IBC Show – Day 2

Alain Andreoli (President / CEO at Grass Valley) might have missed the irony when he announced at the conference that he was very optimistic about the growth of the broadcast industry and suggested that people should switch off their TVs more to escape from the gloomy news.  But surely if less people watch TV… oh never mind.

S4M’s MAM product has partnered with Harmonic and jointly developed a new h.264 proxy format aimed at the news market, which supports conform editing based on a growing file.  They seem to be aggressively going after Dalet’s market with plans to focus on the US.

Snell’s ScreenToo application is being demonstrated showing how Morpheus automation can be used to drive broadcast simultaneously to an iPad.  To monetize this capability, time-based (strata) metadata is used to trigger events on the iPad to synch with events in the programme – e.g. enabling targeted advertising or viewer polls.

iPad based demos of broadcast workflow aplenty – mostly slideware today, but it points to where users are expecting UI experiences to go.  Wisely vendors no longer push the fact that their user interface resembles Microsoft Outlook, which will make training users so much easier.

The Super Hi-Vision demonstration at NHK of the shuttle launch was amazing – 8k, 7680×4320, 22.2 multichannel sound.  Nice!