With the growing interest in stereoscopic 3-D television, Grass Valley was quick to emphasize its expertise in video compression and content processing technologies at this year’s NAB. The company demonstrated products targeted at transport applications for both backhaul (contribution links) and delivery to the home.

(See Broadcast Engineering TV’s coverage of Grass Valley here.)

Speaking with Scott Murphy, he emphasized “[that] sports will be the likely driver for stereoscopic 3-D television.” These high-end applications create the need for high reliability and quality contribution links from the remote site back to the studio. more

Lori Hazen, Gepco marketing manager, gave me a brief run through of the company’s newest fiber-optic products. While fiber isn’t new to Gepco, these new solutions greatly complement the company’s line of optical cable products.

New additions to Gepco’s hybrid fiber distribution systems include HMD hybrid fiber modular distribution racks, HMS hybrid fiber fusion splice racks, HDR1 high-density distribution racks, HSB fusion splice boxes, HDB SMPTE field and studio boxes, HMP8-Bxx SMPTE 304M breakout racks, and HMP8 modular hybrid fiber and Triax panels. The focus of these introductions is to simplify and improve the cable installation process with a modular and expandable design configuration.

To round out the fiber platform, Gepco is also showing other fiber products including the Neutrik OpticalCon, the Amphenol TAC-4 and TAC-12, and the LEMO SMTPE 304M hybrid fiber camera cable assemblies. The company offers a full line of ST/SC/LC multimode and single-mode snakes as well as indoor permanent installation cables. You can view these and other Gepco products at C5643.

I almost want to tell you where the yearly Miranda Technologies press conference will be held, just because company CTO Michel Proulx is so entertaining and educating. I learn more about technology and solutions at his press conferences than all the others combined. By the time the press conference was over, I better understood a range of 3-D terms: over/under, side-by-side, anaglyph, and interaxial adjustments and about a half-dozen other common 3-D labels and technology, but I digress.

As if to emphasize his company’s 3-D expertise, Proulx did a portion of his press conference using 3-D displays and 3-D Web screen captures from the Masters golf tournament. How’s that for nifty? more

Yep, you read correctly, Dolby has just released a professional reference monitor. I got a peek at the display in the Dolby booth with David Yang, marketing guru. This once audio-only company is showing the PRM-4200 LCD monitor. The monitor accurately shows true and deep black levels with higher contrast across the entire color spectrum. It offers high luminance range and level. more

At Saturday night’s press conference, Omneon unveiled new components and enhancements across its product line and several collaborative partnerships.

“Our customers are being driven by business realities to simplify their workflows and leverage their video infrastructure more effectively in producing and distributing content,” said Geoff Stedman, senior vice president, marketing and business development at Omneon. “Supporting the production workflow in its entirety, the Omneon platform offers the best of Omneon storage and processing technology, as well as the interoperability to support the strengths of tightly integrated third-party systems. A series of enhancements to our products and ongoing work with both clients and partner vendors have contributed to the refinement of the Omneon production platform and its value in today’s demanding media workflows.” more

Engineers, traffic professionals, and managers from all over the U.S. gathered at the MGM Hotel in Las Vegas last week to share with peers and hear about PBS plans for 2010 and beyond. The group of around 500 heard presentations on issues including file-based workflow, loudness, compression, traffic issues, grant writing, video quality monitoring, cloud computing, and more. Attendance was up from last year and sponsorships were sold out, pleasing all and allowing PBS to offer scholarships to personnel from a number of stations around the country.

A major focus of the conference is the status of PBS’ NGIS non-real-time distribution system, now in alpha testing by stations. The system will ultimately replace a large portion of its real-time distribution, which requires much of the national content to be locally recorded for later playback. NGIS will deliver content as files to a highly redundant IT-based system deployed by PBS at all 177 of its affiliates. PBS has developed a sophisticated automated workflow (Station Services Platform) that communicates directly with the station’s traffic system. Content is delivered to stations at least 48 hours before air dates, and the system will hold the content for 10 days afterwards to allow stations to copy the content to servers or archives for future playout. more

Tuesday morning the phone function on my Treo broke, putting NAB on hold while I, panicked-ly, scurried around gettting a replacement into service. The experience gave me some new insights into modern life.

First, being phone-less is akin to a disabiity; forcing you into, as Blanche DuBois said, “depending on the kindness of strangers.” Second, the Treo remained useful even though I couldn’t make “phone calls:” calendar, contacts, reminders, chat, Internet, mobile TV.

I was able to check in with Teamcast’s session on the company’s new hybrid DVB-T/DVB-SH mobile TV product line, debuted at NAB. The advantage of a hybrid solution, says TeamCast EVP and GM Serge Mal, is that it lets operators offer mobile TV services leveraging the advantages of both satellite and terrestrial transmission systems. more

Sony have released an HDCAM-SR camcorder, the SRW-9000. This will be a winner for steadicam shots, where the F23/35 have limitations due to their size and weight. This is the first Sony camcorder that permits 10-bit acquisition in HD.

Over at Panasonic, good news for those who find P2 cards too expensive. They have released an economy line, the E-series in 16, 32 and 64GB. The 64GB card will sell for $998.

Harmonic announced that they are integrating Google’s Content ID into the Rhozet Carbon Coder. When content is transcoded to a distribution format the Content ID can be generated on the fly (typically at 10X realtime). The ID is submitted to Google with usage tags. If that content is uploaded to YouTube, when it is processed to the web format, a fingerprint is generated and checked against their database. Unauthorized content is then automatically blocked. This is an easy way to control piracy from YouTube, and can be built right into a post workflow.

As stations add sub-channels after the digital transition, providing EAS to many outputs becomes expensive with discrete channel systems. Many Public stations cover a state, and may want to target one area with an EAS alert. Trilithic released at the show a way to insert EAS into an ASI transport stream. An announcement can be inserted into chosen program streams, with optional graphics insertion for snipes and logs. The system uses RGB Networks BNP for the transport stream processing.

From the Briefing Room…

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — April 7, 2009 — Omneon Inc. today announced that it is partnering with New York’s Tekserve and Hollywood’s Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) to deliver new workflow solutions targeted to the needs of the television and motion picture post-production market. Through these reseller relationships, Omneon will offer purpose-built storage solutions based on the powerful Omneon MediaGrid™ active storage system to enable efficient and highly scalable editing and repurposing workflows. more

Axcera introduced the 6X Series liquid-cooled solid-state television transmitter that uses the company’s frequency agile exciter and LDMOS devices for broadband operation across the entire UHF band.

The showed a 6X transmitter that supports 7kW DVB-T, 10kW ATSC and 20kW analog operation on the floor. It will support power levels up to 30kW DVB-T and 40kW ATSC. According to company president David Neff, an important feature of the 6X transmitter is its relatively small form factor.

Axcera also highlighted the fact it’s supporting five different transmission technologies for mobile TV broadcasts with a red-hot car receiving mobile TV broadcast transmission as part of the NAB2008 demonstration of the technology.

Neff discussed mobile TV transmission, the final push to complete the DTV transition in the United States as well as a recently released report from research organization Centris showing that DTV coverage patterns may leave millions of viewers without over-the-air television reception.

Listen to an audio clip from David Neff.