEG 5, Part 2 LCEVC (Low-Complexity Enhancement Video Coding) streaming solution, which the company says enhances the performance of existing codecs to reduce energy consumption during transcoding by up to 70%, while augmenting compression efficiency by up to 40%.

“It’s encouraging to hear how much the sustainability of video workflows is now on the agenda for our customers,” said Or-

ton-Jay. “Even if not immediately so, they certainly engage when we bring up the significant savings that can be made in the energy consumption of their systems thanks to optimizations in their video compression technology. The fact that it often goes hand in hand with cost reduction tends to help too.”

This “doing more with less” approach is also being pursued by Zixi. ”We’re making our software cost-effective with 14x less CPU than other solutions in the market, 10x port efficiency, and virtual machine efficiency— requiring 50% less computing power,” said Gordon Brooks, CEO of Zixi. “All of these innovations combined save customers money, making our solutions highly sustainable and attractive in procurement.”

“In order to make meaningful progress towards sustainability, technology buyers need to make it mandatory, rather than a plus or an option—it needs to be a qualification of the procurement process,” he added. “And then, as a supplier it’s on us to do everything possible to be as sustainable as cost-effective to make it as attractive as possible.” l

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2023 Product Innovation Awards

TV Tech Congratulates This Year’s Winners!

Now in their 10th year, the Product Innovation Awards recognize excellence in products/services for the TV/pro video industry.

Amagi Amagi NOW

AMD AMD Alveo MA35D Media Accelerator

Backlight cineSync

Amazon Web Services Amazon IVS Real-Time Streaming

Avid - Media Composer PhraseFind AI & ScriptSync AI

Canon - Canon Flex Zoom lenses: CNE14-35mm T1.7 L S/SP Wide-Angle Zoom Lens and the CN-E31.5-95mm T1.7 L S/SP Telephoto Zoom Lens

Amazon Web Services - AWS Elemental Link UHD Integration With AWS Elemental Media Connect

Avid - Pro Tools | MTRX II Audio Interface

Cobalt Digital - WAVE Remote Control Panel Series

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November 2023 | www.tvtech.com |

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2023 Product Innovation Awards

Haivision - Haivision Pro460

Pearl TV - RUN3TV

Telestream - Vantage Cloud

Harmonic - Harmonic VOS360 Ad SaaS

Scripps Nexstar - HPE Sony Mobile Wireless Data Over TV Signals

Telos Alliance - Minnetonka Audio AudioTools Server WorkflowCreator

Matrox Video - Matrox ORIGIN

Shure Inc. - AD600 Axient Digital Spectrum Manager

Telos Alliance - Telos Infinity VIP App

Newsbridge - MXT-1 Generative AI Indexing Technology

Sony Electronics BVM-HX3110

Triveni Digital ATSC 3.0 Translator

Nextologies - 10TX

Sony Electronics - NXL-ME80

TVU Networks - ONE

twitter.com/tvtechnology | www.tvtech.com | November 2023

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inside audio

Immersive Sound – Front, Forward, Above and Beyond It’s time to push the sound envelope

Credit: Getty Images, Dmytro Aksonov

I

mmersive sound was almost directly in front of the viewer and a causality of the pandemic significantly, television depends on because in-person broadcast the sound to give dimensionality and sports productions to the experience. Since the were shuttered and virtually picture is in front and the screen all engineering and financial stretches vertically, why not fill resources were diverted to the front sound space with sound getting and keeping live content from top to bottom? It may not flowing—by remote control. seem intuitive to put more sound Remote production practices and above the viewer and it may not technology advanced quickly be appropriate for all applications, EXPERTISE and subsequently benefitted but a sport like basketball certainly Dennis Baxter less popular secondary sports benefits from sound above the and content for smaller targeted viewer. audiences with an easier engineering setup and overall cheaper WHERE TO PUT THE SOUND production costs.

I believe there still is a reluctance to push Consequently, immersive sound was pushed the sound envelope (experience), which may to the back burner. However, I believe 2024 be a hangover from uninspiring 5.1 surround will see a revitalization of the dimensional sound production and strict loudness sound format. Why? Because immersive sound compliance; but clearly more atmosphere production and reproduction technology is behind and above the viewer does not add available and affordable, however the next task much to the interest of the soundfield. Many for practitioners is to create the “wow” factor sound practitioners approach immersive and stoke the consumer attraction. sound as another horizontal layer over Consider this: Television is basically the existing surround, ear-level layer. No two dimensional with the picture parked doubt this is a limited creative approach to

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immersive sound.

Additionally horizontal layers of sound are hard for most soundbars to reproduce so by pushing the sound into the upper front space, the sound design also takes advantage of the mechanical sound reproduction of a soundbar using up-firing speakers. Immersive sound design for soundbars is more about creating a sound experience over reproduction of an accurate soundfield.

Basketball on television is perfect for advanced immersive sound applications because the visual coverage beyond a wide shot of the action on the court is close-up, head-to-toe of the athlete under the baskets.

With the basket perceptibly above the athlete there is a clear motivation to put the basket sound above the viewer and create a front vertical soundfield of sports specific sounds.

The front soundfield consists of the Left, Right, Left Height and Right Height sound zones acting as a coherent, controllable sound space where sound can be steered anywhere vertically in front of the listener.

Basketball sound is perfect for immersive soundbars and application of the principles of Front Vertical Soundfield Reinforcement

inside audio (FVSF). What sounds go above the viewer?

With film there is “room tone” ambiance as well as specific effects, and increasingly, film sound production uses electronic digital spatial enhancements.

Broadcasters and content streamers of dramatic and serial content produce their sound similarly to film, but with sports, the sonic palate is undeveloped beyond the absolute consumer-expected sounds like the crack of the bat. Imagine head-to-toe sound of the athlete or putting the viewer inside a bobsled at 80 mph.

WHAT ABOUT FIELD SPORTS? With basketball the benefits of advanced immersion applications such as FVSR is obvious, but look at the majority of televised sports, particularly field sports such as baseball as well as football and soccer. These sports are heavy ambiance with a center focus on the sport’s specific sounds.

With advanced immersive sound practices such as trajectory mapping it would be possible to recreate the dimensional movement of the ball in the soundfield—

Sound design for immersive sound is about reproducing a dimensional experience. think a moving asteroid! Think AI-rendered soundfields. Or simply by elevating mono and stereo sounds, elements between the earlevel soundfield and the above soundfield can create a more integrated soundfield with clear correlation between the front and front height speakers.

Sound design for immersive sound is about reproducing a dimensional experience, which to me is all about creating and mixing for soundbars. Since the production sound mixer will probably not mix over a soundbar and the vast selection of consumer soundbars are so different in design it is hard to expect a sound practitioner to mix for soundbars.

However, the sound practitioner should be considering the reproduction side of sound.

The sound mixer needs to be familiar with the physics of soundbars and have a willingness to experiment. After a little practice the sonic outcomes for the sound practitioner will quickly improve. Additionally, I have published a practical guide to immersive sound production with case studies and examples to share my experience and ideas and help jump start the immersive sound initiative.

The creative possibility for immersive sound is an open proposition although a challenge because the ATSC 3.0 did not mandate advanced audio standards for immersive sound. Some in our industry don’t really see the need for immersive sound, but its time has arrived, and it is up to the audio practitioners and the entertainment industry to stretch the boundaries and promote this truly innovative entertainment experience. l Dennis Baxter has contributed to hundreds of live events including sound design for nine Olympic Games. He can be reached at dbaxter@dennisbaxtersound.com or at www.dennisbaxtersound.com.

STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (REQUESTER PUBLICATIONS ONLY) 15. Extent and Nature of Circulation

1.

Publication Title: TV Technology

2.

Publication No.: 3085

3.

Filing Date: 9/29/2023

4.

Issue Frequency: Monthly

5.

Number of Issues Published Annually: 12

6.

Annual Subscription Price: Requester

7.

Complete Mailing Address of Known Office of Publication:

(3) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid or requested distribution outside USPS

7th Fl, New York, NY 10036;

c. Total paid and/or requested

Future US Inc., 130 West 42nd Street,

Contact Person: Cindy Cardinal, 847-438-4577 8.

9.

a. Total number of copies

Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months 11123

10438

8668

7833

b. Legitimate paid and/or requested distribution (by mail and outside the mail) (1) Outside-county paid/requested mail subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541

(2) In-county paid/requested mail subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541

(4) Requested copies distributed by other mail classes through the USPS 8668

7833

2357

2527

d. Non-requested distribution (by mail and outside the mail)

Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of

(1) Outside-county non-requested copies stated on PS Form 3541

New York, NY 10036

(3) Non-requested copies distributed through the USPS by other classes of mail

Publisher: Future US Inc., 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Fl,

Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor and Managing Editor:

Publisher: Carmel King, 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Fl, New York, NY 10036; Editor: Tom Butts, 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Fl, New York, NY 10036

Managing Editor: Terry Scutt, 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Fl, New York, NY 10036 10. Owner: Future US Inc. (Future PLC), 130 West 42nd Street, 7th Fl, New York, NY 10036

11. Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or

Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or Other Securities: None

12. Tax Status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months 13. Publication Title: TV Technology 14. Issue Date for Circulation Data: September-23

No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date

(2) In-county non-requested Copies stated on PS Form 3541 (4) Non-requested copies distributed outside the mail e. Total non-requested distribution

2357

2527

f. Total distribution

11025

10360

g. Copies not distributed

98

78

h. Total

11123

10438

i. Percent paid and/or requested

78.6%

75.6%

16. Electronic Copy Circulation a. Requested and Paid Electronic Copies b. Total Requested and Paid Print Copies c. Total Requested Copy Distribution d. Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation (Both Print & Electronic Copies) 17. Publication of Statement of Ownership for a Requestor Publication is required and will be printed in the November 2023 issue of this publication.

18. Signature of VP, AV Technology Group: Carmel King, September 29, 2023. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal sanctions (including fines and imprisonment) and/or civil sanctions (including civil penalties).

rf technology

Monitoring Over-the-Air Broadcasts Is Now as Easy as Pi The most complicated part of this project was getting all the pieces working together

L

ong-time readers know I like to experiment with remote monitoring projects. A few decades ago, I described my “Cheap Remote” based on a Blue Earth Microcomputer, as an inexpensive device about the same size as today’s Raspberry Pi and other single board computers. I needed the money EXPERTISE I’d budgeted for a commercial Doug Lung remote control to cover the cost of an air conditioner for the shelter for a translator I was installing in Midland, Texas.

Lately I’ve been looking for an inexpensive way to monitor a remote transmitter over a limited bandwidth internet connection.

The result is the OTA (Over-the-Air) Pi Monitor. Using an Orange Pi 4 LTS and a Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD Dual USB tuner, the whole setup, with case and power supply, can be put together for less than $200. It requires about 2 Mbps of upload bandwidth (adjustable) when viewing the video clips.

with a Raspberry Pi 4, Orange Pi 5B or other single-board computer running a Linux operating system. The Orange Pi 4 LTS I used has 16 GB eMMC storage and 4 GB of RAM. Whether using an Orange Pi or other SBC, be sure the power supply can deliver enough current; otherwise, as I learned the hard way, the computer will crash when transcoding the video.

HARDWARE Fig. 1 shows part of the web page available after connecting to the device.

There is a real-time display of signal level, SNR and a continuity count (10-minute interval). Video is available for the main HD program and the SD programs. A short segment is recorded at the top and bottom of each hour. I designed the box to work without high-speed internet. HD video is transcoded from MPEG-2 to AVC (MPEG-4) at quarter resolution (960x540) and frame rate is reduced to 15 fps. SD video is also converted to AVC at 15 fps. The peak bitrate for playback of the downconverted HD stream is under 2 Mbps and around 1 Mbps for the SD streams. The video plays in a web browser. Below the video is transport data with PID data and bit rates (not visible on the screenshot).

The OTA Pi Monitor should also work

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Fig. 1: Pi OTA Monitor web page

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PROGRAM FLOW The OTA Pi Monitor programs are simple.

As you can see from Fig. 2, it isn’t fancy!

Operation is simple: A one-line script, sigdata2.sh, uses dvbv5-zap to grab the tuner data and provide the signal level, SNR and continuity error count. A small Python program, sigdata.py (only 3,905 bytes), runs that script every second to obtain the readings for the web page. A Flask module in the sigdata.py program provides a web server using a small index.html template.

Flask’s socketio module receives the data

rf technology from sigdata2.sh. A 656-byte javascript app, signalapp.js, displays the real-time data on the web page.

I wasn’t able to find a way to easily stream live video over an internet connection, so I decided instead to use dvbv5-zap, the same program used to obtain the data from the tuner, to do a 60-second transport stream capture every 30 minutes. The system timer, available on most Linux distributions, sets the recording times.

Once recorded, FFmpeg is used to extract program streams from the transport stream and transcode them for lower bit-rate playback. Finally, the tsanalyzer program from TSDuck is run to analyze the transport stream and generate a text file. All of this is done in the 15-line (including comments) tscapproc.sh script. The Flask web server displays the transport stream analysis text file and provides HTML5 links to the transcoded program streams (video and audio).

There isn’t room to include program listings in this column but I’m happy to share them; email me and I’ll send you the latest version. If there is enough interest, I’ll make them available for download.

The most complicated part of this project was getting all the pieces working together.

Google searches helped and eventually I was able to assemble a working program. I’d been working on this project for a few years and I found when I tried to use my original software as a starting point it failed due to slightly different syntax in the updated libraries. When stuff fails, the error messages are not always clear, but copying the error message to Google and doing a search often provides a solution.

PROGRAM COMPONENT DETAILS Here are some more details on the software components in the OTA Pi Monitor.

Flask (https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/3.0.x/) simplifies creating a website with real-time data and video. There are several tutorials online. The trickiest part was getting Flask SocketIO (https://flask-socketio.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) working with signalapp.js (delivered by the Pi) and socket.io.min.js (downloaded from cloudflare.com by the browser) to display the real-time data to the screen. I’m happy to share the solution I came up with.

The DVBv5-tools provide an easy way to interface with PCIe or USB DTV tuners. The OTA Pi Monitor relies on the dvbv5-zap tool.

Most Linux distributions offer dvbv5-zap but the package name may vary. I found the best

Fig. 2: OTA Pi Monitor setup

way to record the transport stream was to tune the signal with dvbv5-zap in the record mode, which sends the transport stream to a software DVR device, which can be dumped into a file using the “cat” command (see www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Dvbv5-zap).

The dvbv5-zap program works well with the Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD tuner.

Because the dualHD has two tuners, it is possible to do transport stream captures without stopping the signal quality readings.

TSDuck is a very powerful toolkit that can analyze and edit transport streams among other things. I’m using it as a text-based version of TSReader (learn more about it and download versions for most operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and common Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and the Raspberry Pi OS at https://tsduck.io/).

I had to compile the program from source for use on the Orange Pi 4 LTS, but the build instructions on the TSDuck web page made that easy.

Transcoding is done with FFmpeg (https://ffmpeg.org/). All it takes is one

command line to extract a program’s video and audio from a transport stream and output a file with different resolution (if needed), frame rate, and video and audio codecs at different bit rates and quality. I had trouble extracting specific program streams until I found the “-map p:#” command line option where “#” is the program ID number. That option will transcode the video as well as all audio streams under that program ID. I hope you find this useful for monitoring remote translator sites or perhaps even as a simple way to check on your station when you don’t have access to a TV or antenna or are traveling out of the coverage area. I’m happy to share the files I used to create the OTA Pi Monitor and look forward to hearing from readers who’ve built one and improved it! I continue to update it as time permits and as noted, am happy to share the files and help you build one. l

As always, your questions and comments are welcome.

Email me at dlung@transmitter.com.

twitter.com/tvtechnology | www.tvtech.com | November 2023

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eye on tech | product and services Telestream Wirecast v16.0

DPA Microphones 2017 Shotgun Microphone

Telestream has added a virtual assistant feature to v16 of its Wirecast software-based live video streaming and production solution.

Leveraging generative AI, the virtual assistant delivers real-time feature walkthroughs, technical advice, and tailored troubleshooting in multiple languages, providing quick answers so creators can continue their work uninterrupted.

“We’re really excited about the new AI element of Wirecast and the rapid responses it offers users. Questions take seconds to answer, and we believe that Wirecast customers will enjoy the personalized approach of the new virtual assistant service,” said Telestream CTO Simon Clarke. “We see countless opportunities for AI and machine learning across our entire portfolio. This is where the industry is headed, and we are thrilled to make this technology available to our customers.” z www.telestream.net

DPA Microphones’ new 2017 shotgun microphone is designed to capture authentic sound with high directionality even in extreme weather conditions.

Featuring a specifically designed capsule that is paired with a cutting-edge interference tube and microphone grid, the 2017 offers high performance, both on- and off-axis. It has a high degree of off-axis rejection, which permits the main source to stand out. This heavily attenuated off-axis audio is authentic and extremely usable for mixing into the entire soundscape.

DPA has also prioritized versatility with the 2017, creating an easy to set-up mic that is ideal not only for fixed or booming applications in live sports and news broadcasts, but also in the theatre on a FOH boom or fly bar; for indoor or outdoor booming while capturing location sound; or to pick up a musician’s ambient blend for in-ear monitoring during live musical performances. z www.dpamicrophones.com

Red House Streaming Flight

Magewell Wowza Video Platform Integration with Magewell Ultra Encode AIO

CP Communication’s Red House Streaming has launched Flight, a new video production flypack for multicamera location shoots. Designed for easy setup and quick deployment, Flight offers a professional HD production option for live broadcast or streaming of small-to-medium sized location shoots. The rack-based Flight system supports four Sony HDC-2570 3-CCD HD cameras with Canon 20x lenses on a base level, for live production of corporate events, concerts, music festivals, and Tier 2/3 sports.

The video infrastructure brings together a complete workflow for content creators that is extendable to Spark HD, a 16-foot production trailer with a hybrid HD-SDI and IP production workflow plus a professional live streaming control room. Flight’s content acquisition capabilities can also scale for eight-camera shoots whether used with Spark HD or as a standalone REMI video production flypack. z https://redhousestreaming.com

Grass Valley Kayenne Control Surface Bundles With K-Frame XP Engine Grass Valley has introduced new production switcher bundles for sports, entertainment, news and other applications. The bundles combine newly redesigned Kayenne modular video production center surfaces with K-Frame XP video processing engines.

The new control surface modules are reminiscent of what operators have used for more than 10 years but include several enhancements.

The bundles are designed for larger productions but users can bundle GV’s Korona and Karerra panels with any K-Frame, including the CXP, SXP, V-series or software switcher powered by AMPP. The K-Frame engines can now be fitted with a JPEG XS board for advanced IP input and output based on user needs. z www.grassvalley.com

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Magewell has partnered with Wowza to integrate Magewell’s Ultra Encode AIO live media encoders with the Wowza’s platform to enable seamless and easy-to-deploy streaming workflows from encoding to delivery via Wowza’s global content delivery network (CDN). Supporting multiple encoding formats and delivery protocols, Ultra Encode AIO offers a robust, affordable encoding solution for applications ranging from live streaming and remote contribution to IPbased production.

The PoE device encodes video up to 1080p at 60fps or 4K at 30fps.

It also can encode one live input source or mix its HDMI and SDI inputs into a combined output. The integration adds Wowza Video to Ultra Encode AIO’s output presets, enabling users to bring content seamlessly from the encoder into the Wowza ecosystem without manual configuration. z www.magewell.com

Vizrt Viz Pilot Edge 3 Viz Pilot Edge 3.0 features a new UI and faster response time for newsroom graphics creation. At the core of the redesign is improved navigation for users and enhanced functionality written using modern web technology (Vue, TypeScript), making Viz Pilot Edge more userfriendly, more responsive, and with a start-up time that is now up to 3x faster.

Navigation has been updated to make it easier to locate templates and elements, with dropdowns and tabs for faster access to regularly used features. The search function now contains multiple tag filtering to further narrow down search results. The interface update also includes the ability to drag and drop multiple elements into a story slug, radio buttons in templates, improved crop functionality and faster editing of tables. Requesting and managing images has also been made easier with the new Order Management integration. z www.vizrt.com

eye on tech | product and services Matrox KMLync

Adobe Project Stardust

The Matrox KMLync USB keyboard and mouse switch enables users to control multiple systems, or Matrox Extio 3 IP KVM devices, from their control rooms through a single keyboard/mouse setup. Available as a standalone keyboard and mouse switch or as an accessory to the Extio 3 IP KVM product line, KMLync enables seamless mouse switching between up to four different input sources (KVM or other). When combined with Extio 3 IP KVM extenders, KMLync enables new workflows for larger multimonitor workspaces.

Operators can monitor and control multiple sources across a quad 4Kp60 monitor setup or even larger configurations with up to 16 1080p60 monitors. When KMLync is paired with Extio 3’s multiview capability and fast switching over IP, operators can visualize more information and improve response time. z https://video.matrox.com/en

Adobe’s “Project Stardust” is a new object-aware editing engine that uses generative AI to revolutionize image editing. Project Stardust enables users to easily select, edit and even delete complex elements in any image, making image editing more intuitive, accessible and time efficient for any user.

For example, Project Stardust lets users select persons in a photograph, move them to a different place in the composition and fill in the background where they were previously standing. Users can also change elements like the color of a person’s clothing or the position in which they’re standing—treating any flat images like a file with layers. z www.adobe.com

Synacor Cloud ID Passkey Connect

Avanci Avanci Video

Cloud ID Passkey Connect is designed to end password headaches for consumers, and help service providers and content owners cut down on one of the most frequent and costly reasons for trouble calls with passwordless authentication of access to content. The managed service helps streaming content companies and service providers easily deploy secure, passwordless authentication for online content.

Available now, the service can immediately be integrated into existing authentication solutions to maximize the value of content for secure and frictionless user experiences. Cloud ID Passkey Connect leverages Synacor’s experience in authentication and identity management to deliver simplified access to online content, minimized profit loss from password sharing and fraud, and decreased customer support costs. z https://synacor.com

Avanci Video is a new licensing platform for internet streaming services designed to reduce the complexities in the patent licensing process by providing users with a single, comprehensive license for video streaming services.

Avanci specializes in solutions for sharing technologies and Avanci Video builds on the success of other Avanci platforms. Those include automotive, where almost 100 auto brands are covered by the Avanci 4G Vehicle license, which in a single agreement, licenses the vast majority of essential cellular patents, and Avanci Broadcast, which has licensed the vast majority of essential ATSC 3.0 patents to the makers of most NextGen TVs sold to date.

Avanci Video encompasses the latest video technologies — AV1, H.265 (HEVC), H.266 (VVC), MPEG-DASH, and VP9. It launches with over 25 licensors, including many leaders in the research and development of these technologies, with more expected to join in future. z www.avanci.com

Sony M2L-X Switcher

Octopus Octopus 12 Web Client

The new M2L-X is a software-based switcher that expands the established platform and interface of Sony’s existing cloud-based switcher system, M2 Live.

It allows video/audio switching, graphics insertion and other production functions to be performed remotely during live broadcasts. M2L-X can be used as a standalone software, either in a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) environment, or on-premises. It can then be operated through its GUI, the ICP-X series control panel, and with third party controllers such as Streamdeck from Elegato, providing operators with more flexibility and reactivity during live productions.

The M2L-X can be deployed alongside Sony’s MLS-X1 scalable production switcher, creating a hybrid processing stack, with unified operations through the ICP-X7000 control surfaces. With this setup, operators do not need to think about where the processing engine is located, regardless of whether it is hardware or software. z https://pro.sony/ue_US

Octopus Web Client provides an intuitive and user-friendly design that allows users access to the most essential Octopus 12 functionalities effortlessly from a browser. It allows real-time collaboration across team members and ensures they stay connected and productive anywhere. Among its latest innovations are improved rundown management, seamless speech-to-text integration, a ChatGPTbased AI assistant, streamlined workflows with automation systems, and integration capabilities with resource management systems.

The Client is also designed to improve efficiency with multi-user editing, encouraging smooth collaboration and creativity among the newsroom team. The launch means that Octopus 12 gets the green light for remote news production by providing web-based, on-the-go access; integrations with 70+ technologies; cross-platform compatibility and the flexibility of on-prem or cloud deployment. z www.octopus-news.com twitter.com/tvtechnology | www.tvtech.com | November 2023

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equipment guide | test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors

Kolrom Multimedia Hits the Right Note With Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G telethons and lectures, as well as for virtual production, music videos and VFX work.

USER REPORT

By CJ Kramer President Kolrom Multimedia, Inc.

SEAMLESS SIGNAL MONITORING

BALTIMORE—Delivering multimedia solutions since 1999, Kolrom Multimedia has created hundreds of films and presentations for a myriad of organizations and businesses. With three green screen studio locations across Maryland and New Jersey, including a full wraparound 24x18-foot deep cyclorama wall, each of our projects receives premium service from experienced designers, filmmakers, editors, illustrators, and animators.

Providing pre- through post-production services for films, documentaries, educational videos, commercials and more, our green screen studios host multicamera virtual events and live streams, including talk shows,

With such a diverse portfolio of services, accuracy is key, and we’ve finetuned our workflow, right down to signal management and monitoring, to create a seamless capture to delivery experience for our customers.

Signal monitoring is also paramount, even though it may seem like a simple part of the overall workflow.

Our green screen studios are equipped with Blackmagic Studio Camera 4K Pros and Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4Ks, which are fed into Ultimatte 12 HD and Ultimatte 12 HD Mini real-time compositing processors.

From there, the feeds are sent into our ATEM Mini and ATEM SDI live production switchers, which include the ATEM Mini, ATEM Mini Pro, ATEM Mini Extreme ISO and ATEM SDI Extreme ISO models, and then into the Black-

CJ Kramer relies on the Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12 for Kolrom Multimedia’s pre- and postproduction work.

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magic Audio Monitor 12G. The final step for the workflow is our HyperDeck Studio HD Mini and HyperDeck Studio 4K Pro recorders, which the Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G feeds into.

With presentations, talk shows, and lectures as highly sought after services from us, the spoken word is vital to those deliverables, and as such, audio, and by extension, audio monitoring, are key. When looking for a simple, clean way to monitor audio without having to rely on our control room’s television’s speakers, we turned to the Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G. We selected it because we needed an accurate audio and visual representation of the levels, which the Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G delivers with its two bright audio level meters on the front panel. We even have the flexibility to select between VU or PPM or Loudness scales with a choice of EBU or BBC meters, from -45 to +3 decibels, -12 to +12, or 0 to 7, depending on the scale.

MATCHING AUDIO TO VIDEO Additionally, on the video side, the built-in LCD lets us monitor the video source, which lets us know that the audio matches our incoming video feed, and includes source information, video format and the audio channels being monitored. If needed, the HDMI 2.0 output also allows us to monitor on UHD displays.

We also appreciate the Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G’s compact design, which fits perfectly in our rack and our workflow, freeing up precious desktop space while seamlessly monitoring audio. It’s simple with its at-a-glance level monitoring—while still being powerful enough, with its dual subwoofers, extra wide range speakers, and class D amplifier—to impress clients hanging out in the control room.

Additionally, the majority of our customers are non-profits, so they need to promote their organizations and marketing and fundraising programs as cost effectively as possible. As such, we strive to implement professional, yet affordable gear in order to provide top-notch services but at a cost that’s reasonable for our customers. Blackmagic Design has allowed us to do just that across its product lines, from something as simple as audio monitoring to creating more complex virtual environments. l CJ Kramer is president of Kolrom Multimedia, Inc. He can be reached at Kolrom Multimedia at 410-602-8243 or info@kolrom.com. For more information visit https://www.kolrom.com/.

For additional information, contact Blackmagic Design at 408-954-0500 or visit www.blackmagicdesign.com.

equipment guide | test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors buyers briefs Telestream PRISM

Witbe Witbox+

Developed to address production and post-production environments, Telestream’s PRISM family of solutions for monitoring SDI, IP, and hybrid media applications is designed for master control rooms, production studios, trucks, and signal contribution/distribution centers. PRISM supports video formats from SD to 8K, for high-end productions that require 12-bit RGB 4:4:4 and 4K/UHD content. The complete PRISM family of waveform monitors provides integrated touchscreen or external displays and a variety of form factors to suit all applications.

With test, conformance, and diagnostics of UHD, HDR, and WCG media content, these software-defined monitoring and measurement applications are field-upgradeable to meet the challenges of today’s production requirements. The latest addition to the PRISM family, PRISM MPP, is a multiformat rasterizer that offers a short depth and exceedingly quiet operation, ideal for space-constrained environments such as color or edit suites. www.telestream.net

Witbe’s Witbox+ is offers automated testing and monitoring of video services on multiple devices, including OTT boxes, smart TVs, mobile platforms, and more. Ultra-scalable in a compact form factor, users simply plug any physical device into the unit to remotely test and monitor any video service running on it. Witbox⁺ can test and monitor up to four 4K devices simultaneously, with support for Bluetooth and RF4CE control.

TAG Video Systems Content Matching

Triveni Digital ATSC 3.0 Translator

TAG’s Content Matching technology is designed to ensure that content is delivered in real time to its intended destination without errors or discrepancies.

It also identifies potential issues and confirms signal integrity for increased broadcaster confidence and a high-quality viewer experience.

Content Matching creates a unique fingerprint for video streams to match them across the entire media distribution path. It can accurately identify and correlate audio and video uniqueness regardless of resolution, bitrate, or framerate, thus enabling a match between two or more points in the workflow. This new technology notifies when the first content inconsistency occurs allowing users to get to the root cause of problems faster and troubleshoot more efficiently. Workflow complexity is dramatically reduced, and less eyes-on-glass are required to deliver quality content. www.tagvs.com

Interra Systems Orion Content Monitoring Suite Interra Systems’ ORION content monitoring suite is designed to help companies deliver engaging media experiences. At the heart of this is the ORION platform for 24x7 confidence monitoring of linear/IP video, providing real-time monitoring of IP-based infrastructures, looking at all aspects of video streams, such as QoS, QoE, ad-insertion verification, reporting, and troubleshooting.

For live services and VOD assets, ORION-OTT brings these capabilities to the multiscreen environment. With ORION-OTT, streaming providers can verify QoS and QoE for ABR videos, including checking for inconsistencies related to ABR package compliance, manifest and playlist syntax, download errors, and content quality. www.interrasystems.com

With Witbe’s Remote Eye Controller (REC) software application, network operation center teams and manual testers can remotely access and control every device plugged into the Witbox+ from anywhere in the world, removing the need for engineers to travel thousands of miles to test specific devices in the field. REC aggregates all connected devices on the same screen in a mosaic, and the number of devices supported is unlimited. www.witbe.net

Triveni Digital’s new ATSC 3.0 Translator reduces the cost of NextGen TV, aka ATSC 3.0 delivery.

Leveraging the solution, broadcasters can efficiently repeat or translate their existing ATSC 3.0 signal to other areas without the need for an entire broadcast chain. The ATSC 3.0 Translator also validates ATSC 3.0 signals in real time down to the frame structure, offering support for multiple physical layer pipes.

Ideal for both public, state-wide networks and private, cloud-based environments, the solution not only reduces the time to market for NextGen TV services, but it also helps minimize costs, equipment, and power usage. www.trivenidigital.com

PHABRIX QxP Phabrix bills QxP is the world’s first, portable 12G-SDI, 25G ST 2110 combined waveform monitor, generator and analyzer, with mains and external DC power and a choice of V-mount or Goldmount external camera battery plate. Inheriting all of the tools of the QxL rasterizer, its comprehensive feature set supports HD/3G/6G/12G-SDI, 10G/25G IP interfaces, and HD/UHD, IP SMPTE 2022-6, SMPTE 211010/20/30/31/40 (ST 2110-20 RGB payloads up to 21Gbps) with ST 2022-7, PCAP, Dolby E Decode and AMWA NMOS, future proofing customer investments, offering full operational flexibility. www.phabrix.com twitter.com/tvtechnology | www.tvtech.com | November 2023

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equipment guide | test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors buyers briefs Cobalt Digital UltraBlue IP-MV Multiviewer

Sony BVM-HX3110

Cobalt Digital has expanded its line of multiviewers with the addition of the UltraBlue IP-MV series of IP multiviewers, which can grow with the customer’s needs. UltraBlue IP-MV is offered as both a software package and a cloud instance with a WebRTC output.

These software-based multiviewers can handle a variety of compressed and uncompressed IP inputs and an arbitrary number of outputs (including individual rotation to portrait), with very flexible audio routing, and an intuitive web interface. UltraBlue also offers support for a comprehensive set of protocols (UDP, RTP, RTSP, RTMP, RIST, SRT). www.cobaltdigital.com

Mediaproxy LogServer The core LogServer platform can be easily virtualized and provides seamless integration with cloud environments such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Flexible software interfaces allow LogServer to integrate with existing broadcast workflows and to quickly customize MediaProxy’s solutions when your requirements change.

With support for the latest formats and standards including 4K, HEVC, ST 2022-6, ST 2110, HLS, MPEG-DASH, ATSC 3.0, DVB-2, Mediaproxy consolidates analysis of on-air incidents, content search and ad verification via easy-to-use web browser and mobile interfaces. Compliant with current and IP streaming regulations, Mediaproxy supports all current industry standards for closed captioning, DVB Subtitling, SCTE-35, SCTE-104 and Loudness. www.mediaproxy.com

SmallHD CINE Series For HD/UHD production video monitoring, SmallHD offers three models in the daylight-bright CINE Series, from 13-24-inches designed for indoor and outdoors, with maximum brightness to 1500 nits.

The newest model in the series, CINE 18 offers SmallHD’s rugged unibody chassis built around a 3840x2160 10-bit LCD display with 1100 nits luminance.

It can display 100% of the Rec. 709 color space on up to five independent 4K inputs (with 4 outputs). All include SmallHD’s Page OS 5 operating system offering camera control, camera Log conversion, Multi-view, focus and exposure tools (including Fstop-based EL Zone), CalMan integrated calibration, and more. www.smallhd.com

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Sony’s new BVM-HX3110 is a 30.5-inch 4K HDR professional monitor designed for color grading, live production and post-production. It features a dual layer LCD panel supporting a higher peak luminance of up to 4000cd/m² and proprietary signal processing for greater detail in bright areas while maintaining contrast and rich blacks.

Along with accurate color reproduction, picture consistency and precision imaging, the BVM-HX3110 adds waveform monitor/vectorscope, false color, focus assist, closed captioning, 3D LUT processing and multi-source viewing modes. In addition to 12G SDI and HDMI, the BVM-HX3110 offers standard ST-2110 IP. JPEG-XS decoder and SNMP support is optional. www.pro.sony/ue_US

Imagine Communications Selenio Network Processor - SNP-MV The SNP-MV production multiviewer is one of the many personalities available in Imagine’s widely deployed Selenio Network Processor (SNP). Supporting up to 36 PiPs across up to eight UHD canvases―with a full HDR processing pipeline behind every PIP―SNP-MV can consolidate SDR and HDR content into a sharp-looking UHD canvas in HDR, while simultaneously producing an SDR HD version of that same canvas.

A single SNP unit can mix-and-match up to four of the available personalities, including dual-UHD multiviewer, HD/UHD frame sync, HD/ UHD up/down conversion, JPEG XS encoder/decoder, and HD/UHD Master Control Lite (MCL). www.imaginecommunications.com

Atomos Shogun Ultra Phabrix bills QxP is the world’s first, portable 12G-SDI, 25G ST 2110 combined waveform monitor, generator and analyzer, with mains and external DC power and a choice of V-mount or Goldmount external camera battery plate.

Inheriting all of the tools of the QxL rasterizer, its comprehensive feature set supports HD/3G/6G/12G-SDI, 10G/25G IP interfaces, and HD/UHD, IP SMPTE 2022-6, SMPTE 2110-10/20/30/31/40 (ST 2110-20 RGB payloads up to 21Gbps) with ST 2022-7, PCAP, Dolby E Decode and AMWA NMOS, future proofing customer investments, offering full operational flexibility. https://os11.atomos.com

equipment guide | test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors buyers briefs Avateq ActiveCore ATSC 3.0 STLTP Analyzer

Video Clarity ClearView Analyzer

AVQ1040 STLTP Analyzer is a powerful solution for ATSC 3.0 STLTP (ATSC A/342) Scheduler/Studio to Transmitter Link troubleshooting, analysis, monitoring and verification. AVQ1040 is available as a standalone software package, an embedded platform or as an option to Avateq’s AVQ1022(gen. 2) RF Signal Analyzer. AVQ1040 allows verification of delivery protocols for ALP Transport at every level, including content scheduling and Physical Layer signaling.

The ClearView quality analyzer serves uncompressed audio/video output to an encoder, simultaneously captures the output via IP stream or video decoder, and aligns the resulting uncompressed sequences for testing. It uses highly accurate metrics to score audio and video quality, or measure the absolute difference between what was sent and what was received and then plays the two sequences in many different comparative views onto a video display at full resolution.

The Analyzer also provides statistics of RF bandwidth and channel capacity utilization on per service basis that makes the Analyzer an indispensable tool for emerging applications, including spectrum share and datacasting that requires metering of the RF resource usage. https://avateq.com

Hitomi MatchBox Latency Hitomi Broadcast’s MatchBox Latency accurately measures broadcast delays, offering real-time readings with millisecond precision. Delays in live broadcasts, caused by various factors like graphics generation or equipment settings, can disrupt the viewer experience—for example, a delay in showcasing a golfer’s shot can confuse viewers if the graphics show the ball’s trajectory too early.

Unchecked latency can lead to awkward gaps in live interviews, diminishing audience engagement. MatchBox simplifies the often tedious task of measuring latency, using a two-part solution involving a timed test pattern and a decoding analyzer. With its added functionality and global deployments, MatchBox provides broadcasters a quick, precise tool to ensure a “truly live” broadcast experience. https://hitomi.tv

Cinegy Cinegy Multiviewer Cinegy Multiviewer offers a scalable solution for monitoring and analyzing video streams from various sources, including satellites, cameras, and playout devices. It displays these signals and, upon detecting any issues, raises alerts. Designed for both on-premise and cloud environments, it supports SDI, NDI, and IP. The Multiviewer leverages GPU acceleration for live video analysis, providing users with real-time monitoring, notifications, and a comprehensive analysis engine powered by services and agents.

Cinegy Multiviewer is ideal for local and remote operations and can be massively scaled from just a few to hundreds of channels while remaining fully supported in a cloud-based or hosted service environment. www.cinegy.com

Applying the ClearView full reference test systems with new 4K-capable ST2110 network interfaces allows the user to perform a well-known technique for testing the network path or encoder processing quality whether it be JPEG XS, HEVC, AV1, or any codec. https://videoclarity.com

Leader Electronics LT4670 Designed for use in film and television studios, mobile production vehicles and post production houses, Leader’s LT4670 is a 1U full-rack-width synchronous signal generator designed to ease the migration from SDI to IP. The LT4670 comes with a wide range of features augmented by options which can be added when required, giving customers the freedom to invest in advanced tools as and when they need them.

Connectivity capabilities provided as standard include six independent analog synchronous signal outputs, digital audio outputs, word-clock outputs and LTC in/out. These can be supplemented by options such as GNSS synchronization, PTP synchronization, 4K quad-link, 3G-SDI, HD-SDI and SD-SDI outputs in any combination, allowing optimal management of synchronous systems. www.leader.co.jp/en

TV Logic LUM-181G and the LUM-242G The LUM-181G is a 18.5-inch 4K input-ready monitor that offers 1920x1080 8 bit IPS LCD, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 500 cd/m2, 12-bit processing, 2x12G-SDI, 2x6GSDI, 4x3G-SDI in/out. 1x HDMI 2.0 (4K 60p) input. Built-in 3D LUTs for Rec. 709, DCI-P3, Rec. 2020 emulation., HDR Emulation with HDR EOTFs of PQ, HLG and SLog3, Waveform/VectorScope.

The LUM-242G 24-inch DCI-UHD 4K Monitor offers 3840x2160 10 bit IPS LCD, 1200:1 contrast ratio, 98% DCI Color Space, 500 cd/m2, 12-bit processing, 2x12G-SDI, 2x6G-SDI, 4x3G-SDI in/out. 1x HDMI 2.0 (4K 60p) input. Built-in 3D LUTs for Rec. 709, DCI-P3, Rec. 2020 emulation., HDR Emulation with HDR EOTFs of PQ, HLG and SLog3, Waveform/VectorScope. Both include a table stand. www.tvlogicusa.com twitter.com/tvtechnology | www.tvtech.com | November 2023

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equipment guide | test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors

Vortechs Creates Movie Magic With JVC Monitors USER REPORT

By Steven S. Friedman CTO Vortechs, Inc.

LOS ANGELES—As a Los Angeles-based post-production rental and support company, Vortechs provides equipment and ADR services, along with access to editing suites, screening rooms and soundstages, among other offerings.

We manage close to 100 suites between Silverlake and Santa Monica, Calif., and support productions in Atlanta, New York and London.

The core of our business is renting editing gear and rooms, but we have also more recently started offering remote production systems for teams working off-site. Another aspect of our business is sourcing other types of production equipment to clients, for which we’ll specify, set up and support the gear.

JVC’s DT-N24F ProHD Broadcast Studio LCD Monitor or the legacy DT-V24G1Z Verité Series Studio Monitor can be found in nearly every Vortechs editing bay.

ON THE ROAD When required, we also travel on-site to clients’ shoots to help with the productions. This includes several recent major motion pictures, like Chris Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” which was filmed in New Mexico; the movie adaptation of “Wicked,” which was shot and edited in London; and “Gladiator II,” filmed in Malta and Morocco. Other recent projects include TV series like FX Networks’ “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” HBO’s “Righteous Gemstones,” Apple TV+’s “Physical” and Amazon Prime’s “Peripheral;” as well as films such as “My Spy 2,” “Strays,” “A Man Called Otto,” “Champions,” “Amsterdam” and Sony Pictures’ “65.”

To support these high-profile projects, it is imperative that we use equally matched equipment, such as JVC broadcast monitors, which have been our go-to solution from the very beginning. There are many LCD monitor brands to choose from, but JVC is the leader among all editing rental houses throughout Los Angeles. I think this is because JVC hits a lot of marks―not only brand recognition, but also its products’ standout features combined with an unmatched price point.

Whether it’s the current DT-N24F ProHD Broadcast Studio LCD Monitor or the legacy

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DT-V24G1Z Verité Series Studio Monitor, JVC can be found in nearly every Vortechs editing bay. We also deploy the brand’s DLA-RS4500K Projector in our screening rooms for VFXheavy projects.

THE RIGHT SPECS The most important factor in our choice of JVC was the support for SDI, which provides us with the I/O necessary to set up our editing bays. The DT-N24F supports up to 3G-SDI (SMPTE 425M), including Level-A and Level-B, which are capable of transferring 1080p uncompressed digital video data at a max rate of 60fps at 3Gbps. 2K-SDI (2048x1080p) is also supported to downsample to full HD display.

Additionally, the DT-N24F is compatible with ITU-709 standard color for HDTV, so the contrast and color reproduction is very good right out of the box, and it is always reliable.

The JVC monitors also have built-in waveform, vector scope and histogram, along with a 16-channel audio level meter with alerts and output selections, so you can just hit a button and quickly pull up all the necessary

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information.

As a rental company, it’s important for us to provide equipment that is straightforward and easy for our customers to use. I would say 95% of our clients expect us to supply gear that they can just simply turn on/off and switch between inputs without having to know the intricacies of the product. The JVC monitors definitely deliver on these needs.

When you consider all that you get for the price, the brand has a lot of selling points for us and our clients. l Steven S. Friedman is CTO of Vortechs, Inc. Founded nearly 25 years ago as Digital Vortechs, the company started as an Avid rental and support company and has grown to be a global leader in post-production solution services.

A graduate of USC, Steven first got his start with Vortechs in 2010 as an engineer, later moving up the ranks to senior engineer and most recently to CTO. Prior to that, he worked with other boutique post-production companies. He can be reached at tech@cutwithus.com.

For more information visit http://pro.jvc.

equipment guide | test equipment & signal monitoring/video monitors buyers briefs Ikegami ULE-315U

Digital Alert Systems v5.2 Software for DASDEC Digital Alert Systems has released v5.2 software for compatible DASDEC and One-Net emergency messaging devices. This version includes the latest FCC compliance features, which broadcasters must implement by December 2023. Also, the system has added more security features by fully encrypting data files and adding whitelisting to restrict access to the device.

This update is free for anyone enrolled in the company’s Software Assurance Plan, has purchased a new DASDEC unit, or who has participated in the company’s UP•TRADE program since October 2022. www.digitalalertsystems.com

Wohler iVAM1SUM8 (8 channel) & iVAM1-SUM16 (16 channel) 1U AV Monitors Wohler’s new iVAM1-SUM8 (8 channel) and iVAM1-SUM16 (16 channel) 1U AV monitors have have been designed for use in QC, fast-paced OB and live-to-air production environments and are IP-ready AV monitors/ mixers available with either 8 or 16 channels which may be configured to operate in either single channel or pair mode. With a wide 7-inch touchscreen augmented with hardware controls, standard features include dual 3G-SDI inputs, an HDMI output, a pair of Analog inputs and outputs and HDR detection.

Users may upgrade/license other signal formats and processing options, as and when needed, either initially or after purchase. Additional signal formats include AES3, MADI, Dante, Ravenna, SMPTE-2110 and SMPTE-2022-7. www.wohler.com

Ikegami’s new ULE-351U is a 31.5-inch broadcast-grade Full-HDTV model with SD/HD/3G-SDI as well as HDMI, PC (VGA) and dual composite video (NTSC/PAL) inputs. Housed in a robust metal frame, it has a wide viewing angle (178 degrees horizontal and vertical), 450 cd/square-meter brightness, 1400:1 contrast ratio and 16.7 million color spectrum.

Operating features include an LED backlight, integral 3D comb filter decoder, noise reduction, interlaced-to-progressive format conversion, automatic pixel shift and auto source sequencing. Connectivity capabilities include dual audio inputs, USB port for firmware updates, and standard EIC AC input with integrated power supply. Stereo loudspeakers are built in. www.ikegami.com

SuiteLife Systems Axess Axess is a network-based management application designed to offer users flexibility, capacity and responsiveness.

Axess is deployed worldwide as a mission-critical management tool by leading broadcasters, content originators, telco networks, building management teams and infrastructure facilities operators.

With its ability to proactively monitor and manage faults and failures, Axess can eliminate human error from any monitoring, notification and fault recovery equation. Axess also provides comprehensive logging and reporting of all data and operational criteria whether during normal operations or in fault or failure conditions. It offers easy expandability, making expansion and growth trouble free. The current version of Axess will run on Windows 8.1 Pro, Windows 7 Pro, Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows Server 2008 R2 32/64bit. www.suitelifesystems.com

products & services marketplace

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people on the move For possible inclusion, send information to tvtechnology@futurenet.com with People News in the subject line.

RICK CORDELLA

DR.JOHANNES M.BAUER

KRISTIE GONZALES

JASON HALL

NBC Sports

Federal Communications Commission

Tegna

Gray Television

Tegna has named Kristie Gonzales president/GM at WXIA, Tegna’s NBC affiliate in Atlanta, and WATL. She will continue as VP, media operations for Tegna.

At WXIA/WATL, Gonzales will oversee the stations’ operations across all platforms, as well as community outreach efforts and driving results for advertisers.

Since 2016, Gonzales has been president and GM at KVUE, Tegna’s ABC affiliate and a top station in Central Texas.

Jason Hall has been promoted to VP of Spanish Media Sales at the GrayTV Telemundo Station Group.

Previously he was senior director of Spanish Media Sales, guiding advertising sales growth for GrayTV Telemundo Station Group, which icludes 42 Telemundo affiliate markets, including eight markets in Texas and the flagship market in Atlanta. Hall has more than 20 years of Hispanic media experience managing sales organizations at Univision and Estrella Media.

NBCUniversal has promoted Rick Cordella to president, NBC Sports. He will lead NBC Sports’ collection of brands and platforms, which includes NBC Sports, NBC Olympics, Golf Channel, NBC Sports Digital and two transactional sports businesses, GolfNow and SportsEngine. Cordella will work with NBC Local on the company’s Regional Sports Network strategy and continue to oversee Sports on Peacock.

TERENCE CHAN

Dr. Johannes M. Bauer has been appointed chief economist for the FCC. A respected academic researcher and practitioner, Bauer is the director of the James H. and Mary B. Quello Center at Michigan State University. His research focuses on advanced communications technologies (5G, IoT and AI).

He has also worked in such areas as broadband access, deployment and digital equity. He will serve a one-year term.

MICHAELHUELSKEMPER ARRI

MIGUEL FERNANDEZ

DOUG WIEDER

Clear-Com

CBS Television Stations

Tegna

Clear-Com has appointed Terence Chan its newest product manager, where he will oversee the company’s matrix intercom systems, which includes the Eclipse HX Digital Matrix. Chan brings more than 15 years of experience working in product management for high-tech industries with clients that included Google, Philips and other FinTech ventures. He has a special interest in sustainable tech, and in the variety of makets the company supports.

Michael Huelskemper has joined ARRI as vice president of product management in the company’s lighting business unit. He is responsible for development, improving and broadening the product portfolio of the division.

Huelskemper has more than 15 years of experience in the development and product management of LED luminaires and luminaire components around the world. Most recently, he was head of regional product management for EMEA at TE Connectivity.

Miguel Fernandez has been named VP/news director at CBS News and Television Stations’ local businesses in Miami, including WFOR-TV (CBS 4), WBFS-TV (Ind., Channel 33), the CBS News Miami streaming channel and CBSNewsMiami.com. He has spent his entire 29-year career in South Florida. He has served as the assistant news director at WLTV-DT, the Univision flagship station in Miami, since January 2019. Prior to that, he spent 22 years with CBS Miami.

Tegna has named Doug Wieder president and GM at KARE, Tegna’s NBC affiliate in Minneapolis. He will oversee the station’s operations across all platforms, Wieder joins KARE from Tegna station WVEC, the ABC affiliate in Norfolk, Va., where he has been president and GM since 2019.

Prior to becoming GM and since 2012, Wieder was executive news director at WVEC. He joined the station in 2003 as a senior producer for evening newscasts.

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November 2023 | www.tvtech.com |

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