Industry Insights: Previewing 2020 and its broadcast trends

What trends are you seeing in the year ahead?

“Mobile journalism will accelerate in 2020, which means more people relying on devices like tablets and phones for field production. With 5G enabling higher bitrate content delivery and a better overall experience, AR and VR will be easier to deliver. And as more devices become available, consumer adoption of AR and VR will grow. For example, Apple is launching its own head-mounted display that’s very different to what’s been available so far. We’ll also see more cloud-based workflows, whether that’s certain segments of the workflow or a way to aggregate multiple stations’ content in a centralized location and sharing or routing that content more easily using both the cloud and IP delivery mechanisms,” Thompson said.

“We’re seeing ongoing migration to IP by media organizations, as well as a continued shift toward 4K and HDR. In terms of solutions deployment, we expect to see further investment in studio video walls, virtual sets and augmented reality, and touch-screen and illustrated replay technologies. To simplify operations or ease further growth, we also see more organizations adopting production-in-a-box solutions for OTT content creation and publishing,” Cohen told us.

Industry Insights: Augmented reality adoption by broadcasters

“In our market we continue to see continued 4K and 8K (and higher) adoption,” McKenna said.

“The demand for content localization is increasing rapidly, especially as the online services are launched in more countries. These supply chains are poorly optimized, utilize large amounts of human capital and are very time consuming. This is one of the use cases we have moved to the cloud via IMF component based video and expect to be one of our largest growth areas,” said Sloman.

“Multi-site communications, continued expansion of investment in wireless communications, simplification of workflows for right-sizing complexity to user needs in further stratification of live production in some new, sometimes less formal production tiers,” said Bob Boster, president of Clear-Com.

“As we head into 2020, we’re seeing increasing interest in non-volatile memory express (NVMe) storage. NVMe is better equipped to handle the demands of higher resolution content combined with higher frame rates, more bits per pixel and more cameras per project. It’s on track to exceed traditional solid state drive (SSD) storage capabilities much faster than predicted. With ultra-fast read and writes and the ability to support a huge amount of parallel processing, NVMe is orders of magnitude faster than traditional SSD and HHD storage,” Bassier asserted.

“As discussed above, we see continued embrace of cloud technology and more hybrid cloud/multi cloud environments. We also see a move towards more off-the-shelf multi-tenant SaaS solutions as opposed to large, custom projects, and a move to more loosely coupled event-driven integrations, which will help media companies remain agile,” Finegold said.

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“The need to become more extensible and integrate into customer, supplier, and partner workflows will become necessary to achieve business strategies and goals. As such, more companies will rely upon APIs and ‘low code’ workflow solutions to achieve these integrations without the heavy expense of application development. One example only possible through these kinds of integrations is with advertisers looking to determine where to place their dollar spend and relying upon analytics post-spend from a number of places to look at the results,” Loose maintained.

“Consolidation of systems is a big trend that we are seeing from our customer base. Either by moving to products that provide the combined features and functionality of legacy siloed offerings, or through tightly integrated offerings from multiple vendors, broadcasters are mandating that they be able to access their deployments from a unified interface and not be forced to shift from disparate system to disparate system,” said Wastcoat.

“Exciting new ways organizations are using video walls. I would say this goes beyond news (e.g. sports, all broadcast really…) but for news, it’s been a transformative experience and an evolution of technology that has a direct impact to the consumer. Video walls increase interactivity, enhances the visual experience, and offers new innovative ways to expand the editorial platform, all very exciting. The flexibility from a workflow and studio perspective to quickly adapt/shift to new environments has been made possible by video walls and other technical solutions,” said Kathy Skinski, general manager for broadcast & media at Planar.

Participants

Ray Thompson – Avid
Miguel Churruca – Brainstorm
Olivier Cohen – ChyronHego
Bob Boster – Clear-Com
Benoit Quirynen – EVS
Jim McKenna – Facilis
Kathy Skinski – Planar
Aaron Sloman – Ownzones
Eric Bassier – Quantum
Jon Finegold – Signiant
Greg Loose – Veritone
John Wastcoat – Zixi