Broadcast Engineering has announced the winners of its Pick Hits awards for NAB2009. A panel of independent judges toured the show floor for three days, looking for innovative products and technology. The judges then met to make their selections based on several criteria, including the technical and financial improvements the product can bring to a facility’s operation. Our editors and publishers have no vote in the selection process. more…

LARCAN sees a strong interest on the part of broadcasters in rolling out mobile DTV service and is approaching the market with an integrated solution to make it easy to deploy, according to Scott Barella, the company’s VP technology and business development.

The company is building a mobile DTV ecosystem consisting of partners like Envivio, Triveni Digital and UDcast to offer an integrated solution. The last piece in the puzzle is the mobile DTV modulator, and LARCAN anticipates the availability that piece later in the year. more…

The idea behind AJA Video Systems’ new KI Pro digital video recorder/converter is to allow producers to move straight from the camera lens to post production, said company product marketing manager Bryce Button.

Introduced at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, the KI Pro can be used with a wide variety of cameras, accepting HD-SDI, SD-SDI, component, HDMI 1.3a and after performing the necessary up, down or cross conversion records to a 250GB hard drive, which comes as part of the standard configuration, or optionally to larger and even solid state drives, as Apple ProRes HQ files or in other standard file formats. more…

Like a politician, MobiTV is a master of the art of the possible. In the ATSC mobile TV pavillion at NAB, MobiTV showed its new MixTV, which adds broadcast mobile TV to its unicast subscription mobile TV service — the best of both worlds according to Cedric Fernandes, MobiTV VP, Technology, who talks about it here.

With the acquisition of media transcoding whiz kid Rhozet, Harmonic furthered its goal of providing for almost every step in the broadcast workflow, from contribution and distribution to playout. But when I spoke to VP of the now Rhozet Business Unit of Harmonic David Trescot, he stressed that Rhozet was not completely absorbed. The company still maintains its own offices and exists as its own entity, but it is now Harmonic…

Wait… what?

Regardless of what it’s called, the deal enables Harmonic to integrate Rhozet’s technology into its products and provides Rhozet with a significantly greater amount of resources. (In the words of Trescot, it’s kind of like a college kid with rich parents.) But, mind you, Rhozet is not wiling away its time and resources. It’s still very much growing and improving its products, as well as using its name to create some interesting partnerships. more…

With 1 billion MPEG-2 set-top boxes still in play, MPEG-2 technology isn’t going anywhere soon, and TANDBERG Television has a solution.

At NAB 2009, the company showed me its new EN8100 MPEG-2 SD encoder. The system has been designed to deliver revolutionary encoding performance in a high density, low power (six channels in 1RU) chassis. It cuts MPEG-2 SD bandwidth requirements by at least 15 percent, even in legacy set-top box operations, and delivers a step change in performance.

According to Screen Digest research from March 2009, there are close to 1 billion MPEG-2 SD STBs and integrated digital TVs expected to be deployed worldwide by the end of 2009. The EN8100 opens up new opportunities for legacy service providers. It enables operators to achieve higher picture quality in the same bit rate, which is ideal for making SD MPEG-2 look acceptable on large flat-panel TVs, and to profit from additional revenue from their existing infrastructure. more…

It’s clear to me, based on how busy company founder and president Tim Carroll has been over the past year, that Linear Acoustic “gets” audio.

Tim and I caught up at NAB 2009, where he told me stories about projects Linear Acoustic has been a part of since last year’s show. One of those was the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Tim said the Olympics broadcast was mixed by watching loudness. And those summer Olympics were, according to him, the “best laboratory.” Tim was able to work with top mixers from around the world who gave him insight about what would help them notice changes in audio levels. more…

Signiant announced version 8.1 of its Content Distribution Management (CDM) software, which presents improvements to core functionality and enhances the ability of business-to-business content transfers. CDM v8.1’s open architecture allows third-party members of the newly-formed Signiant Integration Product Program (SIPP) to create add-ons — known as Connectors (such as watermarking systems and quality control applications) — which can easily be integrated at any point within Signiant workflows. SIPP partners include Avid, Thomson Nexguard, Anystream and Interra.

Over at the Shotoku Broadcast Systems booth, company president Naoki Ebimoto showed me their two new robotic control systems — The TR-T and the TR-S.

The TR-T touch control system controls both Shotoky and third-party robotic camera systems. A single operator can control up to 16 cameras. The panel style uses multicolored illuminated keys to communicate system status and control settings, with the same high-precision joystick for smooth on-air control. The system is compatible with all Shotoku heads as well as third-party systems. 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…