Quality Control
Automation
42
BY Shawn Carnahan
How to Maximize Your Current Broadcast Infrastructure and Simplify QC in a Multi-platform World
Content creators are constantly exploring new ways in which automation can improve efficiency.
Like most responsible vendors, we spend a lot of time talking to our customers and prospects about industry pain points, and how to creatively solve challenges that eat into profits on a daily basis. One common area of concern is how to maximize use of the current broadcast infrastructure and yet maintain quality in the run up to standards like H.264 and H.265. And since quality is paramount in any broadcaster's successful operation, how do you successfully manage QC in a file-based multi-platform, multi-version world?
Maximizing Current Broadcast infrastructure
When discussing challenges for broadcasters, it’s temping to talk about H.264 and H.265 as the panacea, but for many, the real and immediate technical challenge is how to get more out of the current MPEG2 infrastructure. With that in mind, at Telestream we're applying many of the techniques that have been developed for
H.264/265 and implementing them in MPEG2 because it still represents the vast majority of today's broadcast content.
We’ve heard from organizations trying to fit "just one more program" through a 36Mbit transponder. Suddenly, they find themselves having to deal with HD at 9Mbits in spite of the fact that MPEG2 was never conceived or designed to handle that. With data rates like these, quality really gets pushed to its limits. So for us as a manufacturer, the challenge is to develop solutions that automate processes while still giving our customers a level of confidence that the quality will remain acceptable.
We realize that broadcasters need to generate as much revenue as they can out of their current infrastructure, so if they can go from say three 12Mbit streams per transponder to four, that’s a 25% increase in transponder throughput and commercial revenue. (Continued Next page)
Broadcast Beat Magazine / Sep-Dec, 2014