This year, Broadcast Engineering offered unprecedented coverage of the NAB Show:
NAB Update e-newsletter: We send the latest announcements from the NAB and companies to your inbox each week for 10 weeks leading up to the show and for five weeks after the show.
Broadcast Engineering TV: We captured all the action. Watch product demos, key speeches and more.
BE@NAB blog: We gave you our personal take on events and new product announcements, including more than 20 audio interviews.
Broadcast Engineering Show Portal Direct from NAB: The place to find all things NAB, pulling content from every corner of our Web site, including e-newsletters, blogs, Broadcast Engineering TV, The Briefing Room and more.
Pick Hits: Our independent judges scoured the show floor the best and brightest of the new offerings at the show and selected 40 winners.
The Briefing Room: Get the company’s official press release on new products that they released during NAB season.
IPTV Pavilion: Here exhibitors showcased their latest products and services centered on content distribution and delivery. The IPTV Pavilion and it’s Web portal and e-newsletter focused on the distribution and delivery of IPTV services, uniting content and new technology to provide innovative solutions to telecom organizations.
And there’s more to come. It isn’t yet May, and I’m already looking forward to our June issue of the magazine. In it we’ll have our NAB wrap-up — filled to the brim with in depth reviews of the latest technology trends and new products announced at the show, including, of course, details on the Pick Hit winners.
My blogging photog friends who Broadcast Engineering features on the BE-Roll were out in full force on the NAB show floor taking video. Here are a two clips that they posted to b-roll.net, an onling photog group: more
My last stop at NAB was at the VCI booth (SU727). There I met up with Jamie Meyer, the division manager for automation systems at VCI. I’d met with him briefly last year, but this was my first time to sit down with him and talk. What he’s excited about is that KEYE-TV, which uses VCI’s autoXe MC automation system, was just announced as the winner in the Station Automation category in the Broadcast Engineering Excellence Awards.
Jamie says that what makes the system so strong is that the database is at the foundation. With digital content, the metadata surrounding content is becoming more important, he says, with the database as the foundation on which the applications reside. more
This morning I met up with OCTOPUS CEO Peter Stokuc to talk about his company’s updated OCTOPUS6 newsroom computer system. Peter says that for the new OCTOPUS system the core functions have been revamped to make operation quicker and more intuitive. Even with all these changes, OCTOPUS6 is still backwards compatible. The key traits of OCTOPUS, according to Peter, are that its platform independent and its solid MOS protocol implementation.
I ended yesterday in the Fujitsu booth (SU10928), where I met with Dan Dalton, Fujitsu’s director of new product development. The big thing going on at Fujitsu is it’s new IP-9500 MPEG-4 AVC low latency encoder for HD satellite newsgathering.
He showed me a demo of how a user could put HD in an SD feed. There’s an option for low latency, encoding and decoding video content at less than 300ms. And it can handle HD video from as low as 4Mb/s and as high 27Mb/s.
Listen to an audio clip of Dan talking about the Fujitsu IP-9500.
IneoQuest’s mission, according to Calvin Harrison, IneoQuest’s vice president of marketing and business development, is to create products for users that help them improve their ROI, deploy services quickly and decrease operating expenses. To that end, the company has created modules that monitor a signal and, when a problem occurs, pinpoint exactly where things went wrong. One of these products is the new Cricket 8-VSB, which offers confidence monitoring of 8-VSB broadcast signals. It provides verification and troubleshooting of studio-to-transmitter link and RF coverage area. Listen to what Calvin Harrison has to say about the Cricket 8-VSB.
At the TANDBERG booth (SU4210), I met with Lisa Hobbs, vice president of business development for satellite and broadcast. The company is showing two new integrated receiver decoders optimized for high-volume video distribution applications.
The RX8310 distribution receiver uses DVB-S2 modulation and MPEG-4 AVC compression. And it has the option to decrypt multipe services, allowing decryption of a complete multiplex of channels with a single unit. The system allows for single service decoding of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 4:2:0 SD video and HD service downconversion.
The RX8320 ATSC broadcast receiver provides ASI and 8-VSB inputs for the reception of broadcast services over terrestrial or fiber links with automatic redundancy switchover between inputs. For more on the RX8320 ATSC broadcast receiver, watch a demo on Broadcast Engineering TV.
SeaChange is looking to change the face of video storage. The company is offering a flash-based library system. This system is adapted to one already in use for VOD and focused on play-to-air servers. Flash-based systems are much less prone to failure than disk-based systems, and Chris Nicholson and Sherry Zhu say that the MediaCluster architecture leverages data so you don’t tax one drive. Listen to Sherry Zhu, director of storage based projects for SeaChange, talk about the FML200.
In booth SU5408, Crispin is introducing it’s new and free asset management system for Omneon video servers. The system allows users to browse the contents of the server for clips and view key statistics of the server. It also allows you to search, sort, rename, delete and copy clips from one folder to another.
In giving away licenses to MediaNav for free, the company is hoping to introduce new people to Crispin’s range of other products. Listen to Rodney Mood, Crispin’s chief operation officer, talk about MediaNav.
The editors and writers of Broadcast Engineering post live from the NAB Show in Las Vegas as the news happens. Check back throughout the day for the latest in industry news, reports from press conferences and product introductions.
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