DALLAS—FIFA has opened the International Broadcast Center (IBC) for the FIFA World Cup 2026 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, with FIFA President Gianni Infantino hailing the facility as "the most technologically advanced and top of the art international broadcast center that the world has ever seen."

The facility will serve as the global broadcast operations center for 180 broadcasters covering the tournament set to take place across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico and the USA from June 11 to July 19 2026.

It is the second time that Dallas has been designated this prestigious function, having also hosted the IBC during the 1994 FIFA World Cup USA.

"It's absolutely incredible to be here in Dallas at this fantastic International Broadcast Centre – it's getting better and better," said Infantino. "There's more and more technology, AI power, people, experts. It's incredible to see how much work, how much passion, how much expertise, how much high-level technological input there is to bring the FIFA World Cup to billions of fans all over the world.

Addressing some of the 2,000 broadcast media representatives who will be based at the facility, he also said stressed that "not everyone can travel to the United States or in the past to other countries to witness the FIFA World Cup, but everyone can see it back from home thanks to the IBC and thanks to the broadcasters," he said.

At the opening, Dallas Mayor Eric L. Johnson said that the city, which will host nine FIFA World Cup 2026 matches, had made targeted investments to support the operation and the thousands of international visitors.

"Having toured the operations here myself a few days ago, I can attest to the cutting-edge technology, including AI and innovation, that will be transforming this facility into a world-class media hub," Johnson said, according to a blog post posted by FIFA describing the opening.

The Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center was selected as the IBC for FIFA World Cup 2026 in part because of its central location across the three-nation tournament footprint, making Dallas the ideal hub for a broadcast operation spanning Canada, Mexico and the United States.

The facility spans 45,000 square meters (485,000 square feet) and will serve as headquarters for FIFA's host broadcaster and Host Broadcast Services (HBS), all FIFA Media Partners, FIFA's Video Content Production Department, FIFA's Football Technology and Innovation Department as well as housing the video assistant referee (VAR) room, the post noted.

"Four years ago, when we opened up the IBC in Qatar, our President was challenging us….and saying: 'We need to continue to push the bar as high as we can in order to remain a reference for everybody in the world in how we can deliver high-quality, our competences to all our broadcasters, to our partners,’” said Romy Gai, FIFA's chief business officer. “And I am happy to say today that what you can see all around us is the result of capitalizing on all our experience from the past, trying to improve and to do more in order to better serve our 180 broadcasters from all around the world."

HBS has delivered broadcast services for the six most recent editions of the FIFA World Cup, and broadcaster infrastructure is fully integrated into FIFA's stadium projects, covering camera positions, interview positions, the mixed zone, studios, media tribune, broadcast compound and press conference rooms.

In a blog post, FIFA said that a key pillar of the IBC's operation is the partnership between FIFA and Lenovo, FIFA's Official Technology Partner, which is providing complete IT solutions across the FIFA World Cup 2026 ecosystem.

Lenovo is deploying servers at the IBC in Dallas to deliver the computing power, devices and AI-driven solutions needed to bring every moment of every match to global audiences. More than 17,000 Lenovo and Motorola devices are deployed across venues and Team Base Camp training sites, supported by over 200 Lenovo engineers across all venues.

Lenovo ThinkSystem SR635 V3 servers manage massive volumes of live video data from stadiums across North America, powering FIFA's IPTV live feed via ten channels to over 1,000 screens at all FIFA venues. Lenovo's technology has also reduced latency within FIFA's IPTV infrastructure to under five seconds, enabling near real-time access to live match action.

As FIFA’s official technology partner, Lenovo has deployed servers and other solutions at the International Broadcast Center in Dallas to support the most expansive broadcast operation in FIFA World Cup history.

The deployment is part of Lenovo’s larger push to expand its sports technology investments. In March, it launched a dedicated sports vertical designed to support organizations operating live, global and mission-critical environments. By integrating AI infrastructure, edge computing, devices, and services into a unified model, Lenovo said it aims to help sports organizations shift from fragmented systems to real-time, end-to-end operational control.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will also showcase Lenovo’s real-world AI advances in sports production, the company said. Lenovo products will manage complex on-premise edge computing, the company said, significantly reducing latency in cases where cloud-only solutions failed to meet broadcast requirements.

FIFA's Gai also highlighted two specific AI-powered innovations that will enhance the broadcast experience at FIFA World Cup 2026.

The first is AI-enabled 3D player avatars, which represent a major development in semi-automated offside technology. Players will be digitally scanned on arrival – a process that takes approximately one second per player – to create precise 3D models that capture highly accurate body-part dimensions. These models will be incorporated into the host broadcast, enabling offside decisions determined by the VAR system to be displayed more realistically and in a more engaging way for fans both in stadiums and watching at home around the world, the blog post explained.

The second innovation is a stabilized referee view. Building on a successful trial at the FIFA Club World Cup™ in 2025, AI-powered stabilization software will smooth footage captured from the referee's camera in real time, reducing motion blur caused by rapid movement. The footage will deliver a higher-quality, first-person perspective for audiences, enhancing transparency, understanding and engagement throughout matches, he reported.

"Thanks to AI, we've introduced some innovations that will be highlighted through the broadcaster for the fans," Gai said. "These are just a couple of examples. We will have more to say, more to tell."

Feld Entertainment, family owned and operated, is the worldwide leader in producing and presenting live touring family entertainment experiences that bring people together and uplift the human spirit.

Properties include Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, Monster Jam, Disney On Ice, Monster Energy AMA Supercross, and the SuperMotocross World Championship. Across the brand portfolio, Feld Entertainment has entertained millions of families in more than 80 countries and on six continents.

For nearly 60 years, Feld Entertainment has brought Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, The Greatest Show On Earth to audiences across the country. In 2026, the 148^th edition was introduced, reimagined for today’s families and touring nationwide, with the clear ambition to evolve the circus into a modern, high-energy experience built for a new generation.

Branded as The Greatest Party On Earth, this new production set out the audience into participants by creating a live environment that feels contemporary, interactive, and immersive, while still maintaining the precision and reliability required for a fast-moving arena tour operating in some of the largest and most technically complex venues in the world.

The Challenge
A key component of this vision was real-time audience integration. Feld aimed to capture and feature authentic, in-the-moment, fan reactions and audience participation during the show by streaming live video directly from the crowd and showcasing live reactions on the large arena (or IMAG) screens in the arenas. This required performers to move freely throughout the audience while seamlessly capturing and transmitting broadcast-quality video.

“To create this fun atmosphere for The Greatest Party on Earth, we wanted to encourage more audience interaction and get everyone up and dancing,” said Brian Hanley, Senior Video Operations Manager at Feld Entertainment. “We thought that by filming from that first person experience from a mobile phone, it would create that social media influencer vibe on the live screen for the whole audience to see.”

Delivering on this vision introduced a complex technical challenge. The solution needed to provide a stable wireless connection, ultra-low latency to ensure real-time synchronization with IMAG screens, and professional-grade video quality—all within highly dynamic, unpredictable environments.

With each performance taking place in a different arena with its own infrastructure, RF environment, and network limitations, Feld was faced with several significant challenges such as wireless congestion from thousands of audience members, varying venue layouts, and limited setup time. These challenges created a live production set up where traditional fixed cameras and infrastructure-heavy solutions were impractical for traversing the crowd and producing the immersive experience they were trying to create.

The Result
With the need for a reliable and portable solution, Feld Entertainment implemented a Haivision-based mobile live video contribution and streaming workflow to support and enhance audience interaction.

Performers now film with smartphones with the Haivision MoJoPro professional camera app installed, which captures live video and wirelessly streams it to the production control environment where a Haivision StreamHub receiver distributes it to the IMAG screens for the audience to see.

By deploying high-powered access points around the performance space, they were able to establish a controlled, high-priority WiFi environment within the venue, allowing for an effective point-to-point connection. This connection and solution enables live video to be displayed at low latency, allowing audience members to see themselves on the screen without delays.

“One of the biggest issues was latency and we did not want to deal with relying on the internet. We didn't want to have to deal with the stream coming back with too much delay. We wanted everything to stay local,” said Hanley. “We don’t always get internet in every arena, so we also needed something that could help with that.”

In addition to performers capturing footage from within the audience, trapeze artists take the experience even further—using MoJoPro-equipped mobile devices while soaring through the air to film breathtaking, first-person perspectives. These dynamic, never-before-seen angles deepen the sense of immersion and bring audiences closer to the action than ever before—something only possible with a fully flexible and highly reliable solution.

Ease-of-use was also important when choosing MoJoPro for the show. Performers are operating the app, so it’s vital that the solution is lightweight, and is very simple to use.

The deployment of the Haivision solution is enabling Feld Entertainment to deliver an immersive Ringling Bros. Circus experience that connects the audience directly to the performers and involves them in the storytelling, enhancing engagement without disrupting the flow of the performance.

Mounting demand for a next-generation video streaming solution that surpasses the latency and unidirectional limitations imposed by the currently dominant streaming architecture is generating strong support for a new standard known simply as "MOQ" (Media over QUIC).

While by all accounts, it will take at least a few more months before the Internet Engineering Task Force finalizes the MOQ specifications, there are now multiple projects underway allowing producers to try out this new multidirectional, multi-latency approach to streaming.

“There’s a buzz and excitement in the air about MOQ we’ve never seen before,” says Will Law, chief architect for the cloud technology group at Akamai and a leader in the IETF MOQ initiative.

HEIGHTENED INTEREST AT NAB
This was evident at the recent NAB Show where MOQ demos abounded on the exhibit floor and an overflow crowd filled the large meeting room devoted to the NAB’s first-ever session on the standard. Entities announcing infrastructure support for MOQ included public CDN operators Broadpeak, CacheFly, Cloudflare, and CDN77 as well as cloud compute platform providers Akamai, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Streaming software system suppliers demonstrating delivery of payloads and advanced features over MOQ-enabled facilities included Ateme, Bitmovin, EZDRM, Nomad Media, Norsk Media, Oracle Media, Synamedia, Red5 and Wowza,.

While proprietary real-time streaming systems supporting video conferencing and a host of other applications have been around for several years, MOQ is meant to satisfy the need for a standardized, ubiquitously available two-way superhighway over which video flows in any direction at any scale with latencies attuned to specific use-case requirements. That’s why Red5, a successful provider of a highly scalable WebRTC-based streaming platform, is throwing its weight behind MOQ, says Red5 CEO and co-founder Chris Allen.

“WebRTC was designed as a peer-to-peer protocol, which means there’s no standard for scaling the way we do by building out clustered cloud resources,” Allen says. “MOQ was designed from the get-go as a scalable broadcast technology for the internet, which we believe will accelerate adoption of next-generation streaming.”

The foundational set of MOQ specifications, known as MOQ Transport (MOQT), marks an incompatible break with conventional streaming modes like HLS and MPEG DASH that are based on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). As a so-called connectionless platform, MOQT employs a simple publish/subscribe approach to streaming by signaling the start and end points of a session while avoiding the thousands of request/response exchanges that transpire between clients and servers in HTTP streaming.

QUIC is a modern transport protocol built on UDP that is designed to make web connections faster, more secure, and more resilient. It was originally developed by Google and later standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force as RFC 9000

Moreover, the new standard provides a way to automatically tune end-to-end latencies to whatever levels meet user requirements, including real-time 200-400ms latencies that are imperceptible to humans as well as what Law calls “interactive live” at 2 seconds for use in sports betting, online casino gambling, banking and similar applications and “conservative live” supporting ironclad HD, 4K, and, eventually, 8K quality persistency at 5 seconds.

ALL YOU NEED IS CACHE
With decoding and other device rendering processes managed through leading browsers, MOQ in most instances doesn’t require client plug-in software. And depending on how MOQ-ready CDNs are designed, MOQ can also support recording live content for short-term replay and catchup and long-term storage for VOD archives and cloud DVR applications. “VOD just means my cache is big enough to hold stuff that was live a while ago,” Law says.

Paralleling MOQT development, there are other initiatives within IETF and through the closely affiliated ad hoc organization known as the OpenMOQ Software Consortium that are aimed at creating a practical operating environment for the transport protocol. They include media layer streaming formats emerging from IETF, a new client player template developed by Red5 and endorsed by the consortium, and several ready-to-deploy players, , including a MOQ-based plug-in for Bitmovin’s new multi-purpose Player Web X platform.

“We have an array of features we enable, and each is treated as an individual plug-in,” says Bitmovin product manager Jacob Arends, who describes Player X as the latest, completely rebuilt version of its popular Web X player. “From a player [configuration] perspective there’s not much more to it than that,” but with MOQ playback departing from the HTTP norms, “it takes a lot of heavy lifting on the cloud side.”

While much of the focus on MOQ has to do with overcoming the limitations of conventional B2C streaming, the protocol also needs to be accommodated in post-production playouts to producers’ broadcast and OTT affiliates, notes Gwendal Simon, senior director for video network technology at Synamedia. “We’re bringing MOQ into our Quortex PowerVu multitrack contribution management system,” Simon says.

It is fitting that the 2026 NAB Show takes place in a Las Vegas Convention Center that recently completed an astounding three-year, $600 million renovation. That makes it the perfect setting for a show that reflects an industry in a constant state of reinvention.

Fitting because like the LVCC, which now efficiently links all of its halls for easy access (and with a Loop transport system to boot), NAB Show will connect a projected 59,000-plus attendees to a media world in which creativity and technology ease the path toward invention and monetization for everyone from a kid with an iPhone to a major media player.

“When you look at what’s happening across the landscape of media and entertainment, everybody’s becoming a storyteller. NAB Show has all the tools you need to do that, but also the community to learn from each other how to further your craft,” said Karen Chupka, executive vice president of global connections and events at the National Association of Broadcasters.

The intersection of community and craft starts front and center for broadcasters with a reimagined TV and Radio HQ, presented by Xperi. It moves this year to a can’t-miss location on the Central Hall show floor. The change is meant to embrace broadcast’s legacy while increasing convenience and engagement, with relevant sessions set in the HQ Theater and with space to network in the inviting NAB Member Lounge.

Spotlight on Sports
In that lounge and on the floor, attendees can expect sports to hold an outsized amount of attention.

“Sports is such a growing category because it is the one thing that everybody still consumes live,” Chupka said.

That emphasis has led to the Sports Summit expanding across four days. Leaders from leagues and teams, and companies representing broadcast, streaming and technology, will cover the rapid evolution of sports media’s production, distribution, investment and policy. Topics such as media rights and revenue, athlete-driven brands, wagering and the new fan economy and international markets will be explored on the West Hall floor.

In one Main Stage highlight, Jon Miller, president of acquisitions and partnerships at NBC Sports, throws open the “NBC Sports Playbook: Rights, Partnerships and What’s Next” in a fireside talk with John Ourand from Puck’s sports-business newsletter “The Varsity.” Miller’s chat comes in the wake of the company’s blazing trifecta success in immersive storytelling and marketing with the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star Weekend.

Another major show theme is artificial intelligence, which hits a new stride at the 2026 Show. AI was housed in one pavilion last year; now it expands to two in the West Hall, reflecting the technology’s growing role as a fundamental part of industry workflows and a key to content models.

“We’re seeing AI move from experimentation to real, scaled adoption across the media industry,” said Silvia Candiani, vice president of telco, media and entertainment and gaming at Microsoft. “What’s most exciting is how AI is removing friction from creative and production workflows and helping creators focus on storytelling, craft and originality, while media organizations operate with greater speed, security and confidence.”

Candiani hits the Main Stage to discuss “Powering Intelligent Media: From AI Experimentation to Real-World Impact.” Later John Footen, media solutions managing director at Deloitte Consulting, tackles practical decisions that leaders face when moving from experimentation to durable impact in “Make AI Make Sense.”

Chupka also encourages a visit to the West Hall lobby to see AI in imaginative action, beginning with the cutting-edge innovators exhibiting in the Startup Pavilion.

There’s also the latest exciting novelty from Amazon Web Services (AWS): an AI-enabled digital basketball shooting experience. Created with Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, owner of the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, it will allow attendees to take three free throws and then receive a digital player card with stats and shooting technique analysis.

Industry in Growth Mode
The convention also will be rich with content about streaming, virtualization, the cloud and the creator economy.

The NAB Show in 2026 looks to find more ways for industry players to stay relevant and competitive. To cite a few examples:

Enterprise Video Strategies, a new conference track situated in the West Hall’s new VideoNext Theater, will explore how enterprise-level organizations are using media and entertainment technologies to tell more engaging stories, and how corporations and organizations are adopting video production.

The two-day Streaming Summit, headed by Chairman Dan Rayburn, features two tracks, in which some 85 speakers will cover trends in measurement, technology challenges, consumer engagement, opportunities for monetization and delivering great user experiences at scale.

Google is building a full exhibit on the floor for the first time this year, showcasing its cloud virtualization efforts.

As part of the Cinematographer Workshop, Oscar winner Roger Deakins speaks about next-era revolutionary tools for filmmakers.

This year, all attendees are invited to experience the three-day Business of Media and Entertainment program, which brings together top industry dealmakers, executives and creatives in discussion about trends leading to the ever-reshaping business.

And the Creator Lab offers access to hands-on learning with techniques and business insights, thanks to a dedicated classroom, theater, recording space and exhibitor activations, all meant to spark collaboration and scalable content in the Creator Economy.

“We have some tools and technologies that make it easier for creators to do some of what they’re doing, and we also cover a lot of content and how businesses could scale up the art of storytelling,” Chupka said. “People can walk away saying, ‘We can try that and see how that helps us build our community.’”

Protecting the growth of the broadcast community is top-of-mind for many attendees.

That includes new innovations like the Broadcast Positioning System (BPS), a technology being developed by NAB that uses ATSC 3.0 signals as an alternative to GPS.

From regulation to innovation, the 2026 confab in Las Vegas offers attendees a four-day forecast for a business in constant growth.

“NAB Show connects broadcasters with the technologies, partnerships and insights they need to navigate a rapidly changing media environment,” NAB President and CEO Curtis LeGeyt said. “From AI tools to next-generation production and distribution technologies, the show equips broadcasters to innovate while continuing to serve their communities. This is where our industry comes together to prepare for the future.”

© 2026 NAB

It only makes sense that it took an out-of-this-world effort to produce the 2026 World Baseball Classic, given that the event was broadcast in 172 countries and territories.

That access and the increasing popularity of the event led to record numbers of viewers for the tournament, which was played in Miami, Houston, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Tokyo from March 5-17.

For instance, the championship game, a 3-2 win by Venezuela over the United States, was seen by 10.8 million viewers on Fox and Fox Deportes. That number is nearly double the 4.9 million who watched Japan defeat the U.S. in the 2023 final.

All told, the 2026 WBC averaged almost 1.3 million viewers for its games on Fox, FS1 and FS2, which was more than double the 506,000 for the 2023 tournament.

With viewership and production expectations so high, Fox was well prepared in the camera department, lensing the action from the usual positions and many more: The mostly-Sony package included high home, high first, high third, low first and low third; plus center and tight center; mid-home robotic and dugout robotic, with two bullpen POVs and a booth handheld.

But that still wasn’t all, since the impact of the games―and the production―had much to do with MLB Network’s approach to present the international spectacle through its world feed.

“We employed two shallow depth of field rightfield cameras, also known as ‘The Megalodon’ (the Mirrorless Gyro-stabilized Lightweight DSLR Nano-rig),” said MLB Network Director of Remote Technical Operations Steve Dolce. Those cameras were supplied by St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Faction Media and were paired with wireless RX/TX equipment from CP Communications, also of St. Petersburg.

Other key equipment was provided by L.A.-based Beverly Hills Aerials, for the in-game drone; an RF Wireless for UmpVu, which is an umpire mask with a built-in camera for the behind-the-plate perspective, for all of the USA games; and from Tempe, Ariz.-based Defy Products, the Wirecam and its new Dirt Cam system, which debuted during the WBC.

Indeed, the WBC proved to be the forum to place cameras virtually anywhere possible. “We placed four in-ground cameras to give us a ‘worm’s eye view’ of [the] three bases and home plate,” said Dolce, which gave the broadcast some incredibly unique views.”

As for the most memorable aspect of the expansive broadcast, Dolce said it was simply capturing the excitement of the tournament.

“Across the board, we really wanted to capture the noise and excitement from the crowds. We added a few extra natural sound mics,” said Dolce, to pick up the sounds of the crowd. “You could really feel that passion in the broadcast, which was incredibly cool.”

Secondly, he said, “When you think about the phrase ‘world feed,’ you need to remember it’s your truck and crew providing game coverage to every fan watching. Rights holders could augment the coverage, but it’s your game feed at the heart of it.

And being in that position, Dolce said, “is a daunting, but amazing, feeling.”

Broadcasting the WBC was different from MLB Network’s usual transmissions, because it used NEP Connect as its international distribution hub. “That ensured strong 24/7 performance from the WBC Network Operations Center, while keeping MLB’s typical distributions focused on spring training,” said MLB Vice President of Broadcast Products and Services Jason Hedgcock.

Any format conversation or standard changes that were needed to connect with the international transmission were handled at distribution by NEP.

As for the biggest challenge, Dolce said that it was the need to constantly plan ahead. “Every round brought additional rights holders and equipment,” he said. “We had to be strategic on things like power and the space needed for drones, launch points and RF gear. The fiber team and I managed fiber drops around the ballpark for all the rights holders.

“We had to be diligent,” said Dolce, “in making sure the proper resources were allocated and tested before anyone plugged in.”

Given the enormity of the undertaking and its global reach, the crew at MLB Network is already thinking about how to heighten the approach for the next tournament.

“There’s something incredibly special about the World Baseball Classic. Each time, it gets bigger and bigger, with more people contributing all over the world,” said MLB Network Senior Vice President of Remote Events Tommy Guidice. “We’re proud of the content we were able to produce.”

Attendees will have more new things to see when they arrive for NAB Show than the products on the exhibit-hall floor — like the Las Vegas Convention Center itself.

This year’s show is the first to be held since the LVCC completed a $600 million renovation project that’s been ongoing since 2023. The project extends elements of the modern, $1 billion design introduced with the renovation of West Hall in 2021 across the whole of the convention center’s 4.6 million-square-foot campus.

The latest renovations, unveiled in January, have added more than 100,000 square feet of lobby space, modernized meeting areas and connected key exhibit halls, enhancing the attendee experience and the LVCC’s ability to host multiple major events simultaneously.

“Much of it is about developing a world-class convention center that meets the scale, ambition and evolution of Las Vegas,” said Dan Hayes, LVCC chief operating officer.

He came on board in November after a 25-year run in the business, including as general manager of the Salt Palace Convention Center and Mountain America Expo Center in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Trends in the convention business call for spaces that are as much about experience-making for attendees as they are about commerce or education, he said, and that’s part of what the LVCC’s refresh is all about.

The Wow Factor
“There’s still education, but there’s a greater emphasis now on place-making and experience-building, so attendees feel like they’re part of something unique,” he said.

“Those experiences often happen in large, public gathering spaces, and that’s something we leaned into heavily with this build.”

One of the first things NAB Show attendees might notice is a large, glass curtain wall facing the Strip, with a sweeping roofline or “eyebrow” that extends across the front of the complex. This continues a theme that was introduced when the West Hall opened.

Once inside, attendees enter a 60-foot atrium that’s dominated by a 75-foot-wide, 42-foot-tall LED video display.

“It’s jaw-dropping when you walk in and see it,” Hayes said.

The atrium isn’t just a way in: It’s meant as a gathering area and a space for activations, sponsorship displays or attendee engagement experiences. It offers wall and window clings and other engagement points for the use of shows or exhibitors, Hayes said.

Attendees will also find the TV and radio exhibit area, including the TV and Radio HQ, just inside the convention center’s newly renovated façade facing the parking lot, easily accessible via Entrance E.

In the Central Hall atrium, “there are a number of seating nooks and lounge areas on both levels with furniture, tables and chairs, so people can step away from the show floor and have a meeting, a Teams call or a Zoom call,” Hayes said. “They don’t have to go back to their hotel room.”

The South Hall also has been redesigned to include a new east-side entrance, a state-of-the-art boardroom and new administrative offices.

Attendees will also find it easier to get around. An indoor corridor now connects Central and South halls, eliminating the need to walk outside. “That connection now ties the entire campus together from South Hall all the way to West Hall,” Hayes said. “That’s an enormous advantage today that didn’t exist before.”

There’s also the ever-expanding Vegas Loop, which will remain free of charge on the LVCC campus, with connections now extending from the South Hall to Central Station to West Hall/Riviera Station, with added stops at Westgate, Resorts World and Wynn/Encore. The Loop continues to expand and could reach Harry Reid International Airport by the time the 2027 NAB Show rolls around, Hayes said.

And don’t fret the Wi-Fi this year. There are now some 3,000 access points throughout the convention center. Dining options are expanded, too, with specials offered from 2 p.m. to close on show days and more healthy options on tap than in the past.

Room to Grow
One of the goals of the renovations was to accommodate multiple events with minimal friction.

That flexibility will be tested this year as NAB Show in Central, North and West Halls overlaps with WWE World (April 16–19), the annual fan fest tied to WrestleMania 42, in South Hall.

“In the past, limited lobby space meant registration sometimes had to be placed inside an exhibit hall, which displaced other exhibitors,” Hayes said.

“Now that we’ve added this giant lobby space, we’re able to host concurrent events and maximize the building’s capacity.”

So far, according to Hayes, the new features have been well-received, and Las Vegas is trending toward one of its busiest convention years ever, with the LVCC alone targeting 1.6 million visitors this fiscal year and 1.8 million for fiscal 2027.

Many of the center’s largest shows are posting their strongest attendance numbers since before the pandemic, according to Hayes.

“We are the biggest operator in the space, we are the most successful operator in this space and we absolutely want a convention center that demonstrates that and shows that,” he said.

© 2026 NAB

Broadcasters big and small are operating in a whole new world, one that can be hard to grasp, thanks particularly to AI’s large-language models.

Perhaps the way media managers can enhance digital growth and develop new audiences is to be found within what local outlets already do best.

This year’s Broadcast Management and Monetization Conference at NAB Show looks to explore such questions over three days, starting on Sunday, April 19.

The conference returns to the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center and brings together media professionals from TV, radio, podcasting and digital.

Forum
The track encompasses six sessions, including the popular Small/Medium Market Radio Forum, which will be held on Sunday this year.

The forum, in North Hall Rooms 252/254, serves attendees from Nielsen-rated markets 51 and smaller. It attracted about 240 people a year ago.

The forum’s speakers include Dave Casper, senior vice president of digital services at the Radio Advertising Bureau; Mike Hulvey, president and CEO of RAB, and Sun Sachs, senior vice president of digital products at Townsquare Media.

Attendees participate in roundtable discussions, led by peers who are station owners, researchers or product solution providers.

The 30-minute roundtable will include forward-looking discussions on AI, cybersecurity and peer-to-peer collaboration, organizers said.

Leveraging Digital
How are your customers or prospective advertisers prompting large-language models? Does your station appear appropriately in the AI’s response?

That’s the subject of a fascinating conference session on Monday, April 20, in N259, “Beyond Search: How Broadcasters Can Win or Lose in AI-Powered Search.”

Kelli Frieler, CEO of Vibrant Impact, will present with Casper of RAB and Jon Latzer, senior VP and general manager of Salem Media.

Frieler is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between traditional broadcasting and the digital frontier. She is the granddaughter of Al Leighton, founder of Upper Midwest radio company Leighton Media, so she grew up understanding the community impact of local radio.

Today, she uses that foundation to empower stations digitally, transforming the web presence of Leighton Media and clients like Baton Rouge’s Guaranty Media.

Through her research, Frieler has identified a major hurdle for local broadcasters: AI models naturally prioritize national aggregators over fragmented local data. It is a battle of volume.

“Places like Spotify have one large aggregate of knowledge and information that they’ve been publishing for over a decade,” Frieler said. “LLMs have to default to trust, and it’s often easier to trust based on a massive library of content.”

How can a local radio station fight back and ensure it isn’t erased from AI’s recommendations? According to Frieler, you don’t reinvent the wheel. You go back to basics.

“We have to be careful not to completely reinvent everything that we know,” she said. “One of the best things we can do is continue to double down on making sure we’re building our brands.”

She offers a highly relatable scenario: A local roofer decides they want a new marketing plan and runs the question through an AI model. It is unrealistic to expect the AI to spontaneously generate your specific station’s name for that roofer’s budget.

“Instead, how do we make sure that we show up there?” Frieler asked. The answer lies in reverse-engineering the models.

She recommends that your digital sales team experiment with the “Big Three” — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude — asking them to build local marketing plans to see where the blind spots are, and adjusting your digital content to fill those gaps.

Ultimately, Frieler argued, broadcasters cannot expect to sell digital and AI-adjacent solutions successfully to their clients if their own digital house isn’t in order.

“If we can do this and showcase our own case study of self-improvement in this space,” Frieler said, “it carries a ton of weight in making traction in our markets.”

Monday’s portion of the track will be capped with the wisdom of Laura Ivey, research director at Edison Research/SSRS, who is among the speakers at “Improving the Listener Experience” in N259.

A panel session moderated by renowned media consultant Mike McVay, president of McVay Media, promises to explore how audience data and real-world insights can drive smarter content and stronger listener connections.

Tuesday begins with “The Local Advertising Buying Landscape,” in N259, featuring a deep dive into the results of Borrell Associates and RAB’s 14th annual Digital Benchmarking Report on radio digital sales based on local business radio advertisers and radio sales managers.

Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, will present, alongside RAB’s Hulvey and Dustin Wilson, senior director of digital strategy for Marketron.

Finally, the “Hot Digital Trends” session that closes out Tuesday in N259 includes Andy Slater, who serves as head of partnerships at ART19, Amazon’s podcast hosting and monetization platform.

© 2026 NAB

The bond between sports and television — both broadcast and digital — has never been stronger. According to Nielsen, 96 of the 100 most-watched telecasts in 2025 were live sports, predominantly the NFL and college football.

With that in mind, the 2026 NAB Show Sports Summit, powered by Lumen Technolgies, will be extended to four days from three, April 19–22 at the Sports Summit Theater, W3643 on the convention floor in West Hall.

The Super Bowl on Feb. 8 marked the second most-watched telecast in U.S. history, with Nielsen saying total viewership of 125.6 million trailed only the 127.7 million for last year’s big game.

The 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympic Games in February was the most-watched since 2014, as NBC, Peacock and other platforms averaged 23.5 million daily U.S. viewers.

And the NBA All-Star Game in February saw NBC, Peacock and Telemundo fast-break to an 87% viewership jump from 2025, averaging 8.8 million viewers.

The headline event at this year’s Sports Summit is “NBC Sports Playbook: Rights, Partnerships and What’s Next,” a Main Stage conversation between Puck sports correspondent John Ourand and Jon Miller, president of acquisitions and partnerships at NBC Sports.

Miller will discuss the efforts behind delivering tentpole sports moments at a global scale, touching on major rights acquisitions, transformative distribution partnerships and the future of the sports media landscape.

“The media world continues to evolve, but broadcast television remains stronger and more important than ever before,” Miller said. “Our long-term sports deals always have broadcast as a key component for our partners.”

Key Moment for Women’s Sports
How can women’s sports maintain their current momentum and become an enterprise go-to? Those questions will be explored during “Women’s Sports at an Inflection Point” on April 19.

“Women’s sports are not just a moment, they are a growth story,” E.W. Scripps Co. Senior Vice President of Marketing Sherry Pitkofsky said.

“For broadcasters, it’s an opportunity to build real fandom, create deeper connections with viewers and invest in a space where demand is finally catching up with talent and competition on the field.”

Scripps Sports has become a big player in that space: Its Ion network televises national games for both the WNBA and the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), while many of its local stations are also team rightsholders.

FAST Studios CEO Stuart McLean said, “Women’s sports carry an incredibly passionate fanbase that is only just now being unlocked at scale.” FAST Studios is the parent of Women’s Sports Network, a 24/7 FAST channel featuring content from the LPGA, U.S. Ski and Snowboard and the World Surf League, among others.

What’s next? “Networks that invest now can help build year-round communities around these sports, elevate the athletes and create franchises that fans feel personally connected to,” Pitkofsky said.

McLean added, “The industry must focus on fan experiences and greater storytelling that supports league, team and athlete partnerships.”

Surveying the Field
Religion of Sports CEO Ameeth Sankaran will speak on the panel “The State of Sports Media: Rights, Reach & Revenue” on April 19.

The session is a global snapshot of where the major sports leagues stand on media rights, platform distribution, and how fragmented viewership is shaping the next wave of revenue models.

Asked how he sees athlete empowerment evolving over the next 10 years, Sankaran said: “Athletes will continue to lead their story and be at the center of it. We are already seeing athletes [and talent] license their NIL [name, image and likeness] to be used via artificial intelligence. I think this trend will continue.”

And Much, Much More
How will emerging technologies like real-time personalization and immersive audiovisual design transform sporting venues in the future?

Scott Sullivan, Shure’s vice president of strategy and innovation, and Laura “LJ” Johnson, executive producer and senior director, game presentation and live events for the San Francisco 49ers, will share their takes during “Stadiums of the Future: Tech-Driven Venue Experiences.”

DealMaker Co-Founder and CEO Rebecca Kacaba and Bruin Capital Partner Jeff Roth will lead “Private Equity, Sovereign Wealth and the Future of Sports Ownership,” focusing on what new ownership models mean for governance, decision-making and league stability, and where global capital is creating opportunities for expansion, infrastructure and media growth.

© 2026 NAB

The NAB Show Streaming Summit returns with a clear mandate to cut through the hyperbole of the streaming business and deliver practical answers for an industry under pressure to prove that streaming can be both innovative and sustainable.

The goal? “Provide attendees with real-world information they can practically apply in their business immediately,” said Dan Rayburn, chairman of the Streaming Summit, which takes place Monday and Tuesday, April 20–21.

“Companies are there because they want to solve problems today, not talk about something that might happen 10 years from now.”

The impact of live sports content on the streaming business will be in play, as several panels examine the financial and viewership effects of the increase in sports content on both distributors and consumers.

Live sports viewing on digital platforms has grown by an estimated 8.3% in 2025 compared to 2024, according to Nielsen. Streaming services Netflix, Paramount+, Apple TV+, Disney+ and Prime Video increased their sports programming catalogs by 52% year over year, according to a Nielsen Gracenote report.

While sports content unquestionably drives engagement, Rayburn said, hard data remains scarce. The summit will look to shine a light on viewership metrics during “The Latest Sports Streaming News and Viewership Numbers,” a panel that kicks off Tuesday’s session.

“We have so little data on viewership,” Rayburn said. “None of these companies puts out what percentage of viewers are watching or how it impacts subscriptions.”

What is clear, though, is the growing consumer appetite for live sports programming on digital streaming platforms. “We do know consumers in the U.S. love sports, especially the NFL, and sports drive viewership,” Rayburn said. “Whether or not it drives profitability, we don’t know.”

That question ties directly into one of the summit’s core themes: how to price, package and monetize content. Rayburn calls it one of the biggest business-side issues heading into the event. Bundling strategies, whether for live sports, on-demand libraries or hybrid offerings, are evolving rapidly. The summit will also examine how streaming intersects with traditional distribution, particularly as linear TV continues to evolve.

“The business looks different year to year,” Rayburn said, pointing to recent subscriber gains reported by major cable providers and growing bundling of streaming and linear services by providers such as Charter Communications’ Spectrum.

Rayburn highlighted the evolution of multiview offerings as one of the fastest-growing developments in the space, adding that what was once experimental has become mainstream. One summit panel will examine Comcast’s innovations in the multiview arena.

The Streaming Summit will also highlight streaming innovations and product launches from some of the biggest brands in television. BritBox President Robert Schildhouse will offer his perspective on navigating a competitive global subscription market through focused brand identity.

The company in September launched BritBox Premier, an annual subscription tier offering enhanced features, including 4K streaming, downloads, early access to new releases and simultaneous streams. Schildhouse recently told Vulture that the signup numbers for BritBox Premier “are already significantly exceeding our expectations,” with current BritBox annual subscribers making up about half of new Premier customers.

“The market has already validated to us that we’re on to something,” he said in the interview.

Mayur Srinivasan, senior vice president, digital platforms at Fox, will talk about last year’s launch of direct-to-consumer service Fox One and what it took to transform a vast content library into a new streaming product.

“Fox had never had a direct-to-consumer streaming service, but they always had a lot of content,” Rayburn said. “We’ll look at what it took to put that content into a brand-new service and all the technical pieces that go into that.”

According to Rayburn, the summit will explore the factors that will allow companies to remain relevant in an ever-evolving business. “The speakers will address real-world issues, discussing the challenges you face today from both a technical and a business perspective.”

Companies speaking at the summit include Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox, YouTube, BBC, Charter, Comcast, Amazon, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Roku, with 75 speakers represented.

© 2026 NAB

Attendees of this year’s NAB Show will see the industry’s evolution not just in the technologies on display, but in the show itself.

This year’s edition, set for April 18–22 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, reflects that forward momentum with a new logo designed to better represent the diverse community of content creators it serves and with a venue that has just completed a sweeping $600 million renovation.

NAB Show also continues to evolve as a hub for industry collaboration. Post-show data indicates that $17 billion in business is generated annually through relationships formed at NAB Show, according to Karen Chupka, executive vice president of NAB Global Connections and Events. She spoke with the NAB Show Daily about what makes it an industry gathering point.

NAB Show Daily: How will this year’s event reflect what you’ve described as the “evolution of storytelling?”

KC: When I first started coming to NAB Show, the conversation was largely about broadcast technology and television infrastructure. That’s still incredibly important, but the world of media has grown well beyond those boundaries.

Today, you have creators building global audiences from their studios or even their homes. Major sports leagues are operating their own media platforms. Brands and enterprises are producing high-quality video at scale. Streaming platforms have become central to how audiences discover and watch content.

The show reflects that shift. This year you’ll see an expanded Creator Lab, a four-day Sports Summit and a growing presence from companies focused on streaming and cloud-based workflows. Artificial intelligence will also be highly visible, with roughly twice as many AI-focused exhibitors as last year.

All of that speaks to how the tools and the people involved in storytelling continue to evolve.

Daily: The new logo and refreshed branding suggest a more expansive vision. What does this new visual identity represent about where NAB Show is headed?

KC: The visual update certainly modernizes the look, but the real purpose was alignment with where the industry is today. NAB Show has grown into a gathering place for the entire storytelling economy, not just one sector of it. The new identity signals that broader role.

Daily: How does having a completed Las Vegas Convention Center campus enable you to think differently about the show’s future?

KC: Instead of thinking about the show as a series of disconnected halls, we can think about it as a more cohesive environment where communities, technologies and ideas flow together.

That allows us to create stronger hubs for sectors like broadcast, sports, creators and enterprise media while still encouraging people to explore outside their traditional areas. Tools like our new and improved NAB Show app also help reinforce that experience by making it easier for attendees to navigate the campus, discover sessions and connect with exhibitors in real time.

Daily: How important is creating a more consistent “home” for communities at the show in reinforcing its long-term identity?

KC: Physical space matters more than people sometimes realize. NAB Show brings together tens of thousands of professionals from across the media landscape, and many arrive looking for the conversations most relevant to their field.

Creating recognizable environments helps anchor those communities. Places like Creator Lab, the Sports Theater and TV and Radio HQ give people a natural focal point for conversations within their sector.

They’re complemented by spaces like the NAB Member Lounge and the Networking Lounge in Creator Lab, where attendees can step away from the aisles to talk with peers, meet new collaborators or connect during more informal moments like meetups and happy hours.

Daily: AI is clearly reshaping the industry. How do you see NAB Show positioning itself in relation to AI — as a showcase, a convener, a translator?

KC: First, NAB Show is a place where the technology is actually demonstrated. … We’ve doubled our AI presence this year with two dedicated AI Pavilions featuring more than 50 exhibitors, with several more in the Startup Pavilion, and roughly 300 companies across the show are highlighting work in areas related to AI.

But the show also serves as a meeting point for the people trying to apply those tools in real production environments. Engineers, creators and executives are all asking the same practical questions about how AI fits into existing infrastructure, how it affects business models and how it should be deployed responsibly.

Daily: How do you balance honoring the show’s broadcast heritage with attracting newer audiences, like creators and enterprise brands?

KC: Broadcast is still the foundation of NAB Show and always will be. Many of the standards, workflows and technical innovations that power the industry today were built by the broadcast community.

At the same time, the media landscape has changed dramatically. Creators are building businesses around their content. Brands are producing sophisticated video for marketing and communications, reflected in the show’s new Enterprise Video Strategies track. Sports leagues have become major media platforms in their own right.

The interesting thing is that these groups increasingly rely on many of the same tools and infrastructure. NAB Show brings them together so they can learn from one another.

Daily: Enterprise video production is now a larger part of the conversation. What does that say about the changing definition of “media?”
KC: Enterprise participation reflects how central video has become to modern communication. Many large organizations now operate internal media teams that produce everything from marketing campaigns to training content and live events. Those teams face many of the same challenges as traditional media companies: producing high-quality content efficiently, managing large libraries of assets and distributing material across multiple platforms.

Daily: Attendance is tracking strongly, and international participation remains broad. What do you think is driving that momentum?
KC: Companies across the world are navigating major shifts in technology, distribution and business models. … The global nature of the industry also plays a role. This year, we’re expecting roughly 60,000 attendees from about 160 countries, with more than 20% of registrations coming from outside the United States. We’re also projecting around 1,100 exhibitors, including about 125 first-time companies.

Daily: How do you expect the show, and its brand, to keep evolving?
KC: Over the next several years, I expect the show to continue integrating areas that were once treated separately: technology, production, distribution and the business side of media. Artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure and new distribution models will likely play an even larger role, and sectors like sports media and the creator economy will keep growing in importance.

What won’t change is the core purpose of the show: bringing the global storytelling community together to explore how content is created, delivered and experienced. As the industry becomes more complex, that shared meeting place becomes even more valuable.

© 2026 NAB

With less than three weeks before the 2026 NAB Show, TV Tech Content Director recently spoke with Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen, CEO of Appear about the company's latest news and plans for Las Vegas.

TV Tech: Since Appear’s successful IPO in late 2025, how has the transition to a public company influenced your long-term R&D roadmap and where are you focusing your 2026 investment to build on your present momentum?
Thomas Bostrøm Jørgensen: The IPO was an important milestone for Appear, not because it changes our R&D roadmap, but because it reinforced the momentum we have built and gives us even greater scope to accelerate. The successful IPO and our market momentum reflect customer confidence in our business, the market opportunity ahead of us, and the role Appear is playing as one of the real success stories in this sector. There is a great deal of positive energy around the company, both internally and externally, and that comes from the fact that customers are responding very strongly to our strategy, our innovation and the results we are helping them achieve.

For 2026, we are investing to build on that momentum in areas where we see the clearest customer demand and the strongest commercial opportunity. The common thread is bringing scale, performance and agility to live event production. Customers are increasingly looking for the flexibility to operate across hardware, software and cloud in hybrid environments, while maintaining the highest standards of reliability, latency and efficiency. This means continued development of our award-winning X Platform for the most demanding live production and contribution environments, expansion of our all-software-based VX to support hybrid and cloud-based workflows, and the delivery of X5, extending the application of our X Platform to a wider range of production use cases.

TVT: There is an industry-wide shift toward IP-based live production. How is Appear helping broadcasters bridge the gap between traditional SDI workflows and the "all-IP" future?
TBJ: The reality for most broadcasters is that this is not an overnight shift. They are managing a mix of legacy infrastructure, new IP investments and growing pressure to become more flexible and more efficient. Our role is to help them move at their chosen pace.

We help customers transition from SDI to IP in a way that preserves operational continuity, while opening the door to newer workflows based on standards such as ST 2110, alongside low-latency transport and processing technologies that support modern live production.

Our customers demand the flexibility to respond to the requirements of each event production. They value the features and performance density of the X Platform as their agile enabler to acquire, process, format convert, encode/decode and transport live video, audio and data in the most demanding scenarios.

TVT: Appear was selected to support NBC Sports for the 2026 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Milan Cortina. What specific technical challenges does a multivenue, high-stakes event like the Winter Games present for your X Platform compared to standard seasonal sports?
TBJ: An event like the Winter Olympics is different from seasonal sports in both scale and complexity. You are dealing with multiple venues, a very high concentration of simultaneous live feeds, a broader mix of production requirements, and a level of operational scrutiny that leaves no room for failure.

For NBC Sports, the challenge was not only transporting more content, but doing so with the quality, resilience and the timing precision expected of a global event of this scale. That includes supporting fibre and satellite contribution workflows, efficient bandwidth usage, high-quality video delivery including HDR, and the growing role of remote and distributed production across the enterprise.

The X Platform really stands out when it is faced with these types of high-density, high-stakes live environments, where customers need flexibility and scale as well as robustly proven performance for the most prestigious events.

TVT: You’ve said the YouTube partnership was driven by direct customer demand from a major European broadcaster. How are real-world customer requirements like that shaping and accelerating the X Platform roadmap, and what does YouTube SRT verification say about the growing role of low-latency, pro-grade IP delivery for both traditional distribution and direct-to-platform streaming?
TBJ: This is a very good example of how our roadmap is shaped in practice. The YouTube verification did not begin as a theoretical product exercise. It came directly from a major European broadcast platform that wanted Appear encoders to support its production pipeline. That customer requirement helped trigger the collaboration with YouTube and ultimately led to official verification of the X Platform for SRT live streaming.

For us, that is exactly how the best innovation happens. When a customer comes to us with a clear operational need, it validates the use case almost immediately and helps accelerate development in the right direction. In this case, it reinforced the importance of giving broadcasters and rights holders a seamless, resilient and low-latency way to deliver high-quality live content not only through traditional broadcast chains, but also directly to major digital platforms.

What the YouTube SRT verification shows is that professional-grade IP delivery is now firmly extending beyond traditional contribution and distribution. Broadcasters, sports organisations and production teams increasingly want one reliable, broadcast-quality workflow that can support linear, OTT, FAST and direct-to-platform delivery. That is exactly where the market is heading, and it is why customer-led developments like this are so important to the evolution of our solutions.

TVT: What will we see at Appear's booth at the NAB Show?
TBJ: At NAB, the conversation will no longer be about choosing between hardware and software, or between on-prem and cloud. It will be about combining these choices intelligently to create more scalable, more efficient and more future-ready live production workflows.

We will enable this by showcasing how Appear technology enables sports leagues, broadcasters, and service providers to address key industry trends and needs, including satellite-to-IP migration, scalable remote production (REMI), and hybrid edge-to-cloud operations. Appear will launch new advances across the X Platform, a high-capacity, ultra-dense, low-latency media processing and gateway platform for live contribution, production and distribution, alongside the commercial availability of the X5, which brings X Platform performance to smaller-scale live productions, delivering Appear quality and core capabilities in a compact, energy-efficient chassis.

At NAB our objective reflects our mission – working daily with customers and the industry to enable the future of live production through innovation and proven technology performance from Appear.

STAMFORD, Conn.—NBC Sports said its Super Bowl coverage Feb. 8 set an all-time media record for peak viewing, with 137.8 million watching in the second quarter as the Seattle Seahawks led the New England Patriots 6-0.

The Seahawks’ 29-13 victory over the Patriots averaged 124.9 million viewers on NBC, Peacock, Telemundo, NBC Sports Digital, and NFL+, based on the official live-plus-same-day Nielsen Big Data + Panel data. It ranked as the second-most watched show in U.S. history, behind last February’s Super Bowl on Fox.

This year’s Super Bowl was also the most-watched show in the history of NBCUniversal, which celebrates 100 years of NBC in 2026.

“The Super Bowl and the NFL once again delivered a blockbuster audience across the NBC broadcast network, Peacock, and Telemundo, and provided an unprecedented lead-in to our Primetime in Milan coverage,” NBC Sports President Rick Cordella saids. “The Super Bowl and the Olympics are the two most powerful events in the world, and we salute our talented production, tech, and announce teams who delivered best-in-class presentations for our viewers, stations and partners.”

In addition, Telemundo delivered the most-watched Super Bowl in the history of U.S. Spanish-language television, averaging 3.3 million viewers. Telemundo’s audience peaked during the halftime show, with an average of 4.8 million viewers—the most-watched Super Bowl halftime in Spanish-language TV history.

The halftime show also set a number of records.

Total social consumption (inclusive of fans, owned platforms, broadcast partners, influencers, etc.) of the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show starring Bad Bunny set a record of 4 billion views after the first 24 hours, up 137% year over year, per Ripple Analytics.

Over 55% of all NFL social views of the halftime show came from international markets.

The three most-viewed NFL social posts in history are now Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show clips. In total, these clips have been viewed for more than 115 years on social media platforms:

• “Only Thing More Powerful Than Hate is Love”—@NFL on Instagram had 179 million views, most viewed clip on NFL Social ever with more than half (54%) of views coming from outside the U.S.
• Bad Bunny Listing Countries Before Spiking Football—@NFL on Instagram had 168 million, the second most-watched clip on NFL social ever with 68% of views coming from outside the U.S.
• Bad Bunny Listing Countries Before Spiking Football—@NFL on TikTok had 100 million views; people have spent a combined 53-plus years watching this clip already; 60% of the viewership is female, 62% comes from outside the United States; 91% of viewers under 35; 36% under 25.

In addition, the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show averaged 128.2 million viewers from 8:15-8:30 p.m. ET in the U.S. Full global viewership for the halftime show will be available early next week.

Apple also reported that immediately following the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, Bad Bunny listens on Apple Music were up 7 times. “DtMF,” “BAILE INoLVIDABLE,” and “Tití Me Preguntó” were the most-streamed songs immediately after the show. Other Apple Music notables from the Halftime Show include:

In the hours following his performance, Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Set List playlist became the most-played Set List on Apple Music.

• The day after Super Bowl LX, Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS landed on the album charts in 155 countries, reaching the Top 10 in 128 countries and claiming the #1 spot in 46 countries, including Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Brazil, Germany, France and Spain.
• Following his appearance in the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show, Bad Bunny also occupied nearly a quarter of the Daily Top 100 Global chart, with 24 songs in the Top 100, 9 songs in the Top 25, and 6 songs in the Top 10, including “DtMF,” which was the #1 song.
• 6 of the 24 songs re-entered the Daily Top 100 Global chart for the first time since at least February 2025, and his single with Cardi B, “I Like It,” re-entered the chart for the first time since January 2020.

The popularity of the Super Bowl also helped NBC’s coverage of the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics. Following the Vince Lombardi Trophy presentation on the field at Levi’s Stadium, Super Bowl play-by-play voice Mike Tirico hosted “Primetime in Milan,” which featured Lindsey Vonn’s downhill run, and gold-medal-winning performances by Breezy Johnson in the downhill and Team USA in the team figure skating event at the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

Sunday’s “Primetime in Milan” and “Milan Prime” presentations averaged 42 million viewers, marking NBCUniversal’s largest Winter Games audience since Day 2 of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics (a span of 53 event days) and an increase of 73% over the corresponding 2022 Beijing Olympics show (24.3 million), which also followed the Super Bowl.

In addition, Sunday was Peacock’s best day ever in terms of both reach and hours streamed, and featured the post-Super Bowl debut of “The Burbs,” which was the highest day-one Peacock original debut ever.

More detailed viewership metrics will be available from Nielsen later this week.

This is the fifth installment in a multi-part series by broadcast historian and former TV Tech Technology Editor James O'Neal.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

By the late 1970s, electronic news gathering was in use at almost every U.S. television market, large or small, with film coverage of events rapidly becoming a fond—or perhaps not-so-fond—memory. ENG had proven itself to be an absolutely essential part of television news operations.

LIive News Feeds Could Sometimes Be Problematic
However, as accepted and indispensable as it proved itself to be, ENG did have a fundamental limitation when it came to live coverage of breaking events — there had to be a clear microwave path from a station’s ENG truck back to its receive site. This “line-of-site” limitation was especially problematic in large cities with tall buildings, and in other areas where terrain and geographic features could block signals. And as more and more stations (and television networks) adopted ENG, another issue arose — spectrum congestion.

Even in areas with relatively few TV stations, filing fast-breaking or even routine stories could sometimes be challenging.

Bob Russo, who was with New Haven, Conn.’s WTNH when that station first implemented ENG, recalled that “with only seven microwave channels available in Connecticut, this created a problem at times.” Russo noted that in setting up for ENG operations, WTNH established two microwave receive sites, which, due to the relative flatness and small size of Connecticut, provided coverage from a lot of sites within the state.

“One of our sites was at our transmitter in Hamden, north of downtown New Haven,” said Russo. “The antenna was mounted on our tower, 840-feet up. The other site was in Hartford (about 35 miles distant) atop a bank building. Each had four Nurad horn antennas that could be switched remotely. With double-hopping, we could hit a great deal of the state. However, there are some valley areas that made things difficult.”

ENG microwave connectivity issues were not limited to areas with deep valleys, tall mountains and high buildings. Even in very flat and open areas of the United States, microwaving news stories back to home base could be problematic. As recalled by Roger Herring, who was with Tulsa’s KTUL-TV in the early days of ENG, getting signals across the great open plains of Oklahoma could also be daunting.

“A lot of time there were events that affected us in Tulsa that took place in the capital, Oklahoma City,” said Herring. “Microwave at that distance (about 100 miles) wasn’t always possible, even with relatively high antenna locations. This limited our ability to cover events from just anywhere in Oklahoma (an area of almost 70,000 square miles).

(The Tulsa television market also extended into the neighboring states of Kansas, Arkansas and Missouri, with the Ozark Mountains to the east of Tulsa further limiting ENG microwave connectivity.)

Satellite Video Linkage Comes of Age
Concurrent with ENG boom period in the latter part of the 1970s, a solution to both the terrestrial blockage and transmission channels was also emerging — an increasing interest in use of communications satellites for relaying television signals. Although video had been relayed via satellite as early as 1962, use of this technology had been very limited due to high costs, and the large physical size of transmitting and receiving antennas (10-meters (33-feet) or more).

Further, the susceptibility of weak satellite downlink signals to terrestrial microwave interference generally required earth stations to be located well away from cities, with connectivity to users provided by common carrier microwave and coaxial cable runs. Early on, this restricted satellite use to major networks, and mostly for well-planned coverage of predictable high-profile events such as the Olympic Games or the “splashdown” of early manned spacecraft.

However, this was eventually destined to change; initially from improvements in low-noise amplifiers and other technological advances, but much more profoundly with an Oct. 18, 1979 decision by the FCC to eliminate licensing of all earth stations, along with the expensive and time-consuming frequency coordination process necessary for establishing a satellite receiving facility. The commission further aided the satellite communications industry by dropping its previous mandate governing minimum size of satellite receiving antennas.

The Commission’s change in stance was universally heralded, with Broadcasting magazine opining:

“The FCC has opened the floodgate on receive-only earth stations — a development of almost revolutionary significance to radio, of great importance to television and, indeed, of signal significance to all telecommunications users, including newspapers.”

This decision was also destined to decrease the cost of entry into the satellite club, with manufacturers beginning to lower unit costs due to increased sales volumes and industry competition.

On learning of the FCC decision, Sid Topol, chairman of a major satellite equipment supplier, Scientific Atlanta, remarked that while his company’s earth station sales volume had reached hundreds of thousands of units, SA was willing “to take this to a volume in the millions.” Topol predicted the arrival of earth stations that could be erected in a single day and with nothing more than “a Boy Scout compass and a Hewlett Packard calculator,” providing every broadcaster with satellite reception capability.

Three Mile Island Spurs Connectivity Changes
Even before the loosening of earth station regulations, some broadcasters were already looking to the future and beginning to think about how satellite linkage might be useful in news operations, especially in the aftermath of a news event that generated banner headline around the globe.

This was the March 1979 incident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station located near Harrisburg, Penn. that resulted in the melting of nuclear fuel and the potential for a widespread lease of radioactive material. News teams from major networks and independent operations alike converged on the scene (or as least as close as authorities would allow), solidly booking any available video connectivity.

Once the danger had passed, at least one broadcast group’s news coverage postmortem considered how its coverage of this unprecedented event might have been seriously impacted by lack of terrestrial video circuit availability. This was the Westinghouse Broadcasting (Group W) operation, which operated stations in several markets (Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh) fairly close to the power plant.

This potential, along with the rising cost of AT&T terrestrial video circuits and the public’s increasing appetite for news on the local/regional level prompted Westinghouse to contract with Western Union for regular transponder time on its Westar bird. Not only did this ensure a transmission path for moving stories from the field to Group W stations, it also permitted daily exchanges of news, features, and sports coverage among stations. Westinghouse also allowed stations outside of the Group W fold to subscribe to this newsfeed service.

While large dish sizes and the relative complexity of the C-band satellite uplink technology at the time precluded its application in bringing back “breaking news” from the field, the Westinghouse initiative did not go unnoticed by others.

NBC Establishes Viability of Ku-Band Spectrum
Another sign of satellite connectivity’s importance was also beginning to take shape at about this time — the replacement of terrestrial microwave and coaxial cable circuit (primarily AT&T Long Lines) with satellite paths for delivery of network programming to network affiliates. Although PBS had pioneered this movement in 1978, the big three commercial nets adopted a “wait and see” attitude, with concerns about moving to a delivery platform with a potential single point of failure, conversion costs, and the loss of the overall comfort level established after three decades of leaving program delivery to AT&T.

As expressed by CBS’s then vice president of operational resources, Frank Smith Jr., in a Broadcasting magazine interview:

"The systems we now have do the job on an economic basis that is acceptable to us."

However, ABC’s president of broadcast operations and engineering, Julius Barnathan, observed that his network was spending some $20 million per year on AT&T distribution charges, and seemed to be a bit more open to exploring satellite delivery.

"I'm willing to go another direction," said Barnathan, "but it's all (about) cost effectiveness" and reliability.

Despite these initial holdouts, it was only a matter of time before the commercial nets caved.

NBC went first, launching its Skypath satellite affiliate delivery in early 1984. The network’s decision to use a Ku-band transponder for this service was very significant in the path eventually leading to satellite newsgathering.

Prior to NBC’s Skypath, Ku-band satellite spectrum was generally viewed as less-than-desirable due to potential for rain fade and the requirement for very precise dish pointing.

However, a much smaller entity, St. Paul, Minn.-based Hubbard Broadcasting, had used the Ku-band to ease into the satellite communications, first in 1981 with a satellite-delivered direct-to-home TV service, and then with the realization that a Ku uplink could be fitted on a mobile platform, green-lighted construction in 1983 of the first-ever vehicle specifically designed for relaying live video news feeds.

Eyewitness to Tech History
Fred Baumgartner, a retired career broadcast engineer, recalls his inadvertent witnessing of the first use of the Hubbard SNG truck and the birth of satellite news gathering.

“This was in June 1984 and I was working at a Wisconsin radio station,” recalled Baumgartner. “There were some terrible storms passing through the area that Thursday evening, with the Madison (Wisc.) weather bureau issuing all sorts of severe weather warnings. In the wee small hours Friday — that would have been June eighth — a state trooper apparently out on routine patrol drove to Barneveld, a small community about 25 miles from Madison, and found nothing there but wreckage and a few dazed people wandering around. The whole town had literally vanished.”

The community had been in the direct path of an F5 tornado, with winds estimated to have been in excess of 300 mph. Baumgartner, an amateur radio operator, who, upon learning about the devastation, traveled to Barneveld to assist emergency responders with communications.

In addition to viewing a community that had literally ceased to exist, Baumgartner also discovered something he’d never seen before — a self-contained vehicle specially outfitted for uplinking video to satellites.

“The truck had just arrived from somewhere around the Chicago area,” he recalled. “I was curious, as I’d never heard of satellite news gathering. I met the operator, Ray Conover who was an engineer with the Hubbard stations, and learned that the truck was still being put together when he got orders to take it Barneveld. Ray was literally connecting gear up as it was being driven from Chicago. Although I didn’t realize it then, I would have to argue that this was first-ever SNG truck and the first use of this type of technology. “

Although Conover — known by many as “Dr. Dish” — passed from the scene several years ago, Baumgartner’s recollection of the June 8, 1984 event was borne out by Jay Adrick, who, a few months later got to do a close-up evaluation of the vehicle created by Conover.

“I believe that the first SNG vehicle was built by Hubbard,” said Adrick. “They did it on their own, building an early prototype somewhere around 1984.”

THE ROLLOUT OF SATELLITE NEWS GATHERING

Following an evaluation of the Hubbard prototype SNG truck, Adrick realized that there would likely be a market for such vehicles and as the company he had and others had established — Midwest Communications —was already constructing ENG trucks, it would be a logical next step to fill this anticipated demand.

Adrick admitted that the first Midwest SNG product, which appeared near the end of 1984 or in early 1985, was more or less a copy of the Hbbard truck, down to the 3.0-meter Andrew antenna selected by Conover.

“The Andrew dish was really designed for use in earth stations,” recalled Adrick. “It had plenty of elevation range, but was very limited in moving side-to-side, and at 3.0-meters, required a rather large truck frame to accommodate it.”

He explained that the only practical way to fit such an antenna into a mobile environment was to mount it in an open space at the very rear of the truck.

“These first SNG products were sometimes referred to as ‘garbage trucks’ due to their open back end and similarity to vehicles used for refuse collection.”

Despite the high price tag of the Midwest SNG vehicles — ranging from around $300k for a “bare bones” setup to $400k for a completely equipped unit ($900k to $1.1 million in today’s money) — Midwest did a brisk business, with CNN becoming one of its first SNG customers.

“This was not long after we’d completed our prototype truck, and followed a big train derailment in northern Ohio,” recalled Joe Mack, former Midwest Communications systems sales manager. “We got a call from someone at CNN saying ‘we know you have this satellite truck, can you sell it to us?’”

Midwest gained a reputation for creating better and better satellite trucks through their creative engineering approach, becoming a leader in the field and selling hundreds of units.

“We didn’t want to be a ‘me too,’” said Adrick. “We did a lot of things that were proprietary as opposed to just going out and assembling,” noting that one of the first Midwest innovations involved the truck’s antenna system.

“The 3.0-meter Andrew dish required a good-sized truck and as we had a relationship with another antenna manufacturer, Vertex, we went to them (to see if an improvement could be made). Rex Vardeman there worked out a design for a 2.6-meter antenna with a laminated reflector, an offset Cassegrain feed, and a very substantial azimuth-over-elevation mount. This allowed us to go to a medium-sized truck chassis.

“Also, we realized that with Ku, you have some losses even with a short waveguide run. We went to Microwave Communications Lab (MCL) to develop a TWT amplifier, combiner and control system that could be mounted in a rack inside the truck directly under the antenna. This cut losses and still kept amplifier out of the weather.”

Adrick noted that Midwest added another (pre-GPS) innovation, the use of the terrestrial LORAN navigation system for establishing the truck’s geographical coordinates and making it easier to determine satellite antenna pointing.

“We supplied an automated antenna controller that used an internal LORAN receiver for truck location. This unit made by Research Concepts used a lookup table for all known satellites,” said Adrick, “You could pull up to a location and select the satellite you wanted to use. The controller would drive the azimuth and elevation motors, with the operator just doing a minor tweaking of the dish. It made manual acquisition a lot easier.”

Sharing With Others
In addition to allowing transmission of breaking news events from just about any location accessible by a motor vehicle, SNG also brought with it the advantage previously realized by the Group W stations in their early use of fixed location satellite ground stations, the ability to simultaneously provide feeds to multiple users.

“Satellite transmissions are advantageous as your feed is up on a bird and everyone can see it,” observed Leland Kesler, a retired satellite truck engineer who began his career in SNG in 1995. (Kesler also refers to himself as a “truck monkey.) “This made it easy to do pool feeds without a lot of complicated routing of signals on the ground.”

Herring, who was on the road a few years before Kesler, agreed.

“Early on, breaking news coverage for our station was the prime reason for acquiring a truck,” said Hering. “You wanted to be the first to get there and the first to get the story on the air. The truck gave us the ability to cover stories anywhere in the state without having to depend on the limited range of microwave. It also gave us the ability to go out of state and cover stories that were national or semi-national in scope. We were able to support news operations for other stations in our group. We’d tell them that we were going to put a story up on the bird and when it was available. We also did many stories that ABC used.”

Herring recalled that his station’s (KTUL’s) SNG truck was instrumental in the airing of initial reports on the bombing of the Alfred A. Murrah Building Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

“We fed our station, as well as other stations in the Allbritton group, he said. “And we also provided ABC with feeds until they could get their own truck in place.”

Live Video From Just About Anywhere
With the widespread adoption of Ku-band satellite news gathering following the inaugural Hubbard tornado coverage, the next logical step was to create a means for deliver news feeds without the necessity for driving long distances in specially equipped vehicles.

According to Midwest Communications’ Adrick and Mack, pioneering work on a “flyaway” travel case-based system began at their company.

“This was in 1986,” said Adrick. “CBS was interested in a flyaway type of uplink for use in covering the planned October summit conference between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that was going to take place in Reykjavik, Iceland.

“In developing this, we partnered again with Vertex to develop an antenna that could be disassembled into components small enough to be easily carried in field cases. They came up with a 1.8-meter dish with a hexagonal reflector hub and six panels that could be hemmed together to form the full reflector. Composite material was used for the reflector. It was two or three inches thick and could be stored in a single carry case. The Cassegrain feed horn and boom were transported in another case. A third case was used for the hub and antenna base.

“The next part was coming up with a compact portable amplifier. MCL didn’t have what we needed, so we turned to a New York company, Satellite Transmission Systems (STS), based in Hauppauge. They used a couple of TWT tubes along with a phase combiner and a pair of Varian power supplies and were able to get everything to fit in three component cases. Scientific Atlanta provided the exciter for the package. The rest of the equipment was simple — a 10 X 1 switcher, a monitor and an L-band receiver with a downconverter.

“The first of these flyaway units was delivered to CBS,” said Adrick. “Then CNN bought several more.”

Midwest’s Joe Mack recalled that part of the acceptance of the flyaway unit by CNN was being able to demonstrate that it would operate anywhere in the lower 48, as well as in Hawaii and Alaska.

“We had to make damn sure that it was operational in all parts of the U.S.,” recalled Mack. “We went around with a couple of CNN engineers to places like Brownsville, Texas and Florida, and all the way to Hawaii. The Hawaii test probably was the first use of a flyaway on an Intelsat hemispherical beam for delivery to CNN in Atlanta.”

Tony Williams, former director of engineering and operations at Atlanta’s Turner teleport, and someone who traveled extensively in connection with CNN coverage, recalled some of his experiences with the “suitcase” uplink developed by Midwest, especially its portability.

“The whole system typically went out in about 12 travel cases, with none of these weighing much over 100 pounds. They could travel on any airplane.”

Williams, in reflecting on his many uses of CNN’s flyaway equipment, observed that there would have been no live video coverage of the 1993 civil war U.S.-led UN Operation 'Restore Hope' in Somalia without the system.

“This was the most difficult deployment I was ever involved in,” said Williams. “It was a real nightmare. The military was set to make an amphibious landing and I was on the rooftop of an abandoned airport with Christiane Amanpour and three other network correspondents.”

Williams recalled that getting video back to CNN’s homebase in Atlanta was delayed due to a logistical issue.

“In traveling to Mogadishu, I stopped in London to pick up a flyaway pack that had been in Rome for some time,” he said. “It hadn’t been used for years, and when I finally got things assembled in Mogadishu I found that I couldn’t locate the satellite’s beacon with the spectrum monitor in the kit, and had to go out and locate a full-blown spectrum analyzer. It took six hours from start to finish before we were ready to go.

“We finally got on the air with Christiane reporting, and not long afterwards the amphibious assault started. This one was really crazy and dangerous. I remember asking myself: ‘you’re an engineer; what am I doing in a war zone?’”

Williams recalled that this delay came back to haunt him from a direction different than CNN management.

“About six months later, I was working at the Atlanta satellite uplink and my boss informed me that some DoD people wanted to talk to me. It seems that the military had wanted to see the CNN feed before they started their operations and I’d held up that deployment.”

In reflecting on ease of use, Williams admitted that deployment of a satellite truck would have almost always been faster in terms of getting on the air (“flyaways” typically took slightly more than an hour to unpack, assemble, power, and perform satellite coordination), the ability to get extremely close to a breaking news event just about anywhere on the planet made the travel case uplink an invaluable tool for news organizations.

“We were able to get to news scenes out in the middle of nowhere,” said Williams. “The flyaway was absolutely a gamechanger.”

(The next installment of this ENG history will examine the impact of digital technology on news gathering operations.)

This is the fourth installment in a multi-part series by broadcast historian and former TV Tech Technology Editor James O'Neal.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

As documented in the previous installment of this lookback at electronic newsgathering’s development, the era of “modern” ENG came about in the mid-1970s, as a “perfect storm” in technology finally enabled broadcasters to move away from movie film for capturing out-of-studio news events and into electronic imaging and recording.

After the initial pieces — smaller, lighter-weight color cameras and videotape recorders, along with editing systems that accommodated this new media —began to fall into place, broadcasters started to dip their collective toes in the water, with some embracing the technological shift wholeheartedly and others holding back for one reason or another. However, the ENG movement had begun and it was inevitable that film’s days were numbered.

As with most nascent industries and endeavors, movement into ENG was not painless, bringing along new problems and issues for early adopters. One of these, described in the previous ENG history installment, involved operators at full-service filling stations assuming that van camera or cable ports were gas tank filler openings and inadvertently flooding a vehicle with gasoline. Other issues were more subtle and didn’t involve third parties.

Powering First Gen ENG Gear Was Not Always Easy
Portable television cameras continued to shrink both in bulk and weight. Imager sensitivity, or the ability to produce satisfactory images in low-light situations, also became a driving force in R&D groups, as did reductions in electrical power requirements.

Power demands of most all of the early ENG cameras were so great that operators wore “belts” with compartments for a sufficient number of rather heavy “NiCad” (nickel-cadmium) batteries to accommodate anticipated shooting times. According to Jay Ballard, who was with NBC when the 1970s ENG movement began, power requirements for some of the early cameras made battery packs even more cumbersome.

“The first cameras used at NBC’s Washington O&O, WRC-TV, were Norelco PCP-90s,” Ballard recalled. “They were paired with Ampex VR-3000 two-inch quad backpack video recorders. (Both) had substantial power requirements.”

He noted that the NiCads powering most early ENG gear could be problematic. One issue was a “memory” effect, with batteries that were not fully discharged before recharging developing substantially shorter operating times. Another issue was the tendency of fully-charged NiCads to self-discharge on their own, creating unpredictable results when an ENG shoot was underway.

“Battery life was always an issue,” noted Ballard. “We used batteries from a number of manufacturers along with special charging (equipment) to try and overcome this problem.”

George Lemaster, who was also with NBC during ENG’s initial rollout also recalled the demands on the operation’s engineering department in terms of battery maintenance.

“NBC Washington deployed more than 20 ENG crews and there was one technician whose duties centered on maintenance of the large number of batteries being used,” he said. “These were NiCads and also some very expensive silver zinc that required a special charger.”

Lemaster amplified Ballard’s NiCad observations.

“Some would last a long time and some wouldn’t. It was the job of the battery technician to determine the run time of each of the battery packs in use. He would discharge them using a timer to see how long they lasted. NBC practice was just to trash a sub-par NiCad pack,” he said. “These were made up of several ‘D’ cells, and usually only one these had failed by shorting out, but that meant the rest were very near end of life.

Those involved in early ENG also recall the heavy and uncomfortable “battery belts,” which completely encircled the camera operator’s mid-section and contained multiple pouches for the batteries needed to power both the ENG camera and the equally power-hungry portable lighting instruments necessary to produce airable video in many low-light situations.

Art Donahue, who shot news and documentary footage for a number of New England stations, remembered some of his own experiences with battery belts.

“In cold weather, you usually needed multiple battery belts to get through a shoot,” he recalled. “The cold weather affected battery output and you would have to carry the extra belts under your parka to keep them warm.

Donahue also recalled another issue that existed before batteries were integrated within camera and recorder housings.

“The connecting cables were always a problem. They kept getting pulled out and frequently failed,” he said. “We had to kept plenty of spares.”

Those Problematic Masts
Microwave antennas used on the early ENG vehicles had very simple pan-and-tilt mounts, with the dish only a few feet above the top of the van or truck. While such mounts were satisfactory when beaming signals to a communications tower or high-rise receiving/relay site, their low elevation above ground was a limiting factor in getting video back to the TV station.

It wasn’t long in the evolution of ENG that some stations began to experiment with telescoping pipe masts in an effort to elevate van transmitting antennas. Later, a commercial product using compressed air as a means for raising the pipe sections was developed and soon became standard equipment on all ENG vehicles.

While these pneumatically-driven telescoping masts did provide greatly enhanced coverage range, they came with their own set of issues. One of the worst usually happened when a crew was in a hurry to go live with a breaking news event and the vehicle operator inadvertently parking under powerlines and elevating the mast without checking for obstructions.

This sometimes-lethal occurrence was eventually remedied via a sensor for nearby AC powerline fields and an interlock that would not allow extension of masts if a power line hazard existed.

Another issue was the occasional “stuck” mast, that typically happened in cold weather.

As explained by Bob Russo, former chief engineer at New Haven’s WTHN, this was due to freezing of water vapor in the compressed air supply used to drive the mast extension.

“This was something we always faced during cold weather,” said Russo. “The moisture in the compressed air would freeze the O-rings used to provide an air seal around each of the pipe sections. We tried any number of things to keep moisture out of the air supply, but every so often the O-rings would freeze and keep the operator from lowering the mast after the news feed.”

Russo explained that the remedy for such freeze-ups was to unbolt the collars at the top of the mast sections, starting with the one closest to the truck. He recalled one rather catastrophic situation involving a stuck mast on the station’s ENG truck that occurred when the operator either misunderstood or didn’t follow the procedure supplied by the station’s chief of maintenance.

“This was in January,” recalled Russo. “There was a really awful accident involving a line of cars stopped and waiting to pay tolls when they were hit by a tractor-trailer rig. We were on the scene for live coverage, and when this wrapped up, the van operator found that he couldn’t get the mast to lower and called in to speak with the maintenance chief for instructions on freeing the stuck mast. This called for loosening the U-bolts on the collars on each of the sections.

“Apparently the operator misunderstood his instructions and applied air pressure after loosening the first collar. The result was the launch of the eight-section 42-foot mast and microwave antenna. When it came down it fell across the highway, fortunately, it came down clear of the stopped cars, otherwise, there could have been additional casualties that night.”

Russo also recalled van operators sometimes overriding interlocks that prevented van movement when the mast was deployed.

“They would be in a hurry to get a better microwave shot back to the station and decide to move the van a few feet without lowering the antenna. We had one incident where this resulted in damage from the mast hitting a tree limb.”

Living With 'Plastic Faces'
Early ENG adopters recall another issue associated with conversion from film to tape operations that no amount of operator training or change in workflow practices could alter. This was a rather peculiar "look" associated with news events captured on small-format videotape machines. In order to shrink the profile, weight, and power requirements of videotape recorders, sacrifices in performance had to be made. The greatest of these was reduction in video bandwidth.

“I evaluated small format machines for video and chroma response,” Ballard recalled. “The video they produced was nowhere near what a conventional ‘quad’ broadcast machine produces.”

The problem stemmed from lower head-to-tape “writing speeds” that were necessary to allow video recording on small and easily handled magnetic tape media. It should be recalled too, that the 3/4-inch Sony U-matic cassette tape format—which became an early ENG industry standard—was never intended for broadcast purposes, but rather for educational and institutional applications where size, convenience and ease of use trumped video performance. The author once measured video frequency response of a new U-matic machine and observed that there was little above 2.25 MHz.

Obviously, NTSC color video, with its chroma information centered around a 3.58 MHz carrier, could not be captured by the U-matic or any of the other first generation of small portable video recorders, so some electronic trickery had to be employed. As explained by Ballard, this involved some electronic alterations.

“Although Sony may have been the first manufacturer to employ it in video recorders, the principle of ‘color under’ came from RCA back in the 1950s,” he said, explaining that when NTSC color was introduced in late 1953, a number of television stations received their network feeds via AT&T Long Lines “L1” coaxial cable paths that dated back to the early 1940s. These coaxial cable routes were designed basically to accommodate multiple voice telephone circuits, with the technology leading to them going back to the 1930s when video was still in its infancy.

As such, L1 frequency response was limited to somewhat less than 3 MHz. To transmit color, RCA devised a scheme for bandpass filtering of the 3.58 MHz chroma content, then filtering the luminance component so that it did not exceed 2.0 MHz. The chroma content was heterodyned down in frequency and transmitted slightly above the bandwidth-limited luminance.

When the modified NTSC color signal was delivered to a TV station, the process was reversed, with the chroma being converted back to its 3.58 MHz berth and recombined with the luminance component. While it wasn’t the best looking video, the process did allow stations to broadcast network color until AT&T could improve their delivery system.

A similar scheme was employed to accommodate color in early small-format video recorders.

“This was okay with one generation of video recording,” said Ballard. “The problem arose when you started editing these tapes.”

Such editing necessitated re-recording the already bandwidth-compromised video, especially the chroma information. After just three generations, surviving detail in the colored areas was limited to no more than a few tens of kilohertz. This lack of detail was especially noticeable in human faces, with the effect being dubbed “plastic faces.”

“This is what happens when you try to squeeze in too much information into limited bandwidth,” said Ballard, “With ‘quad’ and (later) “type C,’ you didn’t have this color problem, as these formats were designed for broadcast.”

While "plastic faces" were never an issue when news capture was done on 16mm color film, it became something of an early ENG trademark, with the immediacy afforded by use of small-format videotape recording generally overriding quality concerns both at network and local TV station levels.

“NBC did have a rule of thumb that any videotape format used had to hold up for at least three generations,” recalled Ballard. “But this was very loose.”

The adoption of video recorders not really intended for broadcast use also created another issue; one that was not so apparent as plastic faces.

‘A Little Extra Blanking Never Hurt Anyone'
The airing of recordings made on so-called “slant-track” VTRs, especially those employing the 3/4-inch “U-matic” format, came with a defect of sorts that the developers of the earlier quadruplex broadcast format machines had been mindful of, and took measures to conceal.

This was the slight perturbation in recovered video that existed when one video playback head ended reading a recorded video track and another head began to scan the next track. The smaller slant track VTRs adopted for ENG were designed with two heads on a common drum, with each recording (or playing back) a complete field (262.5-lines) of video.

On playback, as one head completed its scan of a video track, it was switched off and the second head became active. This resulted in a small amount of visible “flutter,” sometimes referred to as “flag waving” in the recovered video. Sony and other manufacturers designed their machines to place this switching near the bottom of the frame, just above the vertical blanking interval (VBI) where it was less noticeable.

As explained by George Lemaster, a problem arose when some broadcasters wanted to hide this disturbance, in connection with external time base correctors (TBCs) used to provide “legal” sync and blanking signals from the VTRs.

“The CVS 504 (a very popular early TBC) had a ‘vertical advance’ control,” said Lemaster. “Broadcasters would use this control to shift switching out of bottom of picture, and this increased vertical blanking beyond 21 lines.”

The reasoning was that a few extra lines of black in the picture didn’t matter that much. However, at about the same time as the ENG movement was sweeping through the industry, the VBI was beginning to get a lot of attention with the arrival of vertical interval test and reference signals, as well as space for accommodating ancillary data delivery services (Teletext and closed captioning).

An FCC field inspector really didn’t need specialized test equipment to spot stations with excessively wide VBIs. All it took was a quick look at a TV monitor or receiver. Within a four-year period (1974 to 1978), the Commission had issued nearly 250 citations. And as Broadcasting magazine reported, it wasn’t “mostly the little guys” who were being cited. A number of major market stations, including network O&Os, had been ticketed.

“I do recall the FCC handing out citations,” said Lemaster. “NBC came out with a set of standards to comply with FCC rules. We had to go through all of our tape machines and set blanking widths to make sure they were correct.

“Back then, you could also misadjust cameras to produce excessive blanking widths,” he said, noting that the airing of recordings produced by out of tolerance cameras could result in non-compliance with FCC rules.

“NBC would reject tapes (from outside sources) with blanking widths that were too wide.”

By June 1978, the blanking situation had gotten serious enough to prompt the FCC to issue a Notice of Inquiry to determine if changes needed to be made to Commission regulations governing television waveforms, and setting a one-year grace period that allowed blanking widths to slightly exceed specs.

An industry group — the Broadcasters Ad Hoc Committee on Television Blanking Widths — was also created with the objective of helping to “identify problem areas and recommend corrective action” to the FCC.

Eventually, blanking discrepancies were resolved through greater operator vigilance, along with the development of technology for easily spotting and correcting signal issues.

(The next installment of this ENG history series will examine the addition of communications satellite technology as a news gathering tool.)

This is the third in a multipart series by broadcast historian and former TV Tech Technology Editor James O'Neal.

Part 1
Part 2

With the introduction of increasingly better and more reliable transistor types during the 1960s, broadcast television equipment steadily moved away from large and power-hungry vacuum tube designs to transistorized versions. The introduction of the integrated circuit also played a role in miniaturizing gear and making it more reliable.

Camera Imaging devices also improved, with the Plumbicon and other tubes beginning to rival the performance of the much larger image orthicons. Color cameras shrank in bulk and weight—from units requiring several persons to lift and racks of support equipment—to models that could be carried by a single person (with support electronics contained in a separate package, usually in the form of a backpack).

CBS Laboratories created such a device as early as 1968, the Minicam VI. RCA ushered in the era of self-contained portable cameras with the release of the TKP-45 in 1974. Video recorders also became more compact, with Ampex introducing a portable version of its “quad” machines, the VR-3000, in 1967. This rather revolutionary recorder was deemed “portable” in that its 55-pound load could be managed by one person and powered by batteries.

With this miniaturization of cameras and recorders, it was just a matter of time until someone decided to pair them and go out and cover a news event. Just who, when, and where this initial “modern” ENG initiative took place will likely remain a mystery; however, by 1974, at least several broadcasters and a couple of major networks were quietly trialing ENG.

Project X: ‘Anyone Talking About It Will Be Dismissed'
Nashville’s WLAC-TV (now WTVF) was one of these early electronic newsgathering adopters, and in mid-1974 launched a secret project to construct the first ENG vehicle in that market. According to one member of the engineering team who took part in the initiative, none of the personnel involved were allowed to reveal to other station members or others what they were working on, under the threat of instant termination if there was a leak of information.

“Station management really wanted to beat the competition,” said Butch Smith, one of the six or seven WLAC-TV engineers assigned to the project. “We were told by the station’s director of engineering, Ralph Hucaby, not to reveal anything about what we were working on, under penalty of dismissal from employment.”

Smith said that work on the ENG unit took place in a locked area of the station’s basement and due to its secretive nature, one of the construction team dubbed it “Project X.”

“I’m not 100% certain when we went on the air with our first live transmission from the van, but construction started sometime in July and it took us three or four months to complete,” said Smith. “We beat the other Nashville stations considerably.”

According to Smith, the station selected Ikegami HL-33 cameras for the project, but after more than half a century, he is uncertain about the video recorder used. He recalled that, as the van was equipped with a 2-GHz microwave transmitter, a majority of the stories covered went live.

“We had a receive site on top of the high-rise Life and Casualty Insurance Company tower building, as they owned the station then. This was a 33- or 34-story building, and we could go live from just about anywhere around Nashville.”

The NAB Show That Heralded in the ENG Era
A year later, interest in ENG had increased to the point that the April 1975 NAB Show offered its first “workshop” on the subject, with show organizers not really prepared for the number of individuals who decided to learn about the new methodology. As the post-show issue of Broadcasting magazine headlined it, “ENG is SRO at NAB.”

“If you're not already into electronic newsgathering, get your toe in the water," declared Julius Barnathan, ABC’s then-vice president of engineering operations, and one of the workshop’s presenters. (Another was WLAC-TV’s Ralph Hucaby.)

Broadcasters, eager to learn as much as they could about ENG, stood three-deep at the rear of the room, and according to Broadcasting, “completely lined the side walls and were crouched or seated on the floor in front of the stage.”

Another presenter, Thomas M. Battista, vice president and general manager of then CBS St. Louis O&O, KMOX-TV (now KMOV), described that station’s ENG experimentation, observing that in addition to benefiting local news coverage, it also served as a pilot program for CBS’s eventual foray into ENG.

He noted that with ENG, KMOX-TV had covered 20% more stories in March 1975 than in the same period a year earlier. Battista stated that the number of technical personnel involved in news coverage at his station shrank from 56 to 50. (WLAC-TV’s Hucaby reported that he expected his station’s expenditure of $300,000 (almost $2 million in today’s money) would be fully amortized in six years.)

“If you put together a good system and come up with better news programs, you'll make loads more money and won't have to worry about the cost," said Battista.

If that weren’t enough inducement for attendees to start budgeting for ENG equipment—of which there was plenty at the show—ABC’s Barnathan offered two other incentives.

“The first key to ENG is the ability to ‘go live,’” he said. “The second is ‘to save your ass late in the afternoon.’"

(As an historical note, a few years prior to the KMOX-TV O&O implementation, the CBS network had trialed electronic technology as an alternative to news film, equipping a few two-person crews with either CBS Laboratories Minicam VI's (introduced in 1968), or the slightly later Norelco PCP-90 three-tube cameras and Ampex VR-3000 backpack two-inch quadruplex videotape recorders, introduced in 1967).

This approach, the use of traverse-scan videotape recording, allowed the field-generated tapes to be played directly on conventional studio VTRs. The camera/VTR package could scarcely be considered portable, however, with the recorder weighed more than 50 lbs. and the camera, along with its backpack support package, tipping the scales in excess of 40 pounds.

The technology did offer one real advantage for the network, though, as it allowed reporting and transmission of news in locations where no film processing was available. NBC also experimented with a similar equipment package, but declared that while it gave “excellent results,” the camera/VTR combo was “too bulky and heavy to replace 16mm film cameras.”)

How Best to Go ENG—‘Flash Cut’ or Phase In?
Likely as a result of the workshop, and perhaps out of a desire to provide better news coverage and save some money in the process, more and more stations followed Barnathan’s admonishment and dipped their toes in the (ENG) water.

One of those stations taking Barnathan’s advice was KGLO-TV (now KIMT) in Mason City, Iowa. David Ostmo, the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s regional engineering director, and based in San Antonio, Texas, got his start at the small market Iowa station and recalled his experiences with the Akai handheld cameras and reel-to-reel recorders being used by KGLO-TV.

“They were looking for a less-expensive way to do news coverage,” said Ostmo. “Film and processing cost a lot and around 1974, they had acquired an Akai VT-150 camera and a half-inch VTR. We would bump the half-inch tape across three-quarter (U-Matic) for editing, but sometimes we would play the half-inch directly to air.”

Ostmo recalled that even with the acquisition of the ENG gear, KGLO-TV continued to capture news events on film.

“The image was so much better with film at that point in time, and they shot the important stuff on film even though there was latency in getting it processed and edited,” he said. “The film processor wasn’t that old when I was there, so I imagine they were still amortizing it. I’m not sure when they went completely to ENG. I left in 1978 and they were still shooting some film.”

Jay Ballard, who began his broadcast engineering career at Boston stations WHDH-TV and WBZ-TV, also recalled the substandard video quality experienced in many early ENG implementations.

“Early ENG quality suffered, as the equipment was not designed for broadcast use, noting in particular the single- or two-tube cameras placed into service at some stations. “Some chief engineers complained that they did not produce ‘broadcast quality’ news footage; however, their objections were overruled by the immediacy permitted by electronic newsgathering means.”

Ballard, who eventually moved to Washington’s NBC O&O, WRC-TV, and then to NBC network operations in New York, recalled that while NBC did experiment with ENG, the network initially shied away from taking it mainstream.

“The big swing to ENG at NBC occurred when the Vietnam War ended in 1975,” he said. (Secretary of State Henry) Kissinger called a press conference and the networks elected not to carry it live. CBS scooped everyone by shuttling the (ENG) tapes they made over to their M Street operation and playing them to that network ahead of everyone else.

Ballard recalled that in the wake of the CBS scoop, other networks quickly began to take ENG’s immediacy much more seriously.

“Shortly thereafter, PCP90 portable cameras and VR-3000 backpack VTRs showed up in Washington. Later, two-piece cameras from Bosch Fernseh and Ikegami were shipped down from New York. NBC spent a ton of money on ENG.”

Ballard noted that even with this initial 1975 push to join the ENG club, the big transition began the following year at the political conventions and the arrival of a three-tube camera with image quality matching that of much larger studio models.

“For NBC, ENG really began with the 1976 Democratic Convention in NYC,” he recalled. “RCA had just announced the TK-76 one-piece camera, and with a portable Sony U-matic recorder, the transition was underway.”

Breaking Away From Film
Despite the immediacy that ENG brought to reporting, as pointed out by Ostmo, image quality wasn’t always that great, and many stations (and networks) still clung to news film. There were also other reasons for retaining film-based operations.

For the networks and some of the larger television stations, craft union jurisdiction quickly became an issue in attempts to transition away from news film.

“Back then, a network film crew consisted of five people — a photographer, a sound person, an electrician to handle the lighting, a producer, and of course, the on-camera talent,” observed Ballard. “It was a mix of IBEW or NABET and IATSE people.”

George Lemaster, who worked at NBC’s WRC-TV in Washington in the mid-to-late 1970s, recalled union jurisdictional issues there.

“At NBC in 1975, news from the field was still mostly done on film,” said Lemaster. “You had union (IATSE) cameramen who were experienced and good at what they did. The ENG crews were made up of NABET people who eventually took control of the event capturing. There were, of course jurisdictional issues. Eventually, some of the IATSE camera operators converted to ENG positions, new to electronics, but they sure knew how to shoot news footage.”

Lemaster explained that this transition was a learning experience for both film camera operators and station engineering personnel-turned-camera-operators, but once the dust settled, the initiative paid off in much faster turnaround of news stories.

Another reason for easing into ENG, rather than flash cutting, was the not inconsequential expense involved in the purchase of color film processing equipment as local stations — following the lead of networks — began to convert from monochrome to full-color operations in the late 1960s and early 70s. A color processor could cost in the tens of thousands (more than $100k today), and these large investments needed to be amortized.

Some stations, however, opted to move completely from film to tape almost overnight. Tulsa’s KOTV was one of these. Lemaster, who worked in the station’s engineering department prior to his move to Washington’s WRC-TV, recalled the Oklahoma station’s transition.

“George Jacobs, the director of engineering at Corinthian Broadcasting, which owned KOTV then, decided to just ‘zero out’ the station’s photochemical budget for one year and use that amount to purchase ENG equipment,” recalled Lemaster. “That was in 1975, just before I went to NBC in Washington.

Jacobs purchased several Sony VO-2850 U-Matic machines, a Sony editor, two Sony DXC-1600 single-tube color cameras and recorders, and a CVS 504 timebase corrector needed to air the video from the (helical scan) VTRs.

“KOTV was a non-union house and this was a ‘cold turkey’ conversion," Lemaster said. "One day we were doing film and the next day, tape. The film editors transitioned over to editing tape.”

Lemaster recalled that in spite of the differences in technology, the changeover went fairly smoothly. However, after some two decades of post-war II television, use of news film was so entrenched, some felt it would never be completely displaced by ENG.

“Will ENG ever replace news film?” Hugo Bondy, chief engineer at Atlanta’s WAGA-TV asked rhetorically in a 1976 SMPTE presentation on ENG. “Ever is a long time and I’m not that much of a ‘seer,’ but I am not holding my breath yet. Film footage will, undoubtedly, shrink. A year ago, I would have said 40%. Now? Who knows, perhaps it will drop to 20%.”

Bondy opined that until a self-contained “camcorder” the size and weight of then-current 16-mm film cameras was developed, “the total reliance on 100% ENG is risky,” explaining that some breaking news events such as a large fire ruled out the laying cables from camera to truck, or getting camera and VTR operators with their heavy equipment close to the scene of action.

Wane Caluger, who spent a large part of his engineering career at Nashville’s WSM-TV (now WSMV), recalled that his station had a slightly different reason for continuing with legacy film operations.

“The guy running the station’s film processor had worked side deals with several area high schools to process their sports footage, so the processor kept going,” said Caluger. “The dual tape/film operation probably went on for four or five years.”

THE ENG Floodgate Opens
Despite poor image quality, jurisdictional issues, prior investments in film technology and general skepticism surrounding wholesale technological switches, there was no turning back, once cameras and recorders were placed in the hands of news crews.

The real genesis of what was to be called “ENG,” may be traced to St. Louis’s KMOX-TV (now KMOV).

The station is regarded as being first in the nation to completely move into the modern era of ENG, doing so at the behest of its then-owner, CBS. The network used the O&O in a pilot project to evaluate technology for expediting the airing of news events. KMOX-TV began its initial experimentation with ENG gear in February 1973, using Akai portable gear, and the results were so gratifying that use of film ended completely in mid-September of the following year.

By that time, KMOX-TV had purchased three Ikegami HL-33 cameras, modified three Chevrolet vans to accommodate microwave gear and provide additional power for lighting gear and an IVC video recorder and support electronics. Crews were also provided with Sony VO-3800 portable U-Matic VTRs. An ENG operation center and editing bays were added at the station. (After editing on the helical scan VTRs, recordings were transferred to 2-inch quad tapes for playback in newscasts.)

In a special report on the KMOX-TV ENG project published in the July 1975 issue of Broadcast Engineering magazine, the station’s news coverage was reported to have increased by 20% since going ENG, and that interest in the initiative had brought inquiries from broadcasters as far away as Japan, Canada and Great Britain. (At the time of the article’s publication, 21% of CBS affiliates had begun to move into ENG, and the number was expected to grow to 37% by the end of 1975.)

With KMOX-TV credited as the first all-ENG operation in the country, it’s then vice president and general manager, Thomas Batista, prophetically stated in the report: “I have a feeling we won’t be the last.”

(The fourth and final installment of this history of electronic newsgathering will trace the impact of emerging technologies and their role in shaping today’s ENG operations and practices.)

You can see it from almost anywhere in the City by the Bay. No other landmark can make that claim — not the Golden Gate Bridge, nor any of the city’s skyscrapers. Including the ground, the tower has six levels, with hundreds of antennas.

Sutro Tower has stood for 52 years in San Francisco. To many residents, it’s now a sign welcoming them home.

“I think there are more Sutro Tower tattoos out there than Golden Gate Bridge tattoos,” Peter Hartlaub said on the Total SF podcast, produced by the San Francisco Chronicle, in an episode commemorating the tower’s 50th anniversary in 2023.

Co-host Heather Knight remarked that the tower can appear differently, viewing it for instance from the city’s botanical garden or from across the bay.

“It’s like a living thing,” she said.

The tower has come a long way to become a Bay Area icon. To know its story requires a visit to a moment in time when TV broadcasting was still novel.

Where to Place a TV Tower
In the late 1940s, television was on the bleeding edge. Engineer Bill Ruck recalls Ken Nielsen, his mentor, furnishing the John O’Connell School of Broadcast with an RCA TV package with cameras and control units. The inner-city school operated in San Francisco’s Mission District, part of the city’s unified school district. They used KALW(FM), the first FM educational station built in the country, for training.

A 1953 article from the Radio, TV and Recording Technician-Engineer described engineers and station supervisors, many of whom were former O’Connell students, assisting in organization, advice and hiring trainees. Nielsen was an instructor in the program. Ruck said that gaining any kind of knowledge was integral.

In San Francisco, determining the best place to broadcast TV stations from was a question that didn’t have an easy answer in the days before Longley-Rice-based studies, for example, were available.

“It was all kind of trial and error,” Ruck said.

By 1960, the five primary Bay Area TV stations were fielding complaints of poor reception, which required viewers to reposition their rabbit ears to get a clear picture. There were two separate sites. Channel 7, KGO(TV), had its tower at the site of the mansion, La Avanzada, the one-time home of Adolph Sutro, a San Francisco mayor in the 1890s.

ABC planned to reconfigure the mansion into a broadcast facility for KGO, its new local TV station. By 1949, KGO began transmitting from a 580-foot broadcast tower adjacent to the mansion. KPIX Channel 5 would join KGO there.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s KRON(TV), Channel 4, went on the air in 1949 from a tower on Mount San Bruno. The Chronicle was owned by the Thieriot family. Another prominent family in the city — friendly with the Thieriots — was the Crocker family, which owned Mount San Bruno. When the Chronicle wanted to put on a TV station, it was perfectly logical for them to go to the Crockers and buy property, Ruck said.

“All part of ‘old San Francisco money,’” Ruck remarked.

KQED(TV), Channel 9, joined them in San Bruno in 1954, and Channel 2 KTVU(TV), which signed on in 1958, did the same. KGO would propose a tall tower at Mount Sutro, while KRON proposed a tall tower on San Bruno. “Lots of consulting engineers made piles of money studying the two tall towers,” Ruck said. The two sites resulted in about the same coverage projections with the FCC, so the process stalled. Ultimately, a tall tower on San Bruno was blocked by the FAA, as it was much too close to San Francisco International Airport, about two miles to the southeast.

“That’s why Sutro Tower was built,” Ruck said.

In 1968, four TV stations — KRON, KGO, KPIX and KTVU — came together to form Sutro Tower Inc. Initial designs envisioned a 1,200-foot tower that had a restaurant and observation deck. Opposition ensued. Ultimately, a 977-foot height was settled upon. Construction began in 1971 and it was completed a year later. Antennas were mounted in 1973, and on July 4, the first broadcast from Sutro took place.

Ruck is the best living Sutro historian. He started working for 104.5 KFOG(FM) in 1978, which transmitted atop Sutro — today it is the FM side of sports-talk KNBR. Sutro’s manager at the time was Harry Jacobs, who dated back to working with KGO at the mansion. Ruck has been part of the San Francisco broadcast engineering scene ever since.

“The more I look into it, the more I'm fascinated with the pioneers that did it when it had never been done before,” he said.

After Jacobs retired, Don Lincoln took over. Ruck had access to a file drawer of Sutro history during that time. He remembers a “foot of paper” of reports. Their plans, Ruck recalled, only considered San Francisco, San Mateo and Alameda Counties. At the time, there were only ranches and almond groves in Contra Costa County and Santa Clara County.

“Nobody lived there,” Ruck said of their logic.

Today offers a much different story. In fact, Ruck said that if such a tower were being planned now, he’d put it in the East Bay, such as the site of 94.1 KPFA(FM)’s transmitter in the Berkeley Hills.

Navigating Public Perception
Early public relations for the tower — and the surrounding Twin Peaks, Forest Knolls and Midtown Terrace neighborhoods — was, at best, a struggle. Ruck recalls that in the early 1980s two more area TV stations wanted to move to Sutro. Its transmitter building did not have the space for more occupants. Management drafted a design to allot more space, which required a permit and public notice, leading to a lot of pushback. There are homes as close as 300 feet from the tower. Some neighbors refer to it as “an industrial complex.”

“San Francisco invented the concept of NIMBY,” Ruck joked.

Lincoln wanted to engage the neighborhood. He set up a public meeting where the benefits of the tower were highlighted. Ruck remembers being in attendance. Afterward, a neighbor across from where Ruck’s parents lived scolded him for being involved with Sutro Tower. “It was a PR nightmare,” Ruck recalled.

As an engineer, managing the mindset of an average person’s perception of a large tower in their backyard wasn’t necessarily part of Lincoln’s thought process. Ruck remembered suggesting to him that someone be hired specifically to manage neighborhood outreach. Ever since, Sutro has had someone in such a capacity.

How did Sutro become the regional symbol that it is today?

Cody Hmelar, former chief engineer for Salem Media and an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh, grew up in the Bay Area. He said feelings about the tower became warmer by the early 2010s, as what he described as “contemporary hipsterism” rose.

It was simultaneous to the growth in popularity of “Karl the Fog,” a personification for the city’s trademark low-cloud layer.

Its Clarendon Avenue location, he said, sets it apart from other Bay Area towers, prompting its use in local art, tattoo designs and even on the San Francisco City Football Club's uniform badge.

While its East Bay penetration may suffer to an extent, as Hmelar noted, Sutro’s inner-city location makes it a prime site for digital TV transmission — especially since the principal satellite and cable headends are in Petaluma, about 33 miles north of downtown San Francisco, and rely on a strong, centralized transmission source.

Managing Sutro Today
Lincoln would retire, succeeded as Sutro’s general manager by Gene Zastrow and Eric Dausman. Dausman in turn announced he was retiring in 2018.

Raul Velez, 56, recalls seeing Sutro Tower out of his bedroom window a few years after it was completed. “I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my source of [TV] cartoons, so it was really important to me,” he said. Velez received encouragement, including from Sutro’s primary RF consultant, Peter Eckmann, to apply for the opening following Dausman’s announcement. Now he guides outreach efforts.

“When I talk to folks and say ‘I work for Sutro Tower,’ they’re like, what?”

Velez has been involved in Bay Area radio engineering since 1989. He was chief engineer for Univision’s San Francisco stations from 2002 to 2016. More recently, Velez was Bonneville’s director of engineering for 96.5 KOIT(FM), 98.5 KUFX(FM), 99.7 KMVQ(FM) and 102.9 KBLX(FM) from 2017–2019, when he applied for the Sutro job.

From a distance, Velez remarked, Sutro looks static. But there’s work going on nearly every day. He works from an office in the reinforced concrete transmission building at the base, which also houses signal handling and transmission equipment. Sutro Tower operates with a dedicated team of five employees handling administrative, power and building maintenance, supported by contract security and external contractors like Full Wave Tower & Broadcast for specialized tasks.

Each entity, which could be TV, FM or two-way, has its own staff or team that is responsible for their infrastructure. “When I have 11 different TV stations with their own perspectives on the business, I have to manage and coordinate the individual philosophies,” Velez said.

TV stations KGO, KPIX, KRON, KTVU, KQED, KRCB, KPYX, KPJK, KCNS, KDTS and KFSF all transmit their signals from Sutro, representing ABC, CBS, FOX, PBS, CW and TelevisaUnivision.

Hmelar pointed out that in the Bay Area, over-the-air TV is particularly important, as there are several foreign-language and minority-owned media networks that make use of digital TV subchannels as their primary communication method. He noted the city’s language-access ordinances.

“It makes being able to broadcast in multiple languages essential,” he said.

On FM, 96.5 KOIT, 98.9 KSOL, 104.5 KNBR and translator 93.7 K229DD, which relays Chinese-language 1400 KVOT(AM), all call Sutro home. Two 102.5 LPFM stations maintain a timeshare from Sutro: KXSF(LP), operated by San Francisco Community Radio, and KSFP(LP), the San Francisco Free Press.

Seven amateur radio groups maintain facilities on Sutro, including the San Francisco Radio Club (W6PW). “We treat them like everyone else,” Velez said.

If someone calls and asks for a check on their suite to make sure a certain green light is on, for example, Sutro’s staff can save them a trip. Or maybe it’s to dispatch a telco company or assist an HVAC vendor. “Really, our job is to make sure the tower is still there every day,” he said.

Making the tower a “living thing” involves plenty of other hands-on endeavors the Sutro team has spearheaded. That includes a 360-degree, rotatable, movable, zoomable panorama of the tower, available at explore.sutrotower.com. Velez said the feature consists of 1,300-gigapixel images placed together, produced by the Portland, Ore.-based Panogs. A 13-minute documentary produced by Stimulant and a team led by Darren David explores the origins of the tower, from the history of the Sutro family to the opposition residents provided before it was erected.

Sutro also keeps up good relations with nearby Glen Park Elementary, where third-grade teacher Sheila Tenney has students draw Sutro Tower as a back-to-school activity each year. “When you see Sutro Tower, you’re home.”

Chicago's Willis Tower and New York's Empire State Building are among other iconic sites with consolidated broadcast facilities. Hmelar describes Sutro as Empire’s “artsy cousin.” Its unique design features one tower and one building, unlike structures with towers atop office or residential spaces. The closest analogy is perhaps Paris's Eiffel Tower, hosting multiple broadcasters in one location, though Sutro lacks tourist amenities.

There have also been numerous earthquake warnings that have been transmitted via its host signals, most notably 1989’s Loma Prieta, which registered 6.9 on the Richter scale.

Former Sutro spokesman Dave Hyams noted the reason the tower withstood the quake — two of the three KGO(AM) towers did not — is the structural science behind it. The tower is embedded in 15 million pounds of cement.

There are seven generators and an associated fuel supply that can keep equipment running for up to three days without power.

Velez noted that maintenance is a constant part of the process. In 2025 that included the repainting of cladding panels.

Sutro removed vertical cladding to comply with seismic code. Inside panels are now thicker to improve rigidity, which also allowed the panels to be painted offsite. The outside horizontal cladding panels are next, and Velez expects the paint job to be completed by 2027.

Velez’s duties are not without stress. “I dealt with more lawyers in the first year I was here than in my previous 50 years of existence,” he cracked. But by all accounts, the relationship between the 977-foot tower and its neighbors is as good as it has ever been. He credits the team at the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson and at Lighthouse Public Affairs for improving communications between the neighbors and the city of San Francisco.

“We’re here, I can be reached 24 hours a day,” he said.

And if you look up in the City by the Bay, you’ll get a glimpse of the tower, peeking through the fog.

The subtle art of aiming cameras at live events is perhaps the part of film and television practice which has been most resistant to new technologies. While sheer specifications have skyrocketed, outside broadcast camerawork is marked by nothing more than a determination to maintain a consistent operator experience.

Recently, though, the drive for sheer gloss—driven, perhaps, by the ascendancy of single-camera drama from OTT distributors—has imposed change on this most change-resistant of fields.

Adapting to Live
Guilhem Krier, based in France, is Panasonic Connect’s Head of New Business & Market Development, and traces the origins of the trend to “concerts, mostly, where you want to have a very nice cinematic feel for the singer, and the background is blurry so the person is detached. I think it was 10 years ago.”

Larger-sensored options, Krier recalls, already existed, “but they were mostly designed for production work, with a full camera crew. There was a clear request for this kind of picture, but there was no product really designed in this way—a real studio camera, a broadcast camera with a cinematographic look to it. This is where the idea of products like the PLV100 came from.”

The AK-PLV100GSJ is Panasonic’s answer to the problem, a system camera with Super 35mm sensor announced in October 2022. Big chips, though, were already popular in adjacent fields, according to Krier.

“It’s not only broadcast sports,” Krier says, “but also integration. Corporate things, meeting rooms, theatres where we’re selling tons of PTZ cameras. The tendency is to go for bigger and bigger sensors, to get more sensitivity and also to get this kind of picture with a short depth of field.”

While the technological direction was straightforward, Krier describes the early big-chip broadcast experience, which often repurposed cinema cameras, as “an absolute nightmare in terms of blurry pictures and [poor] workflows.

“At the time I was mostly focused on the French market but we had big organizations like [industrial training organization] INA, and they had started tons of training and courses on how to manage focus not only with HD but with 4k and large sensors,” he said.

Time has allowed technique to mostly catch up with technology, Krier added.

“Today we don’t really have people coming up saying it’s too difficult to keep the pictures sharp, but for a long time it was a big topic, especially for people switching to full frame. Super 35 is a bit in the middle, but still you have super sharp sensors with 20, 30, 40 million pixels. It’s still a challenge.”

Super Sensor at the Super Bowl
Masakazu Murata is Senior General Manager, Head of Media Solutions Business Unit at Sony, and relates a somewhat comparable trajectory. “Particularly in sports broadcasting, where there’s a growing demand for cinematic visual expression, we're seeing cinema cameras like the Venice 2 being used more frequently. At this year's Super Bowl in February, in addition to a lot of Sony system cameras, Venice 2 and FX series cameras were also used.”

Perhaps mindful of the ergonomic concerns associated with repurposing cinema cameras for live work, Sony announced its own Super 35mm system camera, the HDC-F5500V, at NAB this year. The new design, Murata confirms, “features a Super 35mm CMOS image sensor delivering impressive bokeh effects while maintaining system camera operability.

“There’s talkback and remote control, and a variable ND filter,” he added. “We've received very positive feedback from broadcasting professionals who appreciate the expanded range of visual expression options. They can mix traditional system cameras, with deep depth of field, and cinema cameras, with shallow depth of field, and select the appropriate visual style for each scene.”

Grass Valley’s Klaus Weber recognizes that mix-and-match option as key. Responsible for product management of camera solutions and technology, Weber reinforcinges the need for proper workflow integration of large-sensor cameras. “Yes, you can adapt UCPs to a camera and yes, you can add a tally light and yes, you can attach an intercom solution. But then it’s building a camera with external blocks to act like a live camera.”

Even then, Weber goes on, many cinema cameras remain compromised. “The time between light hitting the imager and the image being ready for distribution is one frame, perhaps,” Weber said. “It needs to be instant. And the camera does not have multiple live outputs—in live you need a UHD HDR signal but [also] a 1080p feed for shading or iso feeds. You need cameras with a global shutter because… high end sport productions often need to shoot LED walls with a virtual ad replacement system. Sometimes you can set it up so it works, but in a live environment, where you have to react to situations it simply doesn’t work.”

Grass Valley’s response is the LDX 180, launched at this year’s NAB. Weber describes the camera as expanding on a much-loved existing product.

“It’s taking one of our LDX 100 camera bodies and replacing the three-chip block with a newly-developed Super 35 optical block,” Weber said. “Since both imagers are developed with the same technology, the same development team even, they provide the same characteristics, global shutter and dynamic range. Because the imager is more than six times larger, we have more than six times more pixels which gives you a heavily oversampled image.”

Not For Everyone
Even so, Krier suggests that even the smoothest pictures are unlikely to persuade the industry to universal adoption (and the industry seems to concur).

“A big soccer match for the Champions League in Europe is typically 20, 30 cameras; the soccer field is more than a hundred meters long, so a camera high up, shooting down to a player on the ground, has a distance of at least 100 meters to the subject,” Krier said. “You need a focal length of 400-500mm and your depth of field is already close to zero.”

Crucially, the practical performance envelope of larger-sensor cameras is increasingly constrained by optics more than electronics. Joshua Stoner is Senior Technical Specialist at Canon, with responsibility for lenses, and describes the convergence of cinema and broadcast simply. “As the two industries have been on a collision course, they’ve had some crossover,” Stoner said. “Some of our cinema lenses and cameras have been getting broadcast-style operability, the ability to use a third-party control panel to shade our cameras.”

As regards broadcast-specific lens designs, though, Stoner is clear that Canon has no intention of following in the footsteps of Fujifilm and its upscale 25-1000mm PL-mount box zoom.

“I don’t think the market is enough to support the R&D,” Stoner said. “We looked into it when Fujifilm released theirs and went a different way—the cine-servo line of lenses. We have also started releasing the USM Z line, which are RF mount and have external zoom and focus controls. There’s an add-on module that gives you handheld zoom. It has a 20-pin connector, and with a Y-connector you can put on rear controls.”

This sort of hybrid lens technology, with the option to involve electronics in what was once an almost purely opto-mechanical device, seems like the most promising avenue for fundamental advancement in what can be done. “It’s a more video-focused lens,” Stoner says, “but it’s still an RF-mount photo lens, and it has that performance benefit [of a short flange focus distance]. It’s our advancement into that lower cost video kind of lens that people are screaming for.”

Stoner reports one other popular option among people looking for a broadcast operating experience, albeit one which may not extract the best performance from camera or lens: “to put a B4 lens on a cinema camera. That’s popping up more and more. Not very much in live, but a team might have a features group that shoots interviews or team footage and they’re trying to leverage the new cameras.”

Box-lens enthusiasts seem more likely to be entranced by an upgrade option for Canon’s Digisuper 122 and 111 lenses which occupies a previously-disused aperture on the extender.

“You can install this new optical block into the Digisuper 122 and 111 which helps mimic the shallow depth of field look—but you get the broadcast operability,” Stoner says. “And you’re not giving up a camera position. It’s not a true shallow depth of field, [but] the operators are operating the lens like they normally would, they’re not chasing focus and it gives the director the hero shot they want.”

That hybrid try for a best-of-both-worlds solution was announced at NAB 2025 and, Stoner says, was well-received. “The demand for it in the U.S. has been through the roof,” he said. “We’re ready to deploy this this summer in time for the NFL season.” Overall, it seems plausible that the desire for a large-sensor look might well take a third route of this kind, ideally skirting the practicality shortfalls of Super 35mm sensors.

Either way, Stoner concludes by echoing what seems to be the prevailing view. “I don’t see Super 35 overtaking ⅔-inch any time soon. I see it as an add-on inside the industry.”

Artificial intelligence, and its implications for the film and TV industry, were among the main topics of discussion at the SMPTE DC Chapter’s “Bits by the Bay” conference held in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland, from May 21-22.

The conference—organized by the late Peter Wharton, former chief strategy officer for TAG Video Systems—returned after a long hiatus, and the event is dedicated to his memory.

Rounding Up
In a presentation devoted to fractional film frame rates, James Snyder, formerly with the Library of Congress’ National Audio Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC) and now an industry consultant, discussed the evolution of frame rates in tandem with the development of film and television and the expectation that with the film industry transitioning to digital, that frame rates can be modified to address the streaming market.

The battle waged over interlace vs. progressive image standards during the transition from analog to DTV several decades ago illustrated the coming battles between broadcasters—most of whom favored interlace—and the computer industry, who favored progressive.

In a world where 24 fps in traditional film is really 23.98 frames per second (fps) for TV and digital video, and 60 fps is technically 59.94 fps, Snyder said it’s time to round up to the next number (an even integer) because advances in technology have made fractionals less relevant in today’s media distribution ecosystem.

As streaming and gaming have taken hold over the past several decades, progressive has won that battle, and streamers simply don’t care about frame rates, Snyder added.

“Interlace and fractional are two sides of the same coin—they're both problems we need to get rid of,” he said. “[Interlace is] the easiest to get rid of right now, because all displays are now natively progressive; we have no CRTs anymore and progressive is baked into our technical distribution now, or at least the end viewing. And frankly, getting rid of fractional is also baked into it.”

Snyder blamed the current U.S. broadcast TV standard.

“The only reason we can't do even integer right now is because ATSC 1.0 is in the way; ATSC 3.0 can accommodate it, the displays can accommodate it,” he said. “Every vendor I've talked to who has equipment that does production or post production can switch to even integer. The only thing that's standing in the way right now seems to be ATSC. 1.0 is a technical blocker.”

Snyder said he came to this conclusion in his work at the Library of Congress, where he worked in film digitization and restoration. Adherence to global media standards and the demands of storing and managing millions of hours of film and video content prompted him to think of new ways to approach the problems of cost and efficiency.

“We had to deal with the problems of interlace, we had to deal with the problems of fractional frame rates, and we had to deal with the technical issues that came with creating new versions for reuse, because people could license the content, and they would ask for various versions,” Snyder said. “And so I got to see firsthand the extra cost. And the reality is, there are increased costs just in producing new content, there are increased production costs when it comes to reusing old content.

“And so that's where a number of us got together and asked ourselves, ‘do we really need to be doing this?,’” Snyder added. “A genuine technical reason why we're still doing this, and the only one we can come up with is ATSC 1.0. If you take ATSC 1.0 out of the mix, ATSC 3.0 doesn't have that problem, and streaming certainly doesn't have that problem. Streaming doesn't care what your framework is. Your computer just adjusts it to present the content.”

Snyder added that this approach needs to be modified when considering live broadcasts.

“The one area that still needs some discussion and some work is, ‘how do you go from live feeds that are fractional to live feeds that are integer?’ We do need to talk about that. There are converters out there that do the work we can do… but they have a strange cadence to them. We need to figure out how to not have that strange cadence, and work it out in the software and the hardware.”

AI and Democratization of Media
John Footen, managing director with Deloitte, discussed the democratization of media production over the past four decades and how AI is impacting its future, pointing out that for as little as $500, today’s mobile device can produce professional content that cost thousands of dollars to produce in the 1980s. (Footen also pens TV Tech’s Media Matrix column.)

“You don't even have to have an education to do it, people are just doing it … and that's an overall trend of democratization in content production and distribution,“ he said. “Are we done democratizing media? Is it all democratized out? The answer is no.”

The ability for the average Joe to produce Disney-level content powered by AI is coming sooner than we thank, Footen added.

“That level of production is going to be theoretically possible for good or for bad, it's going to happen,” he said. “And it’s going to further democratize the content types that can be created by anyone. You don't have to be good at using a camera because you don't have to touch a camera to make an image, right? You don't have to get a lot of training and framing and all that stuff, because a machine will frame it for you.”

Footen elaborated on agentic AI, the concept of using AI “agents” to do specific tasks that could eventually replace the “app” environment of today.

“You can think of it interchangeably with the word 'apps' that you've been using today,” he said. “An agent is a system … it could be a simple system or it can be a complex system that performs a function. It actually does something like you would expect out of many kinds of applications.”

As these agents become more adept at each individual’s media tastes, this trend will lead to a breakdown of brands that still act as a sort of “walled garden.”

“A curator agent is an agent that works on your behalf to get your content for you today,” Footen said. Using the Plex video playback app as an example, Footen said the more information a user adds to it, the more intelligent it gets, the less important the origination.

“All you need to add to that is keeping track of who you are and what your preferences are, and giving it access to your data and giving it this AI capability to curate for your content,” he said. “Eventually, that curation disintermediates the media company, because why do I care what channel it's on, what app it's on… if it's just coming to you through my agent, my agent is my app. I don't care where the content came from.”

Content Validation
Matt Galek, Footen’s colleague at Deloitte, discussed the issue of authenticated content in the age of AI, elaborating on the latest developments around the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI), a six-year-old project designed to to promote transparency and authenticity in digital content; and the C2PA, a consortium of tech companies tasked with developing the technical standards for content credentials, among other things.

C2PA is the “leading standard” to confirming and maintaining trust in digital content and is on the path to becoming an ISO standard this year, according to Galek, who pointed to the three pillars of technology that drive the standards developed by the CAI: metadata, fingerprinting and watermarking.

“All these together provide a solid foundation for authenticity,” Galek said.

While C2PA’s standards don’t deal with detection of AI-altered media, it starts with the assumption that most of it is now, Galek said. “C2PA kind of assumes that users are going to be changing a piece of media, and [in] some of the research I was looking at, most studies were saying that over 50% of people posting content to social media platforms have manipulated in some way, whether it's due to editing that content or adding a filter,” he said. “So that's a significant amount that has been altered in some way, and kind of unknowingly, you're consuming that media.”

Galek pointed to the importance of metadata in tracking a piece of content’s evolution through the complete production chain and how that vital information is getting lost when content migrates to various platforms. Adopting C2PA will help protect that information, he added.

“There's a ton of tech that’s used today where metadata gets stripped inherently out when media is transferred from one system to another,” he said. “For vendors adopting this standard, you will have that methodology to retain that metadata through an entire supply chain.”

Working groups with the C2PA are focused on areas like audio and video watermarking, but Galek said there has to be intra-industry cooperation.

“There needs to be an additional spotlight on the implementation side of things, to provide a forum for broadcast-based and other industries to collaborate,” he said. “We know how increasingly fragmented the broadcast vendor landscape is, so it’s that much more critical for us to collaborate together around content authenticity.”

Detecting Deep Fakes
Anyone who has dabbled in generative AI knows how better it is getting with time but altering video and images (aka “deep fakes”) has been done for decades, something Ed Grogan, a motion imagery researcher and former Defense Department official, discussed during the session “The Dark Side of AI.”

(Grogan discussed his work in video forensics with TV Tech in 2018).

“When we started this, it took a little Hollywood studio to really make good deep fakes, and they couldn't do much,” Grogan said. “We’re now at the point that some of these levels where that little Hollywood studio was are [now] being done by middle schoolers.”

Using a historic picture of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin at the Yalta conference in 1945—with Groucho Marx in place of the Soviet dictator—Grogan emphasized the importance of spotting discrepancies as early as possible, since a widely distributed AI-altered image could rapidly alter public perception. In other words, it could allow a lie to travel halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on, a line often attributed to Churchill himself.

“If you think it's fake, put it in your documentation, because someone 20 years from now might lose the reference material,” he said. “And if you don't say you think it’s fake and the audience didn’t have the historical reference, they might not know that really should've been Stalin and that’s the wrong Marx. So sometimes, because they don’t have the historical understanding, you can get something past somebody to tell your story.”

Although no one sees media companies losing their gatekeeper status anytime soon, Footen summarized the promise and perils of AI in removing media companies as the “middleman” for content consumption.

“If everyone can do what we're doing today, I think our industry is going to be disintermediated,” Footen concluded. “I'm not sure how much of a media industry we have left when everyone is a media company. Every person, every company, is a media company. Our job, historically, has been to create the content, to gather the audiences and to monetize that content. But what if we’re not needed to do that? That’s kind of happening already.”

The use of remote workflows in radio has been expanding since the onset of voice tracking, but the industry’s response to COVID-19 accelerated it significantly.

No longer is it just an occasional co-host who has a small studio setup at home. Radio may soon get to the point where the word “remote” loses its meaning entirely, because technology will allow all facets of its workflow to be done from anywhere.

“No doubt, broadcasting has left the building,” said Dee McVicker, marketing director for Wheatstone, an NAB Show exhibitor.

“I was at an equestrian park recently when I struck up a conversation with a woman who was traveling for the winter with her two dogs and two horses, broadcasting her radio show from her living-quarters horse trailer. Radio has become just as mobilized as everything else.”

Not just individual shows but entire radio workflows can now be built on the premise of “remote” operation.

“While many radio people doing live shows have returned to the studio, some have not,” said Marty Sacks, vice president of sales, marketing and strategy at show exhibitor Telos Alliance.

“Connectivity and IP-based infrastructure are the foundations of remote radio production. Without the ability to access and control gear located in the main studio, it would be pretty hard to implement remote workflows.”

That includes not only physical equipment but mixing software running in various computing environments, as well as codecs and phone controllers.

Flexibiity, Choice in Workflows
“We, and many of our clients, still love hardware,” Sacks said, “but workflows vary greatly, and we believe that our clients should also have choices that include software-based broadcast solutions that can live in server rooms or on cloud platforms and be accessed remotely any time, from anywhere.”

This is true not only for air talent, but for everyone involved in creating the product.

Today a radio production person based in one market can also be the primary support for others, said Jeff McGinley, vice president of engineering for broadcast group SummitMedia.

“Software like VCreative that displays all of that day’s work that needs to be done allows the team to work together as if they are all located in one building,” he said.

“Many of our production and programming people also have recording setups at home, allowing them the flexibility to continue working when other aspects of life happen and they aren’t able to make it into the station — a sick child or car trouble, for example,” McGinley said. “An internet connection with a VPN gives them the ability to control the automation system or access anything else that resides on the servers located at the station.”

The capabilities provided by high-speed connectivity, AoIP technology and cloud-based platforms are causing broadcast companies to rethink their overall approaches to building infrastructure.

Greg Davis, broadcast systems specialist for Cumulus Media, said: “Of course, cost savings is top of mind for everyone these days. As trends change in the industry, sometimes we must do more with less.

“Larger studios in the most prestigious part of town might not be needed anymore. Smaller, more adaptable consoles and audio equipment make it easier for equipment to be installed in a smaller area, or even portable in some situations. Real estate needs are not what they used to be. Studio are moving away from expensive high-profile areas.

“Technology can allow us to relocate these studios with lower costs and quicker and easier installation,” Davis said.

How far will this trend take us?

Marty Sacks said radio will see continued adoption of remote production over time, in terms of both the amount of content generated and the ease of remote production through continued development of the tech.

“Consider producing a talk show where both host and producer are fully remote. Talent can be located practically anywhere,” he said.

“Forward-looking broadcasters are doing this today, and at Telos we believe that with our continuous commitment to improving the tools and technology that enable it, the number of broadcasters adopting remote production models will increase.”

Dee McVicker expects remote production will become much more seamlessly integrated into the studio.

She noted that Wheatstone now offers fixed consoles that are navigated like an iPhone, as well as software for the laptop that look like a physical mixing console. “We’ll adapt inside the studio and outside the studio, all of which is built on IP audio.”

The future, said Greg Davis, will include AI-powered audio processing, cloud audio production and improvements in cloud-based playout systems to allow remote control of station operations.

“Automation does not have to be cloud-based either. Advancement in reverse proxy, secure tunnels and encryption can enable software to control the studio from anywhere securely.”

Studios on the Move
As studios become smaller, they will also be more portable, Davis said. “Progress in browser engines and web services makes remote audio easier to accomplish.”

Jeff McGinley expects that all aspects of radio broadcasting will accelerate to working remotely in the next few years.

“With cloud-based automation and webRTC taking off, all aspects of programming, production and on-air could be done at home and sent to a hosted service to play out directly to the transmitter site,” he said. “A number of companies are already working towards the end goal of having no physical studio location whatsoever.”

Copyright 2025 NAB

There may be no better way to alert visitors to what’s in store at this year’s NAB Show than to extend a simple four-word greeting: Welcome to the future.

If last year’s show was designed to explore what an artificial intelligence-saturated world might hold for everyone with a stake in media and entertainment, this year’s event can be described as a sleeves-rolled-up plunge into doing business in a world where that future has arrived. In remarkably short order, the industry has progressed from debating where things are going to jumping aboard a train about to leave the station.

“With more hands-on activations, in-depth discussions and next-generation technologies on display, the 2025 NAB Show is set to be the ultimate destination for anyone looking to stay ahead in the evolving media and entertainment industry,” Karen Chupka, NAB’s managing director and executive vice president for Global Connections and Events, said.

Displays and events on the exhibit floor complemented by a jam-packed conference schedule featuring more than 500 speakers will focus on developments along five trend lines that define the new reality, including AI, cloud virtualization, the creator economy, sports and streaming.

For example, the pervasive impact of sports will be highlighted by a new three-day Sports Summit: The Future of Sports Rights and Fan Experience, which explores the technology and trends transforming the sports fan experience and driving new revenue streams, as well as the Sports Business Hub, devoted to exploring new revenue models and engagement strategies.

In addition to the sessions, hands-on activations will include Reimagining Sports Media Through AI-Powered Transformation With Microsoft, as well as the Live Esports Racing Challenge presented by AWS and NVIDIA, Chupka said.

In the streaming domain, Chupka said, multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), OTT service providers and everyone else attending this year’s Streaming Summit will gain insight into “new monetization strategies, evolving consumer behavior and the continued rise of hybrid models like FAST, AVOD and subscription bundling.”

In addition, “Brands like AWS, Amagi, Veritone and Zixi will showcase the latest advancements in content delivery and ad-tech solutions.”

Participants in the Creator Economy will find the show is highly focused on “the merging of trends across Hollywood, broadcast and independent digital creators,” Chupka added.

“The same tools, gear and techniques used in big-budget films and live TV productions are now accessible to creators producing content for social media platforms. This shift is breaking down industry barriers — today, all content creators, regardless of platform, can come together at NAB Show to explore workflows and technology.”

One such creator — boasting some 24 million subscribers — is Main Stage speaker Dhar Mann, who will appear at NAB Show on Wednesday. The Forbes Top Creator will discuss how he and other creators are scaling digital intellectual property, partnering with brands and harnessing other trends, Chupka said.

The AI Juggernaut
There’s no better testament to the transformative fait accompli on display at this year’s show than the normalization of AI in just about every facet of operations.

“From the AI Innovation Pavilion to sessions across the show floor, we’re highlighting AI’s role in content creation, workflow automation and audience engagement,” Chupka said.

“The AI Video Editing Workshops and expanded Creative AI track at Post|Production World will provide hands-on training with tools like Descript, Runway, Premiere Pro and Firefly, helping professionals integrate AI into their editing, VFX and animation workflows.”

Conference sessions hosting AI-related discussions about security, content integrity and copyright protection will be front and center.

For the rapidly growing number of TV station groups that have grown comfortable with their ability to validate and implement AI solutions in day-to-day operations, the show’s emphasis on AI will be right in stride with what they’re looking for.

AI is “saving time and enhancing workflows,” Christina Hartman, vice president of emerging technology operations at E.W. Scripps, said. “The big story about AI in the newsroom is it’s revealing how much time we’ve been wasting on processing, on versioning to take a story to multiple platforms, on reviewing large documents.”

West Hall Presence for Broadcasters
Indeed, no sector is more affected by the transition to the new M&E reality than television and radio broadcasters. NAB Show has gone to new lengths to address their needs, starting with arranging a more convenient location for broadcast-related conference sessions.

This year’s lineup, including the Broadcast Management track, the Broadcast Engineering & IT Conference and the Small and Medium Market Radio Forum, as well as the NAB Member Town Hall and Member Lounge, will be located in the TV and Radio HQ on the second floor of the West Hall.

On the show floor below, Chupka said, attendees will find “the majority of radio exhibits, broadcast innovation discoverable in Futures Park and top-notch thought leaders speaking on the Main Stage, including the NAB Show Welcome session and We Are Broadcasters ceremony.”

NAB Show intensifies the emphasis on ATSC 3.0 under the NextGen TV brand with a major presence in the West Hall amid anticipation that the new administration in Washington will forge a regulatory climate more favorable to broadcasters. With ATSC 3.0 signals now available to 77% of U.S. households, the show will serve to “highlight how forward-looking policies can accelerate these advancements and ensure local stations remain at the forefront of serving our communities,” Chupka said.

Many station groups will be doing all they can at the show to connect the benefits of new technology with their pursuit of regulatory goals. Sinclair Broadcast Group, for example, will likely be taking a “very strong public stance” highlighting the need for NextGen TV, said Sinclair Senior Vice President, Advanced Technology Mark Aitken, who also serves as president of Sinclair’s all-IP platform subsidiary One Media Technologies.

Sinclair will make the case that it’s time for the government to sunset ATSC 1.0, buttressed by the fact that the NextGen TV transition is essential to making the Broadcast Positioning System a national security backup to GPS. Aitken also notes Sinclair will highlight opportunities for broadcasters to exploit the ATSC 3.0 data delivery system with support from the new EdgeBeam Wireless joint venture formed by Scripps, Gray Media, Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair.

Of the sea changes that have enveloped the media industry over the last several years, the concept that “everybody is a storyteller” looms large. While storytellers need tools, and the democratization of these tools gets an awful lot of attention, technique remains critical.

“It doesn’t matter if it’s shooting on an iPhone or if it’s shooting on IMAX, and everything in between, you need to know how to get a story from script to screen,” Kristin Petrovich, president of Createasphere and the producer of CineCentral, said.

“You still need to know how to block a scene. You still need to know how to use the camera to communicate emotion.”

CineCentral — located in North Hall this year — is designed to provide a bit of synthesis between tool and technique, with live demos, expert-led training and hands-on learning for storytellers, whether they call themselves cinematographers, directors, camera operators or content creators.

Being “expert-led” is not posturing. “What’s unique about CineCentral is that we have instructors who are working professionals. They’re not professional instructors, they’re on set making content that we all see every day,” Petrovich said.

The hands-on nature of the CineCentral realm is robust. One improvement from last year is a doubling in the number of “craft clinics” to more than 20 this year. Craft clinics are open and free to anybody attending NAB Show. They run for about 45 minutes and focus on production topics such as shooting with film, film loading, lighting and more. The clinics are generally hands-on, and you get to be part of a limited number of people who will learn a technique in less than an hour.

“If you’re attending NAB, you can just pop in, take a craft clinic, then come back the next day and take a different craft clinic or a workshop,” Petrovich said.

Distinct from the clinics, workshops predominantly are presented by Kodak and the Society of Camera Operators (SOC). These paid sessions are an opportunity for truly deep, immersive dives on a subject. There are four “labs” at CineCentral where workshops will take place. Petrovich said the labs will be used in a more dynamic fashion this year, with participants able to really touch gear, look at footage and talk to professionals.

Deeper Dives
“Last year was pretty darn dynamic, but we really stepped it up this year,” she said. While same-day registration for the paid workshops is available, these can fill up, so she strongly encourages preregistration.

David J. Frederick, SOC, provides an example of a speaker who brings significant experience. He is presenting at sessions that include “Designing and Executing THE Action Shot” and “Getting Cinematic Looks on a Tight Budget.” His decades of experience include shooting with every camera and format of film and digital, and more than 20 years as an active board member of SOC.

“The Society of Camera Operators will once again be providing valuable real-world craft skills at the in-depth workshops,” said Frederick. “The presenters are professionally accomplished and award-winning camera operators at the top of the craft. It brings me great pleasure to continue paying it forward to the next generation of cinematographers.”

Shanele Alvarez, SOC, has extensive experience across genres that include scripted, unscripted reality, documentary and live shows. She’s part of the presentation team at sessions about remote head operation with a joystick and operating handhelds. She emphasizes skills that keep jobs coming.

Alvarez said that expertise with a joystick opens doors to roles in live broadcasts, corporate events and sports television, as well as specialty shots in film and television. She said the handheld workshop is a “must-have” for handheld operating, no matter what genre an attendee works in.

“You will learn to master handheld camera techniques, essential skills like ergonomics, balance, and proper posture, how to shoot with multiple cameras and effective communication with your team,” she said. “Learning these skills will provide longevity and success as a handheld operator.”

Alvarez and Dawn Fleischman, SOC, will present a session on women camera operators that seeks to give attendees real experience with the capture technology and techniques that can be found on any production from reality to features.

“The Women’s Camera Operating Workshop, open to all, is designed to empower participants with hands-on gear experience and the skills to communicate effectively with your camera team for smooth shot execution,” Alvarez said. “Through this course, you’ll gain the confidence and expertise needed to step onto any set and succeed as a versatile camera operator.”

Organizations supporting CineCentral include the Society of Camera Operators (SOC), PERG and ICG Local 600. PERG, Band Pro and Adorama are also hosting receptions. Many organizations including Adorama, Zeiss, Fujifilm, Tiffen, Kodak, Chapman Leonard, JL Fisher, Blackmagic Design and more are participating in craft clinics or in other ways.

Copyright NAB 2025.

Few understand the hustle required to operate as a smaller broadcaster better than Julie Koehn.

Koehn is the chair of NAB’s Small and Medium Market Radio Committee. She is also the president and CEO of Lenawee Broadcasting, which operates WLEN(FM) in Adrian, Michigan, about 55 miles west of Detroit. She serves as the station’s general manager.

She understands that smaller operators may feel overwhelmed by the bright lights of Las Vegas. Drawing from her own experiences, Koehn helped design the forum to highlight what NAB Show offers to local broadcasters.

The forum takes place on Saturday, April 5, at NAB Show in the TV Radio Headquarters on the second floor of the West Hall. It is designed to bring together small- and medium-market broadcasters.

Staff at these stations often wear multiple hats. “A lot of us are owner-operators,” Koehn said. “On Monday, I might focus on programming. Tuesday, I’m out in the field with sales. We’re all looking for a well-rounded education.”

That in large part is what the Small and Medium Market Radio Forum aims to provide.

The forum began in 2019 with about 60 attendees, according to Koehn. This year, she expects attendance to reach approximately 240. The forum was born from Koehn’s conversations with Steve Newberry, NAB’s former executive vice president of industry affairs, about the needs of small broadcasters. “We decided we had to make this available to everyone,” she said.

Koehn is enthusiastic about the topics to be featured at the roundtables during this year’s forum. There are 10 in total, each focused on a different topic related to radio operations, marketing and sales. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in three of the roundtables, which run 30 minutes each.

Last year’s roundtable on AI use in radio was extremely popular, and Koehn expects this year’s “AI’s Use in Marketing and Ad Support” session to generate similar interest.

There will also be a roundtable on podcasting strategies for radio. “Whether you are targeting New York City or Cheboygan, there’s an emphasis on being multiplatform now,” Koehn said.

She believes each roundtable session will provide takeaways that help operators solve operational challenges in their home markets.

This year’s two panel sessions at the forum include “Economic Outlook — Opportunities and Obstacles to Broadcasting Success,” presented by Justin Nielson, principal analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence, and “Unique Revenue Strategies — What’s Working,” presented by Pierre Bouvard, chief insights officer at Westwood One/Cumulus Media.

“One hundred percent of my ad sales is direct,” Koehn said of her work at WLEN, unlike larger stations that use advertising agencies. “Providing market trends to my customers is extremely valuable and that’s what this session is geared toward.”

Koehn said she finds Bouvard’s session particularly insightful.

“Pierre always comes prepared with a wealth of information and it is a unique opportunity to hear it tailored to community-oriented operations,” she said.

What advice does Koehn have for first-time attendees of the forum?

Plenty to Learn
She said to be ready to meet many new people who hold a variety of roles in their companies. Keep an open mind and don’t hesitate to check out a roundtable session you wouldn’t ordinarily consider attending.

“Be open to learning something new,” Koehn said. “Chances are, the material presented will apply to your station.

“It brings radio back to its core,” she continued. “As smaller-market broadcasters, we should embrace the ability to try new things and recognize that we are not always in the same position as big markets to rely on tried-and-true methods. I think that’s the beauty of exchanging ideas at a forum like this.”

The forum wraps up with a 50-minute cocktail reception.

This year’s NAB Show will feature several dozen radio sessions in addition to those at the forum. The Small and Medium Radio Market Forum will take place in rooms W213-W215. (That’s also convenient to the floor of the West Hall, where many of the show’s radio exhibitors can be found.)

Attendees are encouraged to register as soon as possible, as recent forums have been standing-room-only. More information is available here.

There will be a lot of new wrinkles for attendees to dig into at this year’s edition of Post|Production World, the training conference for production and postproduction professionals set for April 5-9 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, at NAB Show.

A new extended reality track will explore how virtual production and augmented reality are reshaping storytelling. A significantly expanded artificial intelligence track will address its growing role in creative workflows, with case studies into uses such as the AI-driven automation of tasks like motion tracking and character rigging.

Other new features on tap for this year include interactive sessions, small group roundtables and panels on topics such as monetizing creative passions, the ethical implications of AI and more. In the evening, “Birds-of-a-Feather” networking sessions will focus on attendees’ shared interests.

The NAB Show Daily caught up with Post|Production World Program Managers Gary Adcock and Rich Harrington about what’s new for this year.

NAB Show Daily: Can you elaborate on the expanded session tracks for this year’s conference?

Gary Adcock: Attendees of NAB Show gather to witness and experience innovative concepts and technologies in the dynamic realm of media and entertainment. In response to this evolving landscape, we have expanded our offerings beyond the traditional sessions of previous years, with topics that delve into the realm of creativity for wearables and mixed reality storytelling, utilizing both the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest. Additionally, we will also present designs to assist in management of Unreal Engine workflows. There will also be sessions to understand the capabilities and limitations of artificial intelligence in the creation and delivery of content.

NAB Show Daily: How does the new extended reality track aim to explore the impact of virtual and augmented reality on media and entertainment?

GA: A significant challenge arises from the fact that the term “XR” holds distinct meanings within various technology communities, depending on the context. In the realm of cinema, XR is commonly associated with digital set extensions, akin to the hand-painted matte effects employed during the film era. Alternatively, it refers to digital previsualization techniques, such as those implemented using Unreal Engine. For designers and engineers, XR serves as a development tool that facilitates the previsualization of automotive and industrial designs.

One of our XR sessions delves into the creation of emergency medical training simulations designed to train NASA astronauts. Another session focuses on an award-winning immersive F1 simulator that enables fans to experience the driving of the Las Vegas Grand Prix race on their mobile devices during the actual event. Furthermore, we offer a range of sessions on color science and using metadata in XR and virtual production.

NAB Show Daily: In what ways has the AI track been enhanced to address its growing role in the creative process?

GA: AI is gradually entering the creative arts, while content creation still requires significant improvement. However, the use of AI to generate ideas or iterate designs has become increasingly prevalent in recent years. It is essential to recognize that machine learning forms the foundation of all AI, and we have been training devices for an extended period, considering the engines powering Google and Apple Maps, Siri or Alexa, and the numerous Captcha requests we have encountered for bicycles, crosswalks and buses during our digital lives.

NAB Show Daily: What are some of the key takeaways attendees can expect from the corporate storytelling track, especially in crafting visual narratives for a multiplatform world?

Rich Harrington: Corporate storytelling is more than just a buzzword — it’s one of the fastest-growing areas in content creation. At Post|Production World, this dedicated track dives deep into the craft of working with brands, clients and stakeholders to develop compelling narratives. From strategic preproduction to final delivery and distribution, you’ll gain the skills to elevate your work and expand your impact. Whether you’re an in-house creative or a freelancer/agency serving businesses, this is where you learn to tell stories that truly matter.

NAB Show Daily: What insights are industry leaders sharing about the future of postproduction
careers and skill development?

GA: The proliferation of real-time in-camera visual effects, or ICVFX, in the context of virtual and XR productions has necessitated a comprehensive understanding of possibilities and limitations for visual effects. These projects are actively integrating editors and VFX crews earlier into the production process, thereby optimizing VFX pipelines and integrating edit-ready visual effects into the compressed timelines for deliverables in features and episodic content.

NAB Show Daily: What are the objectives of the “Birds-of-a-Feather” networking sessions, and which shared interests will they focus on?

RH: As the traditional classes wind down, the real conversations begin. “Birds-of-a-Feather” sessions at Post|Production World offer a unique space where like-minded creators — editors, colorists, producers, and production pros — come together to share insights, tackle industry challenges and build lasting connections. Whether you’re diving into AI’s role in content creation or discussing the business side of production, these interactive discussions are where knowledge meets community.

Post|Production World is produced by NAB in partnership with Future Media Conferences. For more information, visit ppw-conference.com.

© NAB

Content is still king without a doubt, but the throne is more of a moving target. A decent program might hop platforms, become its own global franchise or disappear.

The inaugural Business of Entertainment track at this year’s NAB Show, produced in partnership with Hollywood business publication The Ankler, will feature entrepreneurs and executives navigating the mutability of today’s entertainment market.

The BoE track will feature 10 sessions Sunday and Monday, April 6-7 (W217-218), and a Main Stage event with WWE President Nick Khan and WWE Chief Content Officer Paul “Triple H” Levesque, Wednesday, April 9, from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.

Khan and Levesque, also a longtime grappler, will discuss how they envision the 72-year-old wrestling juggernaut’s future, with The Ankler’s Sean McNulty moderating, Wednesday, April 9 from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. An Exhibits Pass is required.

“NAB is thrilled to have Nick Khan and Paul Levesque to take the stage for this all-new programming track,” Karen Chupka, executive vice president and managing director, NAB Global Connections and Events, said. “We’re also excited to work with The Ankler to bring the very latest and most well-informed perspectives to these sessions.”

Other topics in the track include a look at the vast category of unscripted TV, leveraging a brand, what attracts investors
and more.

As co-founders and co-CEOs of Candle Media, Tom Staggs and Kevin Mayer are on the leading edge of content investment. Blackstone-led Candle was formed less than four years ago and quickly made several acquisitions, most notably, Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine.

In a Monday session titled “Navigating the Future of Hollywood: Opportunities in Uncertain Times,” from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., Mayer and Staggs will share their insights on how major Hollywood players are regrouping after work strikes, a spending contraction, evolving audience habits and profoundly destructive wildfires. The duo will discuss where content investment and production is heading and how to stay ahead of the curve.

The unscripted genre, once the unsophisticated sibling of scripted series, now dominates the content landscape. In “Reality Check: The New Rules of Unscripted TV,” Tuesday from 3 to 4 p.m., Ankler entertainment journalist Elaine Low will lead a discussion with reality execs and entrepreneurs that focuses on evolving viewer habits, the impact of content globalization plus the role of AI and social media.

Low will be joined by Emmy and Peabody winner Andrew Fried, founder and CEO of Boardwalk Pictures (“Where’s My Jet?,” “The Black Godfather,” “Val”); Critics Choice Awards winner and Pantheon Media CEO Jennifer O’Connell (“The Way Down,” “Heaven’s Gate,” “What Happened, Brittany Murphy?”); food, home and lifestyle content maven Courtney White, president of Wheelhouse Entertainment; and Emmy winner Howard
Owens (“Running Wild With Bear Grylls,” “Life Below Zero,” “The Biggest Loser”), founder and co-CEO of Propagate.

When it comes to leveraging a brand, few have mastered it so well as Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, co-founders of World of Wonder and executive producers of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”

Creating content, scoring distribution and making it stick is a feat in the evolving platform ecosystem, so Bailey and Barbato built their own platform and created a global phenomenon in the process. In the session “Werk Ethic: The Art of Building a Global Brand, Drag Race Universe and Beyond,” Monday, 1:30-2:15 p.m., Bailey and Barbato, executive producers of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” will discuss how they have managed and grown the success of the drag performance competition show with 29 Emmys, now in its 17th season and franchised in more than 20 countries.

The pair launched their own streaming app, WOW Presents Plus, eight years ago on the strength of the “Drag Race” brand.

Sessions and speakers were still being added at press time. A complete lineup of the Business of Entertainment track will be available on the NAB Show session search site.

© NAB

Sports and broadcasting have a partnership that goes back a century. Much has been learned in all that time, but new tools and distribution methods continually change how broadcasters deliver winning programming to eager consumers.

Sports and broadcasting are the topics of NAB Show’s Sports Summit: The Future of Fan Engagement, which runs in Theater 1 of the Sports Business Hub on April 6 and the morning of April 7 and in Rooms W224-225 from the afternoon of April 7 through April 8. (Sessions in W224-225 require a Premium Conference/All Access Pass.)

Gotham Chopra, co-founder of Religion of Sports, the sports documentary studio he co-founded with NFL stars Tom Brady and Michael Strahan, will kick off the Sports Summit with his keynote presentation, “Peak Human,” Sunday at 10:45 a.m.

Delivering Monday’s keynote at 2:45 p.m. in W224-225 will be Portia Archer, CEO of the Women’s Tennis Association, whose fireside chat is titled “Breaking Barriers — Lessons from the Rise of Women’s Tennis and the Future of Women’s Sports.”

The Sunday session, “Beyond the Game: Original Content Driving Viewership Off the Field of Play,” will be addressed by Lauren Fisher, vice president and creative director at Religion of Sports, which has produced content for platforms including ESPN and Netflix.

Fisher is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and animator who takes a unique view of sports.

“My work has spanned platforms and formats — from in-venue activations to streaming docuseries — giving viewers a 360-degree view of how content builds deeper fan engagement,” she said. “My work in animation proves that innovation in visual storytelling matters in shaping the way fans see athletes, legends and narratives.”

What is it about sports that so captures our imagination?

“Sports storytelling is inherently cinematic, with real-life drama unfolding in every game — but fans crave ways to see and feel the humanity behind those moments,” Fisher said.

“Beyond competition, sport is a cultural force, a universal language that transcends borders, uniting people across languages, spaces and even time. In many ways, examining sports is like examining humanity itself.”

Fisher said she intends to explore how animation, experiential content and documentary storytelling can create more emotional and memorable fan experiences. The result will help attendees understand how to extend the sports experience beyond live games.

Other sessions include “The Future of Live Sports Production: Innovation in Real-Time Broadcasting,” “How Free Ad-Supported Streaming (FAST) Is Changing Sports Broadcasting” and “The Future of Sports Rights: Negotiating in the Age of New Media.”

There are also panel discussions with sports industry experts, such as “Engaging Audiences Through On-Air Talent,” which features Tracy Perlman, senior vice president of football communications and marketing for the NFL. Also on the panel are sportscaster and former NFL star Jason McCourty and Sandy Nunez, vice president of on-air talent management at NFL Network. That takes place Sunday, April 6, at 2:45 p.m.

Add Spice to the Mix
Understanding how to best deliver sports broadcasts and maximizing the audience will be the focus of the Sports Summit at NAB Show. Adding spice to these sessions will be the growing importance of streaming as the delivery medium.

Sports betting in media is expanding rapidly, and the Sports Summit will address how sports betting and broadcasting can work together to build the audience. “Wagering and Viewership: Capitalizing on the Betting Boom in Sports,” will be held on Sunday April 6 at 2 p.m. in Theater 1 and is open to all badge holders. Another growth area in broadcasting is the use of artificial intelligence in streamlining what broadcasters can deliver and improving the viewers’ experience. One session to address this is “Beyond Broadcast: The Role of AI, Data Analytics and Personalization,” set for Tuesday April 8 at 10:30 a.m. in W224-225 (this session requires an All Access/Premium Content Pass).

Sports remains a very popular broadcast genre, whether in national media covering major events such as the Olympics and the Super Bowl or local broadcasters airing citywide high school games. According to Nielsen, the Super Bowl on Feb. 9 had 127.7 million viewers, the largest audience for a single-network broadcast in U.S. history.

© NAB

As the media and entertainment sector continues to evolve, NAB Show is staying ahead of the pace of change and expanding its presence across the landscape of content creation.

“As NAB Show broadens its scope beyond its traditional broadcast audience, we are placing a greater focus on artificial intelligence, startups, live sports, streaming and the business community — key drivers shaping the future of media and content creation,” said Karen Chupka, managing director and global vice president, Connections & Events, at the National Association of Broadcasters.

“For more than 100 years, NAB Show has served as the industry’s launchpad for innovation,” she said. “As the industry continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace, we recognized the need to expand its audience to reflect the shifting landscape. By embracing new sectors, NAB Show ensures it remains the premier destination for discovering future trends and cutting-edge technologies.”

One major area of emphasis for NAB Show is the creator economy. Independent creators, many of whom are using tools and techniques like those employed in Hollywood, have become a significant media presence, building large audiences and securing brand partnerships.

That economy now employs some 50 million people around the world, according to Goldman Sachs, with its value projected to reach nearly $500 billion. NAB Show’s Creator Lab has been expanded to serve this burgeoning audience.

“NAB Show serves as a crossroads for these industries, fostering collaboration across film, broadcast, streaming and digital-first content,” Chupka said. “The newly expanded Creator Lab will offer education, demonstrations and networking opportunities to help creators utilize cutting-edge tools and strategies to enhance storytelling, grow their audiences and unlock new revenue streams.”

Also keeping revenue in mind is NAB Show’s new two-day Business of Entertainment track, produced in partnership with The Ankler, a digital media company covering the business of Hollywood. Sessions will offer insider perspectives on crucial industry shifts, Chupka said, including media dealmaking, content bundling, emerging ad models, evolving audience trends and the growing intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy.

“With thought leaders driving these discussions, the Business of Entertainment track will deliver sharp analysis and candid conversations on the future of the industry,” Chupka said.

NAB Show will spotlight the vital role of live sports in driving real-time, must-see content for the television industry. The three-day Sports Summit brings together broadcasters, streaming services, athletes, leagues, technologists, policymakers and brands to explore end-to-end solutions for live sports production and delivery, Chupka said.

Topics to be tackled include AI, data analytics, remote production, cloud-based workflows, ultra-high-definition streaming, sports wagering technology and more.

“The Sports Summit will highlight innovations in fan engagement and monetization, ensuring that NAB Show remains at the forefront of sports media’s evolution,” she said.

Perhaps no technology has more potential to revolutionize how content is created than artificial intelligence. It offers broadcasters new opportunities to deliver alerts more quickly, present more localized news and personalized experiences, streamline workflows and optimize engagement, Chupka said.

NAB Show will showcase the latest cutting-edge tools, training and insights to help professionals integrate AI into their workflows, which you can find across the show floor, specifically in the AI Innovation Pavilion and PropelME, a dedicated area for startups.

Early-stage companies exhibiting in PropelME make it a prime spot for entrepreneurs, investors and industry professionals to explore emerging technologies and innovations paired with expert discussions on the new Startup Stage. A new partnership between NAB Show and FBRC.ai will bring in pitches and programs designed to forge relationships.

“Both PropelME and theAI Innovation Pavilion feature cutting-edge solutions where industry leaders and decision-makers connect, explore innovations and engage through networking events,” Chupka said.

Further Forward
In 2024, according to Chupka, more than half of NAB Show attendees who were buyers attended the show for the first time. The shift in strategy should provide NAB Show’s more than 1,150 exhibitors from 41 countries with more new business opportunities and exposure to an evolving market. Nearly $17 billion in business is generated through connections made at NAB Show each year, Chupka said.

For longtime attendees, this evolution presents an opportunity to stay ahead of the curve.

“As new storytelling methods, platforms and technologies emerge, industry veterans can gain fresh insights, expand their professional networks and explore innovative solutions that complement traditional media practices,” Chupka said. “In blending the tools and expertise of Hollywood, cinema, broadcast and digital creators, NAB Show fosters a unified community of storytellers, ensuring that those who have been attending for years continue to find value in its ever-expanding offerings.”

© NAB

As the year wraps up, we’re posting a series of articles covering some of the major developments of the year, from AI to streaming and ATSC 3.0 to contentious retransmission consent battles.

Here are the 20 most popular stories of 2024 on the TV Tech website:

1. DirecTV Unveils New User Interface For Satellite Customers
2. ATSC 3.0 Deployments: Where and When Will NextGen TV Be Available?
3. Nearly Half (45%) of All Men Plan to Use AI to Compose Valentine’s Day Missives
4. CNN To Stream Election Night Coverage for Free
5. LG Channels Adds Local Stations to Free Streaming Lineup
6. Sinclair, ONE Media to Discuss NextGen TV, Other Tech Topics at NAB Show
7. NextGen TV Advocates Express ‘Deep Concern’ Over Future of ATSC 3.0 Products
8. Antenna Use Climbs Among Internet Homes, but NextGen TV Awareness Remains Low
9. Sinclair Promotes David Gibber to EVP and Chief Legal Officer
10. Wisconsin TV Stations Change Call Signs, Channel Numbers
11. Eight Channels Added to MyFree DirecTV Streaming Lineup
12. OTA Wireless Readies ATSC 3.0 Datacasting For Commercial Deployment
13. DirecTV Launches App-Based Free Streaming Service
14. Michael Malone, Long-Time ‘B+C’ Editor and Reporter, Dies at 55
15. CIMM Study Explores Big Data Measurement Problems
16. FCC Orders $3.3M in Fines Against 113 TV Stations for ‘Kid Vid’ Violations
17. The Many Moving Parts of the Transition to NextGen TV
18. Q Link CEO Issa Asad Pleads Guilty to Stealing $100 Million-Plus From Lifeline Program
19. NAB Show: Creative Lens on Live Sports
20. Disney Stations and Channels Blacked Out on DirecTV

There’s a sense of anticipation among some influential leaders in the U.S. broadcast industry that the nagging issue impeding ATSC 3.0 from living up to its full potential will be resolved with Donald Trump’s election to a second, nonconsecutive term as president.

With the November election, many are hopeful the Federal Communications Commission will embrace deregulating television broadcasting and enable the industry to compete more effectively with Big Tech.

As the year closes, broadcasters are hopeful ATSC 3.0 will be on the FCC’s deregulation list—particularly when it comes to sunsetting ATSC 1.0, thereby freeing up multiple sticks in local markets to transmit NextGen TV and begin delivering on the promise of 3.0.

Looking back from the future on this year, it may one day appear 2024 was the last time broadcasters, CE manufacturers, broadcast vendors and others worked to birth NextGen TV under a voluntary transition dictate rather than moving forward with certainty that legacy DTV would end by a certain date.

The Numbers
As of the close of 2024, 78 of the 210 Nielsen designated market areas (DMAs) were on-air with ATSC 3.0, making NextGen TV available to 76% of Nielsen TV households. Two markets—Jacksonville, Florida, and Davenport, Iowa—launched in mid-December, perhaps closing out the year for NextGen TV launches. Notably, 26 NextGen TV markets were transmitting ATSC 3.0 from at least two sticks at year-end. A few had three when low-power television (LPTV) stations were added to the mix. Taken together, this means more than 500 services were on air from 3.0 sticks in 2024, an Advanced Television Systems Committee spokesperson said.

More NextGen TVs and devices are also finding their way into Americans’ homes. The installed base of NextGen TV products climbed to nearly 14 million, up from the 2023 total of 10.3 million. Every day in 2024, Americans purchased 12,000 NextGen TVs—up from 10,000 per day in 2023, the Consumer Technology Association said.

More CE makers are selling NextGen TVs as well. Early in the year, TCL joined Sony, Samsung and Hisense in offering NextGen TVs in the U.S. In September, Panasonic announced its return to the U.S. TV market with OLED and mini-LED sets with NextGen TV support via a firmware upgrade.

Missing from the consumer set roster in 2024 was LG Electronics, one of the companies instrumental in developing the ATSC 3.0 standard. LG decided to sit out selling NextGen TVs in the United States in 2024 after it was ordered in 2023 to pay nearly $1.7 million and $6.75 for every future NextGen TV to Constellation Designs for patent violations. LG appealed the ruling, and in August, Pearl TV filed an amicus brief with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas in support of LG.

Pearl TV said it filed the brief because if the damages are allowed to stand not only will LG pull its NextGen TV sets but other CE vendors are likely to do so as well, effectively scuttling the future of TV broadcasting. The appeal is expected to be decided in 2025.

Wins At Home and Beyond
ATSC 3.0 in 2024 saw a number of big wins in the United States and elsewhere. At home, NextGen TV viewers of the Paris Summer Olympics in markets with NBC-owned stations could watch HD coverage with Dolby Vision high dynamic range (HDR) and Dolby Atmos immersive audio over the air via ATSC 3.0.

Gray Television also offered Dolby Vision and Atmos Olympics coverage to viewers in eight of its NBC affiliate markets. In May, the station group offered NextGen TV viewers of WAVE-TV in Louisville, Kentucky, coverage of the Kentucky Derby in Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos—a first for the event.

NBCU also began offering NextGen TV viewers of its NBC- and Telemundo-owned stations in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami a start-over feature as well as other personalized broadcast experiences made possible by ATSC 3.0.

The fruits of Run3TV, Pearl TV’s NextGen TV middleware app development abstraction layer, were on display at April’s NAB Show from a variety of developers, including Velope, Playanywhere, Gameloop and Roxi. Each promises to enhance the NextGen TV viewer experience in its own way.

ATSC 3.0 datacasting, too, advanced at NAB Show. Sinclair announced its Broadspan datacasting platform; AT&T Business discussed a trial of 3.0 datacasting aimed at commercial rollout for businesses; and Peak3 announced a deal with Sinclair and an impending deal with OTA Wireless (a joint venture of Nexstar Media Group and E.W. Scripps) to resell 3.0 bandwidth as a mobile virtual network operator. While not directly related to viewers of NextGen TV, these datacasting developments have the potential to touch consumers’ lives in multiple, diverse ways.

In March, America’s Public Television Stations (APTS) and Sinclair reached an agreement to ease public TV stations’ entrance into NextGen TV. For public stations not on air in 3.0 where Sinclair is, the station group agreed to provide free-of-charge carriage of virtual channels. In October, Nebraska Public Television in Omaha, Nebraska, was the first to take advantage of the deal with what Sinclair calls “BEST,” or broadcast-enabled streaming television, to reach viewers with its virtual channels enhanced with Advanced HDR by Technicolor.

Outside the U.S., one of the most important ATSC 3.0 developments was a recommendation by the SBTVD Forum, a nonprofit that advises the Brazilian government on digital TV and policy matters, to adopt the ATSC 3.0 physical layer for the South American nation’s TV 3.0 terrestrial broadcast service.

Other noteworthy 3.0 developments around the world include: Jamaica, which completed its 3.0 deployment in 2024; Trinidad and Tobago, which adopted 3.0 in 2024 and is expected to begin deployment in 2025 with completion in 2026; South Korea, the first nation on air with ATSC 3.0 launching 4K UHD in May 2015, where there was a push this year by broadcasters to encourage regulators to allow activation of mobile services; and India, where development of tech and standards for Broadcast-to-Everything (B2X) under the 3.0 umbrella is commencing with the goal of supporting Direct-to-Mobile broadcasting in India and various datacasting applications worldwide.

In October, the city of Calgary, Canada, and Humber Polytechnic B²C Labs announced a collaboration to design, build and test over-the-air datacasting for secured emergency responder communications, targeted public alerting, digital signage, remote education and timing and navigation applications.

Timing and navigation also may ultimately prove to be the killer app for ATSC 3.0 back in the United States. An ATSC 3.0-based Broadcast Positioning System (BPS) that relies on precise time and positioning data inserted into the over-the-air IP stream of NextGen TV broadcasters could serve as an augmentation or backup to the nation’s satellite-based Global Positioning System.

The U.S. Department of Transportation in September 2023 issued a request for information on GPS alternatives. Since then, NAB has led the industry’s efforts to respond and in 2024 was coordinating with major broadcasters and the government to launch a trial. Adoption of BPS by the government as a GPS backup could lead to rapid removal of existing obstacles to nationwide 3.0 deployment given the national security implications of losing the satellite-based positioning system.

The year 2024 will be remembered for numerous developments that advanced ATSC 3.0 for broadcasters and viewers at home and around the world—and that was under a voluntary transition edict. One can only wonder about the pace and number of developments next year if regulators clear the way for 1.0 to ride off into the sunset at home, and others around the world look to deploy a next-generation television system.

It’s easy to get the impression that the film and television industry has largely picked the low-hanging fruit of sustainability. LED lighting is both an environmental and a financial boon: reduced trucking, crew, generator and fuel costs have never been a hard sell to line producers. Moving beyond that, though, takes new ideas—especially given the current economic circumstances.

People at every level of production have their part to play, but those who make a living hauling lights around back lots are often aware that the ability to have nice things comes from the very top.

Matt Rivet, partner at Altman Solon, a consultancy focused on media and tech, works with corporates—from studios to broadcast and cable networks to streaming services—and all the tech that supports them. He also supports investors in media companies and assesses the commercial merits of said investments.

“Generally speaking, I think there’s a shift toward sustainability, broadly," Rivet says. “The most obvious place that everyone goes is energy consumption. It feels like it’s a place where there is a very obvious way—quick wins is where it’s at. The other things are waste, water, how you buy, where you buy from.”

Taking popular new ideas and making them part of the solution can help take the sting out of change, Rivet adds. “One of the things we highlight in our report is travel mileage. Virtual production can potentially be one of those things that helps reduce the amount of travel that needs to be done.”

Virtually Obvious
Sony Pictures, Rivet relates, has run the numbers on at least one kind of production. “This is not analysis we did—it’s Sony Pictures’ Greener World initiative,” he says. “They compared two productions with scenes that were shot on location and in a VP studio.

“The comparison in terms of the overall emissions was quite stark. I don’t know the exact numbers but it was something like 15-25% less emissions.” The embodied carbon of a high-end virtual production stage, of course, is far from zero, but it can be amortized over multiple productions.

The hugely varied tasks required of film and television production have always made coordination difficult.

“Media and entertainment is inherently disparate,” Rivet reflects. “People are going to various places doing various things, and it’s hard to consolidate. We’d love to, but it’s just not practical … in our data, there’s a lack of awareness of benefits of sustainability. Sixty-eight percent of folks said that’s why they hadn’t prioritized sustainability. Fifty-six percent said there was not enough of an incentive, or high up-front costs.”

“Media and entertainment doesn’t have to be a first adopter,” Rivet points out. “Other industries will go there. The future here will likely be some level of moderate change over some period of time.”

Even so, that time may not be now or next week.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you that M&E companies are under a lot of financial stress," Rivet says. “They’re looking for opportunities to improve efficiency and save on their cost basis. And I do believe, if you model it out, there’s a long-term benefit for sustainability because it will create some savings. The push and pull is that they can be interested in doing those things, but they have to balance that against the realities of operating their business.”

The Buy-In
Ben Stapleton, executive director of the U.S. Green Building Council California, has seen firsthand how critical boardroom-level support can be. Even with that support, Stapleton counsels that getting the most from any sustainability initiative often means more than a simple equipment exchange.

“It’s about working these ideas into the production from the beginning, not as an afterthought,” he says. Generators are an example … people use generators and run cables, it’s expensive and dangerous and creates a bunch of carbon. You can just distribute the power into smaller batteries all around the production, save money on wiring and have a safer set.”

Broadening the scope of sustainability efforts beyond energy doesn’t necessarily mean they need to become expensive, Stapleton continues. One concept involves direct reuse of resources such as the lumber used to create often short-lived sets.

“Waste is clearly an important area," Stapleton says. “How do you approach material reuse, prop reuse? It’s not just creating new props and backgrounds. There’s a ton of waste that comes out of that process—how is that waste managed? Yes, it is a sustainability principle to figure out how we can reuse, but it’s also going to be cheaper to reuse.”

Again, though, the imperative to make that happen needs support throughout the organization. “Part of the challenge is—let’s say—you’re someone who’s managing the set design and the props,” Stapleton adds. “If you don’t have buy-in from the person who’s handling the financial and operations side, they’ll come to you and be like: ‘What are you doing here? That’s not how we handle things.’ If people have been [trained] and understand why these decisions need to be made, they can approach it differently. It doesn’t add cost and delay.”

Moving to the Grid
Mark Thornton, a London-based lighting technician, has enough experience at the sharp end of film production to put him in a good position to assess new ideas. The knowledge that electric mains flow beneath most city streets—often just feet away, but inaccessible—led Thornton to get involved in a project to provide access to that power at key locations.

“I was contacted by Film London who were talking about putting this mains post into Victoria Park,” Thornton recalls. “They’d already done most of the work on it, so I got involved in a consultation group and said the place where it is is brilliant, but here’s some suggestions for the box itself. I suggested a few ideas of how to manage it, being a remote location away from Film London’s base and not something they’d normally do.”

Power drawn from the grid will usually be cleaner—and certainly quieter—than power that is generated on-site.

“That was the whole point of it being at Victoria Park,” Thornton adds. “They had a lot of fairgrounds and live events, concerts. They were trying to make sure people were able to use the post—actually it’s a rather large box—rather than bring in generators. The issue is not only sustainability and environmental impact, it’s also noise. Even when we go on the route of having battery generators, we have to charge them somewhere. The idea is that a production could go to Film London and say, ‘We have a 25kW battery pack that we’d like to charge up on a regular basis’ and it’d be up to them to charge a cost.”

Rules in the Way
That sort of idea requires no new technology and comparatively little investment; as so often, the barriers are administrative. Here, Thornton refers to another idea that seems to combine high utility with low inconvenience, but which has found itself enmeshed in red tape.

“One of the ideas is that we get access to EV charging points. There is a company that makes towable batteries … they use the Tesla power packs and the brains so they can go and use the Tesla supercharger—but if you do that in central London, it doesn’t have a [license plate], so it doesn’t have an account.

“It’s the rules that seem to be getting in the way,” Thornton muses. “The infrastructure is technically possible but there’s someone with a pen somewhere who says you can’t do that. As an industry, we’re doing pretty well, moving toward LED light sources. The physics is not going to change, but if you look at the wider country, there’s a lot of renewables, wind power, wave power, as soon as they start phasing out all the natural gas … There’s a really good web site called Gridwatch that I’ve used quite a few times to highlight where the [U.K.'s] energy comes from, and the closer natural gas gets down to zero, the better off the country will be.”

While those big-picture issues are addressed at a societal level, Thornton points out, there are still some very accessible avenues to explore. Particularly, he proposes one very general principle which will be painfully familiar to people experienced with single-camera drama—and talismanic of the drive for sustainability as a whole.

“There’s a bit of people not knowing what they want,” he concludes. “It’s about planning—right across the board, from personnel management to kit ordering to logistics. If we were able to plan, if someone up the food chain made a decision early in the process, we could plan better. The problem we have as an industry is everyone leaves it to the last minute.”

It’s been five years now since the wireless carriers began rolling out 5G connectivity. Claims—sometimes exaggerated—about its possibilities were rampant then, including better steering of scalpels in robotic surgeries, downloading of HD feature-length movies in milliseconds, alleviating traffic jams and obsoleting human control of automobiles.

Not all of these glowing promises have come to fruition, and only time will tell if they ever will. One thing about 5G is certain, though, and that’s its much-less-hyped impact on TV broadcasters and content producers. Although bonded-cellular video transmission arrived a decade ahead of 5G’s rollout and has done a lot in terms of freeing remote telecasts from conventional connectivity, broadcasters—in general—agree that this fifth iteration of wireless broadband is living up to the promises that accompanied it.

What It Brings to the Table
“We have spoken for several years now about the impact that 5G has made to bonded cellular,” said Dan Pisarski, chief technology officer at LiveU. “A key example is what is called ‘deterministic latency,’ where the changes in the in-air protocol called ‘New Radio,’ or ‘NR,’ in 5G, use a much more fixed latency compared to LTE [long term evolution, a term used to describe earlier broadband wireless technology].

Pisarski observed that 5G’s utilization of new spectrum allocations provides “a much more complete workflow for users,” allowing such enhancements as two-way intercom capability, video return feeds, robotic camera control and more.

“This ensures that a team deployed with a LiveU unit is a full-capability remote team, communicating, reviewing and interacting with remote management—not just ‘shooting video,’ ” he said.

A notable example of how 5G is impacting live sports coverage happened last summer when NBC Sports was able to add more 5G cameras to more holes at Sahalee Country Club in Sammamish, Washington, site of the 2024 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship. This was due to the scalability of T-Mobile’s 5G portable private network, according to Chris Melus, vice president of product management at T-Mobile’s Business Group.

“Broadcasters loved that they could get super-fast, fiber-like speeds without the wires,” he said, adding that 5G can provide “glass-to-glass latency that averages under 100 milliseconds, enabling full-4K 60 fps resolution.”

As an added bonus at the tourney, T-Mobile also rolled out another 5G-based enhancement for spectators in the form of real-time player data delivered to smartphones. The app provided such information as radar trajectory of golf shots, 3D imagery, views of greens and more. “Broadcasters have found tremendous value in the ability to integrate 5G into their remote production suite of tools because of 5G’s ability to efficiently bring fans more high-quality content without the burden of wires,” Melus added.

5G at the Olympics
5G also made a big splash at the Paris Summer Olympics, allowing broadcasters to provide coverage of events in ways that would not have been possible previously, and taking both in-person and video spectator enjoyment to new heights.

5G was key for France.tv to be able to cover the torch relay across 1,600 kilometers (about 1,000 miles) of France from May to July, according to Matt McEwen, vice president of product at TVU Networks.

“In the past, a large-scale moving event like this would have required helicopters and planes to receive and relay the video signals being captured by the mobile cameras,” he said. “Utilizing both public and private 5G infrastructure allowed France.tv to transmit the mobile signal without aerial support, saving 92% of the typical costs. If such a workflow were not possible, France.tv simply would not have been able to produce nine weeks of live torch relay coverage due to budget constraints.”

“5G has absolutely transformed how we now cover large-scale events like the Summer Games in Paris,” said Sukhvir Grewal, sales account manager at Dejero. “These events demand real-time, high-quality coverage from multiple locations and angles. With 5G’s higher bandwidth and lower latency it’s possible to deliver a better viewer experience even more seamlessly.”

In recalling coverage of the event’s opening ceremonies, which took place along a 6-kilometer (about 4-mile) portion of the River Seine, Jim Jachetta, chief technology officer at VidOvation, observed that 5G made all the difference in capturing close-up footage of athletes aboard the scores of boats.

“Olympic Broadcasting Services, in partnership with Haivision, utilized over 200 Samsung S24 Ultra smartphones equipped with Haivision’s MoJoPro mobile camera apps … [to provide] HDR video feeds via a dedicated 5G network supported by 12 5G cells mounted on bridges,” he said.

Jachetta added that history was made in coverage of another water event, the Marseille sailing competitions. “A standout achievement was the creation of the world’s first sea-based private 5G network,” said Jachetta. “This network, which featured 5G antennas on large catamarans, enabled live video transmission from rapidly moving boats. The 5G network’s flexibility allowed it to adapt to various sailing courses, ensuring uninterrupted coverage of the sailing events regardless of the boats’ location.”

Is It Really All That?
Since its introduction, bonded cellular has been quietly displacing conventional microwave and satellite links to deliver news and other live feeds. When the first bonded-cellular gear appeared, 4G (with anticipated data rates of perhaps 100 Mbps), was just beginning to roll out, and 3G with its low Mbps (or even high Kbps) throughput was still the norm.

Fast forward to 2024 and the availability of 5G networks across most of the United States has greatly expanded, with about 60% of the population within the reach of a 5G signal. We asked several broadcasters if it was really making a difference in their field operations. The answers were something of a mixed bag.

“I can’t say I’ve noticed a difference between 4G and 5G,” said Pete Sockett, Capitol Broadcasting’s director of engineering and operations, who is based in the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area. “It may have helped some with connectivity, but it’s hard to say.”

Dan Wilson, chief engineer at WPSD-TV Paducah, Kentucky, had a different response. “Since we switched to 5G, we’re able to get shots that we could never get before,” he said. “With 5G it’s even better and easier to get shots. Before 5G, the shots might pixelate and a reliable transmission was ‘iffy.’ Once 5G hit, that went away.”

Wilson noted that his station was still getting used to 5G, as it’s only been available in the Paducah area for the past half-year or so. He also commented on the impact 5G’s reduced latency was having on WPSD’s remote operations.

“The low latency is even better than I thought possible,” he added. “We’d gotten accustomed to a minimum three-second delay. Now it’s a second-and-a-half or even just a second. This has gotten us almost back to analog microwave days in terms of delay. It’s a real game-changer.”

David Ostmo, San Antonio, Texas-based regional engineering director for Sinclair Broadcast Group, noted that while 5G has perhaps increased the comfort level in bringing in remotes via bonded cellular, it hasn’t been a complete panacea.

“We were making pretty extensive use of LiveU technology prior to the 5G rollout,” said Ostmo. “It may be a little more comfortable trusting a football game to 5G than to 4G. We’re always concerned about a secondary link with microwave or satellite at an important event. We’ve lost live shots at large events using only bonded cellular. There was a strong signal when we were testing, but then the video was poor with pixelation when we went on the air.”

He noted that in this respect, 5G has made things better. “Where it is available, we get a more robust connection and better throughput,” he said, adding that 5G was also enabling more elaborate field productions than could be undertaken before its deployment.

What About Trucks?
Ostmo noted also that while his organization had eliminated some of its conventional microwave and satellite trucks, he felt that it was important to retain a backup to cellular, despite the claims made for 5G. “We need the ability to broadcast after a large natural disaster such as a hurricane or tornado, and cellular networks could be destroyed,” he said. “This is especially in tornado- or hurricane-prone areas.”

Ostmo observed that as microwave or satellite trucks “age out” and are retired, there will always be a need for microwave and two-way radio linkage from the field that’s independent of common carriers.

Perhaps the biggest problem with 5G right now, according to Ostmo—whose responsibility extends over Sinclair stations spread over several states in the south-central portion of the U.S.—is lack of solid coverage.

“Where it’s available, we get a more robust connection and better throughput,” he said. “But it’s not available everywhere. In San Antonio, there’s good coverage in the city and not-so-good coverage as you go further out. There’s not any advantage in Nebraska.”

With the total value of the global digital video market estimated at $193 billion in 2023 and expected to explode to more than $503 billion by 2032—according to IMARC Group—that growth rate of nearly 11% represents a market that needs to make content protection a top priority.

“The growth trajectory means it will be a dereliction of responsibility for companies in the digital content space that derogate or underfund efforts to protect their investments and IP,” said Emeka Okoli, senior vice president of business solutions with Zixi, a secure content streaming platform provider for companies such as Amazon, Bloomberg, Apple, Fubo and Roku. “All linearized content, including big-screen VOD assets, are fair game to the bad guys who also see a gold mine.”

In the past, broadcasters and content producers could live with a certain level of piracy and look the other way, according to Asaf Ashkenazi, CEO of Verimatrix; developer of streaming security solutions such as Verimatrix Streamkeeper, whose Counterspy module uses AI to anticipate attacks. “However, today’s incredibly competitive market forces everyone to be more efficient and make sure they don’t share their value with cybercriminals and pirates.”

A Wide Range of Threats
Given the multibillion-dollar value of digital video content, it’s not surprising that it’s under attack from many directions. “Key threats include piracy, content leakage, theft and illegal distribution, all of which compromise content monetization,” said Ian Hamilton, CTO of Signiant, known for its SaaS solutions that support secure content exchange within and between media organizations. “Piracy and illegal distribution result in lost revenue from unauthorized access, while content leakage and theft devalue exclusive releases.”

There is a mind-boggling variety of threat actors doing their best to steal content and then profit from that theft, according to Hamilton. “Threat actors range from organized crime groups and hackers to insiders, individual pirates, and even state actors,” he said. “Organized crime groups run piracy operations for profit, distributing stolen content through illegal channels. Hackers may target content for financial gain or to disrupt media companies. Insiders, such as employees or contractors, might leak content for personal or financial reasons. Individual pirates steal content for notoriety or minor profits, while state actors may pursue political or economic objectives.”

To make matters worse, today’s video content pirates are not the stereotypical lone hackers sitting in a darkened theater with a camcorder, or recording video streams on their home computer and then sharing those copies with friends. In many cases, “they are organized just like a profitable digital streaming business, often operating across borders with sophisticated operations centered around one goal: making money at the expense of hard-working content providers and video distributors,” said Ashkenazi.

The Pros and Cons of AI
The advent of AI isn’t helping. “AI enables threat actors to automate attacks, enhance social engineering, and create deepfakes,” said Hamilton. “It facilitates rapid identification of vulnerabilities and streamlines the theft and distribution process.”

The bottom line: “Anyone who can steal content probably will,” observed Ben Jones, director of solutions marketing at MediaKind. “Their motivations include profit from selling pirated content or bypassing paywalls to watch stolen content for their own personal gain.”

Advances in technology are aiding thieves in their attempts to steal digital video content, but technology is also helping content producers and distributors to better protect themselves against such theft. This technology is being harnessed by companies like Akamai, MediaKind, Signiant, Verimatrix and Zixi, to deter and disable such attacks when they occur.

At MediaKind, their clients are increasing their use of digital watermarking—hiding unique, traceable identifier data within the content, so that owners of pirated content can be found and alerted. “At any point in the chain where there’s been a detection of leaked content, we can work out where that occurred using watermarking,” Jones said. “With this data, content owners can point their lawyers at the pirates, and force them to take the content down.”

Upgrading Encryption
Increasing the complexity of cipher blocks and secure algorithms is also making it harder for thieves to steal content digitally. “The older encryption system used a 42-bit key; now we are moving into 228- and 256-bit keys, which are much more military-style and secure,” said Jones. “We’re also using measures such as DRM [digital rights management] and real-time content monitoring online.”

Zixi’s SDVP and telemetry plane, Zen Master, includes high AES encryption. “We also provide DRM functionalities that utilize DTLS [Datagram Transport Layer Security], which safeguards against stream ripping, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks and fraudulent endpoints by verifying the receiving device’s certificate of authenticity,” Okoli said.

“From an Akamai lens, since we’re dealing mainly with streaming services delivering video content to end users, primary threats to content include theft, piracy, rebroadcasting, automated scraping and account hijacking,” noted Tedd Smith, solutions engineering manager at Akamai Technologies. “These types of actions can be incredibly damaging, causing everything from decreases in viewership, loss of content rights, brand damage, increase in enforcement costs, and revenue loss.”

“Furthermore, Zixi’s platform includes DPDK (Data Plane Development Kit) high-performance networking, enabling content to operate at the network layer, bypassing the operating system and effectively blocking potential OS-based ransom malware. With Zixi’s new multi-hop product, we can offer customers upstream metadata observability which will help companies proactively trace their content incoming digital journey and footprint.”

Signiant’s content protection protocol employs integrated multilayered strategies to protect its clients. “This includes using AI for real-time monitoring and threat detection, applying strict access controls based on least privilege, and employing encryption,” said Hamilton. As well, “Minimizing copies of content by interfacing with customer-owned storage reduces exposure and potential vulnerabilities.”

Akamai and Verimatrix also use the many content protection strategies described above.

Constant vigilance is another important tool: “Visibility is a key component of content protection as well, especially when dealing with direct-to-consumer delivery,” Smith said. “This is critical during live events when immediate mitigation is a top priority. Having real-time visibility into traffic patterns and user behavior allows streaming services to quickly catch things like stream-sharing and rebroadcasting so access can be revoked.”

Overall, “our commitment is to make piracy unprofitable, illegal distribution unsustainable, and content security an enabler of business growth rather than merely a compliance checkbox,” said Ashkenazi.

Verimatrix’s position is shared by the content protection companies interviewed for this story, all of which want to ensure that crime does not pay for pirates, and that legitimate video producers/distributors continue to profit from the multibillion-dollar value of their content.

As television moved out of the laboratory and into regular broadcasting schedules during the decade of the 1930s, it was obvious early on that the “hand signal” methodology used in radio broadcasts for communication between a show’s director and performers in the studio wouldn’t work. Television’s glaring lights and much larger studio spaces made such visual communication either very difficult or impossible.

As a solution, early TV broadcasters cobbled together their own intercom systems from available telephone company technology (switchboard operator headsets and carbon microphones) to enable “party line” communications among all crew members.

Although there was much technological progress in other areas such as higher power transmitters, UHF, color and videotape, during television’s post-WWII boom, intercom technology largely remained stagnant.

A few manufacturers such as RCA, began to offer commercial pre-packaged versions of the telco-technology party line systems, and others, such as Telex (an early provider of hearing aids) developed improved operator headsets with better ear cushioning and a headphone for each ear that allowed wearers to hear both intercom traffic and program audio, but that was about as far as it went for the next couple of decades.

Gone forever were the days of two-camera black and white remotes. To meet such expectations, the networks added more and more camera positions, and enhancements such as instant replay, electronic graphics, and on-field mics for capturing officials’ calls. All of these involved operators who needed to be “on headsets.” With these additions in support personnel, the limitations of existing intercom technology soon became apparent.

“As you continue to add stations, the circuit impedance goes down and levels go down,” noted Dave Brand, whose career spans some 40-years of involvement in intercom technology, and who, with his son Stephen, established Intracom Systems of Malibu, Calif. “These early systems were very limited as to how many users they could accommodate.”

Jay Ballard, who spent much of his broadcast career with NBC agreed, noting that such “two-wire” telco technology had been the norm even in the mid-1970s when he started at NBC’s Washington, D. C. O&O, WRC-TV, and also at the network’s New York headquarters.

“Adding stations lowers levels on a two-wire system,” he said. “To try and get around this, NBC New York had employed multiple two-wire circuits for isolation when I went to work there.”

Brand observed the next step in intercom evolution came from Clear-Com, a fledgling San Francisco company started by audio engineer Charlie Butten, and Bob Cohen, owner of a live sound business.

“Bob put together a different type of intercom system,” recalled Brand. “Instead of using voltage-sourced user stations where each added station lowers the impedance and level, he came up with the idea of a current-sourced system with high-impedance devices. This way you can stack a whole lot of stations together before you notice any significant loss.”

Brand recalled that almost simultaneously with Clear-Com’s push for a better intercom system, another group of garage innovators— Douglas Leighton, Stan Hubler, and Rick Karwoski—teamed together to create enhanced intercom technology, which included two-separate communication channels, ultimately founding RTS Systems.

According to an RTS company history, “(our technology) replaced a system patched together with telephone headsets, adapter boxes, and cables… (which) barely worked with very few stations connected together.”

This early RTS system accommodated as many as 50 stations, and provided “good clean audio as loud as the user wanted.”

“Europeans understood the need for four-wire early on,” said Ballard. “Coverage of sports, especially the Olympics, necessitated it. NBC had tried using multiple buses to accommodate an increased number of users, but this wasn’t a very versatile approach, as a guy in videotape didn’t need to hear what was going on in camera control. It was around 1970 that the four-wire approach began to take off in this country, with ABC leading U.S. networks in moving away from two-wire technology.”

Ballard noted too that coverage of national political conventions was also a driving factor in the eventual movement away from two-wire technology.

“The sort of convention coverage that began in that era required directed and isolated communications,” Ballard said. “A lot of manufacturers got into the business then, with companies like McCurdy addressing this need early on.”

(Toronto-based McCurdy Radio Industries, which began operations in the 1940s, was pivotal in moving from party line to individually directed intercom communications. The company had been delivering four-wire hardware, including necessary switching matrices, long before there was a U.S. demand. McCurdy advertised four-wire matrix-switched intercoms in U.S. trade journals as early as the mid-1960s. Another Canadian company, Ward Beck Systems (WBS) was also an early supplier of four-wire gear.)

Entering the Digital Era
The emergence of digital integrated circuits during the 1970s was another driving force in intercom system makeovers, with companies beginning to offer such features as computer (microprocessor)-controlled switching matrices and programmable key panels with LED (and later, LCD) alphanumeric key labeling.

Digital signal processing was soon to follow, with manufacturers now touting “broadcast quality” audio. Large multiconductor intercom cabling also fell victim to digital technology, with a single coax or CAT-type data cable able to handle both audio and control functions.

Switching matrices also grew in size, with manufacturers offering systems as large as 450 x 450 by the mid-1990s. It also became possible to link (trunk) multiple physically separated matrices to create extremely large systems.

Portable operator stations (aka “beltpacks”) were also developed, eventually with wireless connectivity that provided operators with a much greater range of movement than ever before.

“Systems then were very simple,” said Dugan. “There was a beltpack, a power supply and cables. Everything was hard-wired.”

This soon changed.

“The digital matrix became the core technology, and networking has taken over the intercom world completely,” he said. “Clear-Com and RTS now have 1RU units with wireless capability, connectivity through the internet, and hardwired connectivity all from the same box.”

Dugan observed that a really big technology leap occurred a dozen or so years ago when the first DECT (digital enhanced cordless telecommunications) systems began to appear. “DECT-based units now are the ‘bread and butter’ of today’s wireless intercom world,” he said

Dugan also noted that the move to wireless intercom stations has become universal.

“It’s not uncommon to have as many as 100 wireless beltpacks deployed when two studios operate side-by-side on a show,” said Dugan. The networks sometimes operate with several hundred beltpacks.”

The biggest problem in deploying intercom systems nowadays is not with the equipment, but in managing spectrum as a resource in which to operate, Dugan said. “At the end of the day, spectrum is the real estate where we build wireless systems, and that’s something that the FCC, and to some extent, manufacturers and consumers who lobby, will ultimately drive and impact.”

What’s Next?
Two members of the engineering operation at one of the country’s largest television broadcast operations, the Sinclair Broadcast Group, were asked to share their thoughts about advances in intercom technology, and to speculate where it may be going.

Paul Spinelli, SBG’s assistant vice president of engineering, opined that “this would definitely be the move to IP,” noting that earlier in his career, “the intercom filled half a rack; now you can do the same thing in a few RU and a switch.”

Charlie Straker, Sinclair’s senior director of cloud engineering and operations, agreed.

“It’s all migrating this way,” said Straker. “[IP] certainly makes things a lot simpler and more efficient. I would also say that there has been kind of a ‘democratization’ of intercom systems. For a long time, it was just RTS or Clear-Com. Now you’ve got companies like Riedel—all sorts of companies—that are really innovating in this space.”

“There’s also a lot of open-source intercom software out there, and some of this is evolving into paid-support models,” added Spinelli. “It’s quite good.”

Spinelli and Straker shared their thoughts about what TV production intercom systems might look like a few years from now.

Straker shared Spinelli’s observation regarding a universal movement to other IP formats.

“I see NDI kind of taking over Dante,” he said. “There are some companies already doing NDI intercoms. It’s just a matter of time before that gets picked up by the big boys out there. It’s all part of the democratization of everything. IP protocol makes everything cheaper for everybody. There are a lot of benefits.”

The two engineers also reflected on the pandemic-fueled changes in broadcast facility intercommunications; changes that have resulted in a communications modality likely unfathomable to those working in television’s early years.

“Covid drove intercoms,” said Spinelli. “Everybody’s got an intercom app now. I can talk with Charlie or anyone else in this building. It’s now ‘intercom anywhere.’—you just put in your wireless earbuds from your phone, load an app, and you’re communicating with everyone in the control room.”

Spinelli and Straker agreed that it’s just a matter of time before the hardware-based intercoms that have served the industry since its inception are destined to become pages in a history book.

“I’m the cloud guy,” said Straker, “And I would say that we’ll be getting away from having actual hardware frames and migrate everything to the client/server model where everything is software based.”

“I don’t see many facilities purchasing intercom panels anymore,” said Spinelli. “They’re going to web-based GUI virtual interfaces and a computer headset. Why would I purchase an intercom frame and panels at a few thousand dollars apiece when you can run a soft panel?”

Spinelli observed too that technology has reached a point where hardware really isn’t necessary for intercom systems; they could be driven by a cloud-based server.

“Suddenly you have an intercom at a really effective cost point,” he said.

“With a cloud system, you only spin it up when you need it, and then spin it down when you don’t,” Straker added.

“If you’re a production house or content center, you’d only turn it on when you have a customer,” Spinelli concluded.

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers is a highly respected organization that works to establish technical frameworks for the creation and distribution of films and television programs. Although it is not the only group involved in broadcast standards, some of its good works involve such critical signal distribution standards as the Serial Digital Interface (SDI), ST 2022 and ST 2110.

SDI, first defined in 1989, remains a popular and reliable method of transporting high-quality video signals from point-to-point within a facility or field production. (The current version of SDI is “SMPTE ST 2083.”) However, since 1989, our world has become increasingly data-oriented and it soon became obvious that transporting broadcast-quality video signals over IP networks was both necessary and advantageous. SMPTE’s first standard to marry SDI video with IT was the ST 2022 standard.

“When the need for uncompressed IP networks in live TV production arose, companies turned to the SMPTE ST 2022 family of standards, the online media-over-IP standard available at SMPTE, to build infrastructure,” said Thomas Bause Mason, SMPTE director of standards development. 

“SMPTE ST 2022 was designed for content contribution, and was not well-suited for live TV production. A better standard needed to be created that reflected the needs of live TV production.”

That standard is ST 2110. First published in 2017, it is catching on quickly. 

“When it comes to large-scale infrastructure, almost all new facilities built [that have] IP networks for production are using SMPTE ST 2110,” Mason said. “SMPTE ST 2110 was also greatly adopted by equipment manufacturers, and SMPTE ST 2110 products are widely available.”

Core Parts Are Done
The core parts of the SMPTE ST 2110 standards family are done and were published starting in 2017, Mason said. Since then, all documents in the family except for one (ST 2110-30) went through revisions to clarify their provisions and to fix minor issues, while considering compatibility with existing implementations. These revisions were published in 2023. (SMPTE recently announced that SMPTE Standards will now be available at smpte.org to members at no additional cost.)

Perhaps the biggest benefit of using ST 2110 is that it uses standard IP networks. This has many advantages, including a large body of IP specialists that can build and maintain such networks. Another big advantage is that high-speed networks suitable for live television use commercial-off-the-shelf products that are relatively common and inexpensive. 

SDI, as well as it works, is for television only. SMPTE ST 2110 uses what the rest of the world uses.

Manufacturers are wasting no time building products compatible with the ST 2110 standard.

“Imagine has introduced SMPTE ST 2110 technology into almost every product family in our line,” said John Mailhot, CTO for infrastructure at Imagine Communications. “We see ST 2110 as the basis of design for almost every large media project in our pipeline, and even small/medium facilities are seriously considering the redundancy and scalability advantages of an ST 2110 approach.”

Mailhot said that Imagine’s Selenio Network Processor uses SMPTE ST 2110 to carry up to eight uncompressed UHD signals in each direction over 100G network interfaces, alongside their related audio and ANC components. This consolidation reduces the amount of cable (fiber) and the associated construction and project management time significantly.

“The ability to pick-and-choose from a marketplace of QSFP [quad small form factor pluggable] optical power options ensures that 100G [and 400G] IP connections can reach even the farthest corners of large facilities or even campuses,” he said. “In university settings, we are able to run 100G network connections between sports facilities on opposite corners of large campuses, building consolidated production environments that would have been much more expensive and difficult using traditional SDI approaches.”

Launching Products
Blackmagic Design launched two products last year using the SMPTE ST 2110 standard: the 2110 IP Converter and the DeckLink IP. The 2110 IP Converter 3x3G is a rackmount converter that converts 3G-SDI devices to 2110 IP broadcast systems, and the DeckLink IP is a family of three PCIe cards that capture and playback 10-bit uncompressed, broadcast-quality video directly into ST 2110 IP-based broadcast systems.

“Blackmagic Design views ST 2110 as an important tool for the industry,” said Dave Hoffman, business development manager for Blackmagic Design. “From a simplicity and flexibility standpoint, ST 2110 creates a universal language we can all speak and work in.”

Hoffman pointed out the features that make the company’s 2110 IP converter the right fit for many applications.

“Unlike using an array of miniconverters, the Blackmagic 2110 IP Converter 3x3G is rack-mountable and includes a front panel with an LCD, so users can walk up and change settings at any time,” he said. “The front-panel LCD also has the benefit of allowing live video monitoring of all input and output channels. Plus, the LCD includes network diagnostic tools to assist in troubleshooting issues in complex 2110 IP broadcast systems.”

Matrox Video offers both point-of-use ST 2110 converters as well as ST 2110 network adapters for OEM applications.

“ST 2110 is important for broadcasters, venue and stadium operators, and other media companies seeking to move to IT-based production workflows,” said Francesco Scartozzi, vice president of sales and business development for Matrox Video. “As an open SMPTE standard, like SDI, customers can choose best-of-breed products from their preferred vendor and maintain compatibility. ST 2110 production workflows use general-purpose networking equipment, which means users can easily upgrade an ST 2110 network from 10GigE to 25GigE, and even (in the future) to 100GigE without changing the whole infrastructure.”

Scartozzi said that another advantage ST 2110 offers is its ability to process video, audio and auxiliary data streams separately, depending on the capacity of the network. For example, with the right network connection, one Matrox ST 2110 NIC can support up to four 25 Gbps links and can process up to 32 channels of HD with full redundancy enabled.

“Matrox Video is an expert in ST 2110 and supported the standard before its SMPTE ratification,” he said. “We provide components to OEMs, who then build end-user products for media production, and are being used in ST 2110 productions worldwide today. The knowledge and expertise we gained during the development of ST 2110 OEM network cards has been poured into Matrox ConvertIP, which converts 3G/12G SDI to/from ST 2110. This lets broadcasters work with baseband signals inside their IP video network, and display ST 2110 on SDI/HDMI monitors.”

Manufacturer Agnostic
Chris Scheck, head of marketing content at Lawo, pointed out that an advantage of ST 2110 is that it is manufacturer-agnostic. That means customers can pick the best gear for their operations and production workflow, and avoid being locked into any particular manufacturer’s equipment universe. 

A recent addition to Lawo’s IP-native product portfolio is .edge, its hyper-density SDI/IP conversion and routing platform with up to 192 SDI connectors on 2RU.

“We recently introduced HOME Apps for server-based multiviewer generation, up/down/cross conversion, stream transcoding and graphics insertion,” Scheck said. “A lot more HOME Apps are on the roadmap, some of which will be introduced over the coming months.”

Scheck said that both these product lines feature JPEG XS compression and decompression for lossless, yet bandwidth-saving stream transport. On top of that, Lawo’s HOME Apps support NDI, SRT, H.26x, and will support more formats/protocols as soon as they become relevant.

PAC-12’s New 2110 Facility
ST 2110 is making strides in the real world of big-time sports production as well. The Pac-12 Network, a major collegiate sports producer on the west coast, recently fired up a 42,000 square-foot broadcast and production facility that it will use for production of more than 850 live events each year.

The Pac-12 Network system, designed and installed by Advanced Systems Group, uses a hub-and-spoke design where content acquired at the sports venues is backhauled to control rooms in San Francisco. This model reduces onsite staff and minimizes reliance on costly mobile trucks. 

Pac-12 also exploited the universities’ existing Internet 2 IP backbone for A/V transport and centralized production, creating the largest private IP network in the U.S. dedicated to sports. Pac-12 selected the Imagine Magellan control system for IP routing, control and monitoring, and Arista high-speed Ethernet switches. Imagine’s Magellan formed the ST 2110 orchestration backbone of the facility, while Arista’s switching and routing is the core transport component. 

There were many other vendors involved in the Pac-12 build, including Calrec Artemis audio consoles, Grass Valley K-Frame video switchers, Ross XPression graphics, Evertz Dreamcatcher replay systems, just to name a few. The audio in the Pac-12 Netword system is AES67, a standard for audio-over-IP that’s part of the ST 2110 protocol. Interoperability between the two is paramount, and requires careful network orchestration so that the two transports are handled separately and all I/O’s align properly.

“Implementing audio redundancy within an IP infrastructure is not a trivial undertaking,” said Dave Van Hoy, president of Advanced Systems Group. “We got caught in a couple of places where those became very interesting challenges. Everything worked out, with many thanks to the impressive cooperation of the Calrec, ASG and Imagine teams. It was definitely a learning lesson.” 

Identifying What's 2110-Compliant
The Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) is a non-profit organization founded by leading manufacturers to promote the adoption of standards as the industry transitions toward an IP future. AIMS has catalogued nearly 300 products related to SMPTE ST 2110 from 45 manufacturers (available at ).

“Originally a specialized solution for high-end or spatially constrained projects, SMPTE ST 2110 has evolved into the primary choice for designers building reliable, scalable IP-based systems,” said Andrew Starks, marketing working group chair for AIMS. “There is a tremendous innovation happening within the SMPTE ST 2110 community.”

Does this mean that the industry is rolling toward a future that is all IP and does not use SDI?

“SDI’s affordability, industry-wide familiarity, and proven reliability ensure its continued relevance,” Starks said. “Presently, most SMPTE ST 2110 systems incorporate some level of SDI integration, acknowledging its practicality and the need to support legacy equipment.

“This reality underscores the importance of interoperability between SDI and SMPTE ST 2110,” Starks added. “Such interoperability influenced key aspects of ST 2110’s design, notably in the handling of ancillary data (ST 2110-40). As SMPTE ST 2110 equipment becomes more affordable, and as the industry gains more tools and expertise in managing IP media networks, we anticipate a shift towards predominantly IP-based systems.”

The economy, familiarity and ever-growing capacity of IP networks make them a natural medium for carrying television signals. As SMPTE ST 2110 takes hold and more products are exposed to more people, expect to see ST 2110 forming the backbone of an increasing number of facilities.

Recent innovations in live on-set virtual production (OSVP) have gone a long way toward addressing concerns about workforce skillsets and costs fueling producers’ lingering resistance to upending old ways of doing things.

As 2024 gets underway, the gains are impacting progress at both ends of the production spectrum and all points in between. At the high end, content producers now have access to an unprecedented array of purpose-built OSVP studios in the United States and beyond, many of which just came into operation over the past year or so. Featuring massively scalable LED volumes, these facilities are supporting projects that routinely set new OSVP benchmarks for use case versatility in film, broadcast, and ad productions. 

Meanwhile, in-house productions are making use of LED wall building blocks linked to camera-to-computer rendering “cabinets” that can be stacked to support virtually any volume space. Workflow management systems harmonize dynamic elements across the physical and virtual spaces, including robotic cameras, 3D extended reality (XR) objects, lighting that illuminates the physical space in synh with on-screen luminosity, and much else.

Procedural and Cost Concerns
But, for all these gains, the next-gen approach to VP can still be a hard sell when it comes to convincing project managers to relinquish heavy reliance on postproduction in favor of spending upfront on expertise and technology that significantly reduces the need for location-based production. 

The point is made by Gary Adcock, a leading voice in next-gen VP production who leverages expertise in lens and camera manufacturing to help producers navigate tough use cases.

Adcock says it’s often hard for people to embrace the idea of basing production on a roadmap that front ends preparations for dealing with all the nuances of visual effects, coloration, lighting, etc. that have traditionally been reserved for post.

“You have to think about what the end point is and work backwards to make sure what you’re setting up in VP will take you there,” Adcock explains. “For people who have spent a long time in film, that can be a hard transition to make.”

Especially when they must get budgetary approval to cover the upfront costs. “Our rough planning is every three meters of wall has its own computer rendering system,” Adcock explains.  “When you start getting into 100-meter walls and every three meters you have to do that, all of a sudden you have a tremendously expensive outlay for computer systems.”

Those devices can run $25,000 to $40,000 each or more, he notes. And then there’s the cost of licensing and running in-camera VFX software such as the commonly used Epic Games-supplied Unreal Engine, which combines, compresses, unifies frame rates, and parses out the moment-to-moment scene-specific raw CGI and camera-captured video footage for synchronized rendering on each wall segment. 

But such costs pale next to what it can cost for a location-based shoot, especially if the in-camera VFX approach can deliver truly realistic visuals that would otherwise be impossible. For example, Adcock notes, no one can tell there are no real cars involved in the climatic wild car chase at the end of “The Batman,” released in 2022. “We’ve gotten to the point where we can mimic the reality of the world in a way that’s necessary for the types of things that are done for filming and television,” he says.

Recruitment Challenges
On top of these incremental costs, there’s a need to hire people with new skillsets and/or retrain existing staff to work in this new environment. This is made harder by the difficulties the industry is having with bringing new people on board, notes Ray Ratliff, evangelist for Vizrt products utilizing extended reality (XR) that have helped propel the company to the forefront in next-gen VP. 

“A significant challenge to the industry is the lack of new people joining the broadcast engineering workforce,” Ratliff says. He knows this from first-hand experience with customers whose leaders “share the challenges of recruiting new talent from universities and broadcast-adjacent technology fields.”

Vizrt is doing its part to remedy the situation, Ratliff adds. “Vizrt works with universities in many parts of the world to expose technology students to the broadcast field and nurture their interest in the field,” he says. “We also have opportunities for internships and development programs that we are also in discussions to expand to further support building the broadcast engineering talent pipeline.”

AI to the Rescue
The heavy lifting is getting less burdensome thanks to advances in the use of AI, which Ratliff says Vizrt is leveraging “to eliminate complexity and bring more value to our customers.” One of the more dramatic cases in point involves a solution to one of the most vexing issues with in-camera VFX, namely, enabling realistic immersion of on-screen personalities into the virtual environment.

Vizrt’s latest version of its Viz Engine real-time graphics rendering platform incorporates a new AI-driven function called “Reality Connect” into its workflows. Utilizing AI algorithms in conjunction with continuously updated 3D models of people on set enabled by Viz Engine’s integration with Unreal Engine, the solution delivers “significant improvements in reflections and shadow in the virtual environment,” Ratliff says. 

AI is providing many other ways to save staff time and reduce the level of expertise required to execute tasks. For example, Vizrt is using the technology to track objects in a scene, obviating the need to implement multilayer tracking systems. 

Ratliff also points to the recently introduced Adaptive Graphics tool, which eliminates the need to manually configure graphics for each type of display used in a production by allowing designers to build a graphic once and set parameters for automatic adaptation to different displays.

Building OSVP Expertise
But even with such advances there remains a big gap to be filled when it comes to much-needed OSVP expertise. Closing that gap is a front-burner priority at Sony Electronics (SE) and Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE), according to Jamie Raffone, senior manager of cinematic production at SE. 

The two divisions are teamed using SE components to support in-camera VFX on Sony Innovation Studio’s Stage 7, a giant volume facility at SPE’s Culver City, Calif. production lot under management of Sony’s Pixomondo (PXO) unit. 

“Everybody [in production] wants to understand not just what the costs are but what it takes to make use of this technology,” Raffone says. It’s not just a matter of retraining personnel, which is essential; it’s also about educating decision makers, she notes.

“There’s not a single role that says ‘yes’ or ‘no’” to using volume facilities in production,” she says. There needs to be decision-making expertise at multiple levels of management, “from vice presidents to directors to producers to people overseeing corporate investments.” At the ground level, once a go decision is made, there’s a need for knowledgeable oversight that “starts with script evaluation and getting the staff together to execute the project.”

Sony is playing an active role in filling these knowledge gaps, Raffone adds. “Sony is aligning with specific workflow integrators, designers, and consultants, so that when a company wants to use the Sony ecosystem, they have a partner guiding them through the entire workflow. There’s so much more to this than buying equipment.” 

Simplifying Broadcasters' Use of OSVP
Making the right equipment choices is fundamental to expanding OSVP adoption. Looking at how this point has resonated in the live broadcasting arena, Mike Paquin, senior product manager for virtual solutions at Ross Video, says use of the technology “is starting to become more mainstream, in part because we’re making it more user friendly.” 

Automated orchestration of components is a big part of this, he adds. Under the command of Ross’s widely used Overdrive automated production control system, the company’s VP controller Lucid orchestrates every in-house or third-party component that’s been integrated to operate in the VP workflow, including switchers, robotic cameras, graphics platforms, and Ross’s Unreal-powered Voyager XR rendering system.

With its acquisition of G3 LED in 2021, Ross also became a leading supplier of LED panels that can be seamlessly stacked for use in any scenario, including giant volumes with pixel pitches as small as 1.56 mm encompassing floors, walls and ceilings. “We’re one stop,” Paquin says, “the only things we don’t provide are lenses and cameras.”

These integrated solutions have gone a long way toward simplifying OSVP for broadcasters, Paquin notes. “We’re helping people do stuff every day without an army of people,” he says. “Instead of needing one studio for the new set, another for sports, separate ones you have to set up for special events, you can flip a whole set from one use to another during a commercial break.” 

Will in-camera VFX be the live broadcasting norm everywhere in two or three years? “That’s my goal,” Paquin says. 

Systems Contractor News, a sister brand to TV Tech, recently announced the new inductees to its Hall of Fame for 2024. Among the honorees was Dave Ross, CEO of Ross Video. The following is SCN Content Director Mark Pescatore's profile:

Although he officially joined the company in 1991, David Ross has been a part of Ross Video since he was about 9 years old. He has a vivid memory of watching his father, John, working with a graphic designer on the company logo at the time.  

It may seem like it was destiny, but David almost didn't build his career with the family business. He had plans to work for a big tech company or possibly for NASA as an engineer. But after he shared his potential future plans, his mother pulled him aside and told him his father had always assumed David would come to work with him at Ross Video.

As David recalled, Ross Video was a one-product company (video switchers) at the time—and after a particularly difficult recession, his father was one signature away from selling the company. Instead, they decided to work together to save it.

And did they ever. The Canada-based company has not just survived but thrived, improving its revenue from $2.5 million in 1991 to about $400 million today. Under David's leadership, Ross Video has enjoyed a pattern of consecutive growth lasting 32 consecutive years. David became president of the company 20 years ago and added the title of CEO in 2006.

Ross Video is known for a variety of product lines, from its production switchers to its XPression graphics, Ultrix routers, Spidercam robotic cameras, D3 LED displays, and … socks? Like so many other companies, Ross Video has offered a variety of promotional items over the years, including socks. 

During the company's keynote at the 2019 NAB Show, David jokingly launched Socks 2.0—and the online chat exploded. So, the company decided to, well, run with it. The result has been a regular dose of levity at their annual event, as well as a sock drawer for the CEO that's half-filled with company-branded stockings.

Technically speaking, David is an engineer. He earned a degree in computer engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and helped redesign the company's switcher software while he was a co-op student. You can see his most recent handiwork in the look and feel of TouchDrive 4, the company's latest family of control surfaces for live production. However, business was basically his unofficial minor at the university—and he's spent plenty of time educating himself to the point where he considers himself more of a businessman these days.

Ross Video maintains a strategy of "integrated diversity," which means it only expands its product offerings through companies and technologies that "touch on the edges of what we already do," he explained. As a result, the company benefits from utilizing the same sales, R&D, and manufacturing teams, while targeting the same verticals and customers with new products and services. The company's strategic acquisitions have also added resources across countries and continents.

"I think what we're doing works really well," David said. "I love exploring new technologies and finding ways to make customers more successful."

While traditionally known as a broadcast company more than a Pro AV company, that perception of Ross Video may be changing. In late October, David congratulated the sports and live events team, because its sales surpassed broadcast sales for the first time. "Broadcast equipment has been getting cheaper, and I think Pro AV needs are getting more sophisticated," he said.

More than 30 years in, David, 58, is still excited about the company his father started in the 1970s with an analog switcher. "You wake up every morning with a list of things to do that's different from the week before," he said. "There's nothing like the multiple dimensions of running a company like Ross."

Artificial intelligence was the great “disrupter” of 2023, not just on the world stage, but particularly in the media & entertainment business. 

(Read: AI named word of the year by Collins Dictionary)

Anyone using an Amazon Echo or similar smart device knows how AI has been in the business of “disrupting” lives and livelihoods prior to 2023; but it was OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT—the first widely accessible generative AI application—at the end of 2022 that turned heads: in M&E, academia, government, Madison Ave., anywhere creativity, critical thinking and originality is valued and monetized. 

It certainly turned heads in Hollywood and was among the leading issues resulting in one of the longest and most widespread labor disputes in the industry’s history. The Writers Guild of America sounded the alarm, walking off the job and onto the picket lines in May when it announced its first strike in more than four decades.

 Although the new work and financial realities resulting from the television industry’s increased focus on streaming services were a main complaint, AI was also a major concern, with both writers and actors—who launched their own strike by mid-summer—warning that their livelihoods were at stake if “guardrails” were not initiated. 

Actors were concerned that studios were going to use AI to scan their images into digital files with the goal of using their likenesses in future productions without their consent, while writers saw ChatGPT and panicked, with good reason. However, some in the industry took it in stride, voicing their concerns that it's not the technology they fear, but how it will be used. 

“I’m not worried about the technology,” comedy writer Adam Conover told TechCrunch at the beginning of the strike in May. “I’m worried about the companies using technology that is not in fact very good, to undermine our working conditions.”

Both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA—the actors union—settled with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) last month and under the new contract with the WGA, AI will not be permitted to be used to write or rewrite scripts, and AI-generated writing will not be considered source material, which means writers won’t be competing with AI for screen credits. Writers will be permitted to use AI tools if they want but no employer will be allowed to mandate such use. 

For actors, studios will have to obtain “clear and conspicuous” consent from any performer where the studio has created a digital replica of the performer with the intent to use their likeness for monetization. The studios will be required to compensate the performer for the number of days it would have required the studio to hire the performer in person and the same terms would apply in the case of a background actor whose likeness is upgraded to portraying a principal character.

Not everyone was happy, with one SAG-AFTRA national board member lamenting the loss of control over one's image.

“Consent at the time of employment isn’t consent,” Shaan Sharma told the L.A. Times. “It’s coercion. You don’t really have a choice. If you want to work, you’ve got to give them the right to replicate you.”

Actress-producer Justine Bateman, who has long been involved in Hollywood labor issues, says studios are favoring digital technology over creativity.

“Doing projects that don’t involve humans … you’re not in the film business anymore,” she said. “People who don’t want to have any humans involved have never really been on a set. They don’t know what it’s like to make a film.”

Double-Edged Sword
The double edged sword of AI is felt most often in content creation. On the one hand, it can create chaos in copyright, compensation and in some cases, the ability to distinguish fact from fiction; in the right hands with the right technologies, it can be a gamechanger. 

“Today, AI's influence extends beyond traditional filmmaking into the realm of content creation,” Gary Adcock wrote on tvtechnology.com earlier this year. “This includes generating or enhancing articles, videos, images, and social media posts. The benefits are manifold, ranging from accelerated production and enhanced efficiency to superior quality and unparalleled personalization for audiences.”

Adcock goes on to say that “many people are worried about AI replacing human creativity. However, it's essential to acknowledge that true creativity stems from the profound human experience—emotions, thoughts, and expressions that machines cannot replicate. As technology advances, AI's role lies in complementing and amplifying human creativity, not supplanting it.”

AI was the dominant theme at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, with exhibitors introducing new AI advances in graphics, captioning, imaging, audio, media management and network management, offering more solutions to automate menial tasks. 

During his opening address, NAB President Curtis LeGeyt discussed the impact of AI on the broadcast business, raising issues that predicated the great Hollywood walkout that occurred a month later. 

“It is just amazing how quickly the relevance of AI to our entire economy—but, specifically, since we’re in this room, the broadcast industry—has gone from amorphous concept to real,” LeGeyt told the audience. 

But he also warned that “big tech [uses] their platforms to access broadcast television and radio content. That, in our view, does not allow for fair compensation for our content despite the degree to which we drive tremendous traffic at their sites.” LeGeyt warned that the use of AI could put such practices “on overdrive,” and urge legislation to institute some “guardrails.”

There Oughta Be a Law…
AI was also on the mind of Congress this year, which focused mainly on the impact of AI on the federal government. The FCC, which, for the most part, cannot regulate broadcast content, focused mainly on the use of AI in battling robocalls; however it does have a stake in ensuring broadcasters are disseminating accurate information.

 So perhaps that’s why the commission’s proposal last month to allow the FCC to prioritize the processing of applications for license renewal or for assignment or transfer of license filed by radio and TV broadcast stations that provide locally originated programming was seen as not only promoting the value of local journalism—which NAB has touted for years—but also as a backdoor effort to encourage local stations to favor a thriving in-person local newsroom over an algorithm to deliver the news.

Currently, the savvy technophile can often spot the difference between content generated by humans and content generated by AI. And although that will become harder as AI improves, it still has a way to go. But with the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign in full swing, the threat of misinformation via AI is real and growing—with broadcasters at the forefront.

In a blog post for the Brennan Center for Justice on using generative AI in political campaigns, Christina LaChapelle and Catherine Tucker discussed the concerns over the use of AI in an unregulated environment:

“Given the current absence of AI regulations, there is growing apprehension that antidemocratic groups or other bad actors could exploit AI-driven advertising technology to unleash torrents of misinformation on the internet,” they wrote. “This very real possibility underscores the urgency to establish robust detection systems that can rapidly spot manipulated or fabricated content and bring it to voters’ attention.”

“From the perspective of well-intentioned campaigns, however, an issue that has received less attention in the press lies in AI’s capacity to inadvertently create false content,” they added. “Text generation tools like ChatGPT have been shown to ‘hallucinate,’ fabricating facts about individuals or events to fill in gaps in their knowledge. Recently, a mayoral candidate in Toronto used AI-generated images in a platform document, one of which depicted a person with three arms.”

It’s clear that wherever it takes our industry, AI is the great disrupter that has resulted in more hyperbole—whether unjustified or not—than just about any other recent tech development.

In the world of technical stock analysis, there’s a common phrase that reminds traders to grasp the big picture, take to heart a stock’s long-term direction and ultimately –it is hoped— win on more trades.

That phrase, “the trend is your friend,” seems to fit an evaluation of ATSC 3.0 in 2023. Overall, if 3.0 were a stock, the trend continues on an upward trajectory. However, like all stocks, its rise has not been straight up. While 2023 may be remembered for some new highs, that’s not to say there haven’t been a few notable pullbacks.

As Madeleine Noland, president of the Advanced Television System Committee, put it in a September bulletin to the standards bodies’ membership: “Every technology transition has its challenges. That’s normal.”

Her comment was directed at easing concerns over the announcement that LG Electronics, a major contributor to the development of the standard and one of the original three TV manufacturers to offer televisions with 3.0 receivers, had informed the FCC that it would discontinue 3.0 receivers in its 2024 televisions.

The move, prompted by a court loss in a patent dispute over a key technology leveraged in the 3.0 physical layer, left many wondering whether Sony, Samsung and Hisense, which joined the ranks of NextGen TV manufacturers last year, as well as any company offering a device with a 3.0 receiver might face similar suits and take similar steps. 

“The impact of this patent situation is likely very limited…,” said Noland, pointing to comments from an unidentified “prominent electronics industry market analyst.”

Upward Trend
While the question over further patent cases has yet to be answered, the overall trend of 3.0 continued its upward path this year. As of late 2023, NextGen TV is available in more than 70 markets, reaching 70% of U.S. homes.

The most notable addition in 2023 was New York City, the nation’s largest TV market with more than 7.7 million TV households. WLIW, owned by public broadcaster WNET Group, lit up the NextGen TV lighthouse in mid-October. WCBS, WMBQ-CD, WNBC, WNET and WNJU joined WLIW on its stick. Another 3.0 transmitter is expected to light up before the end of the year, said Noland.

An important aspect of the New York 3.0 launch is its crowded airwaves, which makes the market one of the hardest around the country from which to launch NextGen TV service. 

Other notable market additions to the 3.0 roster in 2023 include Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Miami-Fort Lauderdale Fla., Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minn., Cincinnati, Hartford-New Haven, Conn., Reno, Nev., and South Bend, Ind. In all, 14 new markets came online this year, accounting for nearly 24 million more NextGen TV households.

Both Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Minneapolis-St. Paul are now on-air with two 3.0 sticks.

The nation’s transition to 3.0 appeared to get a shot in the arm during the 2023 NAB Show when Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced the Future of Television initiative. 

“Today, we are announcing a public-private initiative, led by the National Association of Broadcasters, to help us work through outstanding challenges faced by industry and consumers,” said Rosenworcel during her NAB Show speech.

Before the show, various broadcasters noted that the slow pace of the voluntary transition to NextGen TV was a threat to the future of television broadcasting. 

In The Home
While how the patent issue will impact CE makers other than LG is unclear, there was also NextGen TV progress among consumers and manufacturers. Pearl TV in July predicted that by the end of the year more than 10 million certified NextGen TV television sets will be in the homes of Americans.

Beyond the purchase of new televisions, consumers had a few new options to receive NextGen TV, including set top boxes (STBs) from Atlanta Direct To Home (ATDH) powered by Tolka software and Zinwell—both of which bear the NextGen TV certification logo. 

ZapperBox also tackled 3.0 DRM support with its ZapperBox M1 NextGen TV DVR, which it released in mid-September.

A confusing report this summer stating Silicondust had added 3.0 DRM support to its HDHomeRun NextGen TV FLEX 4K Tuner by virtue of the addition of FreeCast was in error, leaving the first NextGen TV STB on the market without support for DRM-protected 3.0 channels. 

Outside the United States, ATSC 3.0 garnered some important wins in 2023. Brazil, which is in the process of defining its TV 3.0 next-generation television standard, narrowed down the field of possible physical layers in November to two, including ATSC 3.0. After field testing, the nation’s Fórum Sistema Brasileiro TV Digital Terrestre is expected to choose the winner next year. It previously had chosen several ATSC 3.0 components for TV 3.0, including ROUTE/DASH transport, MPEG-H Audio, IMSC1 captioning and Advanced Emergency Messaging. Trinidad and Tobago also began its ATSC 3.0 transition this year.

In India, which is considering mandating ATSC 3.0 in smartphones, there is a tug of war between the government, which sees the standard as a way to cut network congestion by offloading video to broadcast, and smartphone vendors and the nation’s association representing the interests of cellular and electronics interests, which are resisting adding 3.0 reception due to the expense. Despite the resistance, the nation’s telecommunication standards development body (TSDSI) and mobile broadband standards group 3GPP have adopted ATSC 3.0 as their own, said Noland.

In South Korea, where ATSC 3.0 now reaches more than 80% of the population, Sinclair Broadcast Group is working with SK Telecom spinoff SK Square to enhance 3.0 services between the U.S. and South Korea and expand a broadcast backbone technology called Data Distribution as a Service (DDaaS) globally. 

DDaaS, which Sinclair president and CEO Chris Ripley laid out during a press conference at the 2023 NAB Show, will take advantage of a cloud-based local broadcasting management and control platform and real-time 3.0-based datacasting technology to power data delivery business models. In October, Sinclair president of technology Del Parks said the broadcast group would “soon” have 30 of its NextGen TV stations connected to the DDaaS platform.

ARK Multicasting and Gaian Solutions this year also advanced 3.0-based datacasting. The pair announced their Nexus Connect joint venture that combines the former’s broadcast internet network and the latter’s Mobius intelligent platform.

3.0 Pullbacks
As Noland noted, ATSC 3.0 also faced some challenges. The year started off with a report in early January that Evoca TV, the 3.0-based hybrid MVPD serving tier two and three markets with a pay-TV alternative, had shut down. (The company actually closed Dec. 31, 2022, but reports surfaced Jan. 2, 2023.) Former Evoca CEO Todd Achilles pointed to a refusal of Disney, Fox, NBC and CBS to cut content deals with his company as the reason it closed.

One factor helping to push 3.0 across the regulatory finish line when the FCC authorized transmission of NextGen TV in November 2017 was the standard’s support for advanced emergency alerting.  In the intervening period, the Advanced Warning and Response Network (AWARN) Alliance has worked to advance next-generation emergency messaging.

However, in 2023 despite continued support from Sinclair, Capitol Broadcasting Company and other broadcasters, the alliance lost Pearl TV, Fox Television and News-Press and Gazette as members, which alliance executive director John Lawson hopes to see reversed in the future.

One of the most worrisome pullbacks involves a much larger concern: a lack of NextGen TV awareness among the public. Researcher Dave Tice, a senior consultant to Hub Entertainment Research and principal of research consultancy TiceVision, has asked consumers about their awareness of NextGen TV for the past five years. 

“This past year in April when we asked it, only about 20% of people had ever even heard the phrase, and 7% who knew the phrase could give any sort of description,” Tice said during a TVTech Summit panel in November on the NextGen TV rollout.

How does this finding jibe with Pearl TV’s estimate of 10 million certified NextGen TVs in the homes of Americans by year’s end, one might ask. In the view of Tice and others before him, NextGen TV is along for the ride with other consumer-facing technologies built into new sets. 

Perhaps this lack of awareness is just another of the discomforts of a maturing technology and will fade as 3.0 market deployments and additional sticks in markets come online. As Noland headlined her September bulletin to members, developments in ATSC 3.0 “underscore both progress and growing pains.”

After the pivotal year of 2022 when the streaming bubble finally exploded and Wall Street hammered the stocks of loss-making streaming companies, 2023 was all about the industry’s battle for bucks and better financial prospects.   

That translated into more price hikes, more ad-supported tiers and more emphasis on bundles that would reduce the alarming number of people who were dropping subscriptions or churning in and out of services. 

Much of this was not greeted warmly by consumers. During 2023 a host of research companies reported alarming large numbers of consumers cutting their streaming subscriptions and churning in and out of different services. Magid, for example, found that on any given month about 8% of the subscribers at one of the top 20 streaming platforms were dropping the service while a Parks Associates survey reported that churn rates were holding steady, at a whopping 47%. 

Price hikes in 2023 by  Netflix, Max, Disney+, Apple TV+, YouTube TV, Fubo TV and others were one major factor fueling consumer discontent. 

This marked a major change in a medium that only a few years earlier had promised to radically improve the television experience by offering consumers fewer ads, lower prices and content that was easier to access, better produced, and more critically acclaimed.  

More Ads, Less Content

Widespread price hikes were also part of an industry-wide push to create new revenue streams from advertising. During the year, analysts noted that streamers like Netflix, Max and Disney+ were strategically using those price hikes to push consumers into their ad supported tiers so they could supercharge their ad business. 

This proved particularly successful at Netflix, which had for years vowed to never interrupt content with ads.  On the first anniversary of the launch of its ad-supported tier in the fall of 2022, Netflix announced that the service has amassed 15 million global monthly active users, triple the figure the streamer reported in May. 

Netflix had launched the ad-supported offering following poor subscriber growth that hammered the value of its stock in 2022. Since then the availability of a less expensive ad-supported tier, a crackdown on password sharing and price hikes, improved both its finances and sub counts, even in the more mature and highly competitive U.S. and Canadian region. Its Q3 2023 results saw the streamer add 1.75 million subs, a vast improvement over the 0.1 million subs it added a year earlier in Q3 2022.

The embrace of advertising by services like Netflix and Disney who had long resisted ads was obviously part of a much larger trend towards ad-supported streaming services, particularly free ad supported TV (FAST) streaming channels. Researchers at Omdia are now predicting that free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels are set to produce revenues of $6.3 billion in 2023, with about 80% of that figure coming from the U.S. 

Meanwhile streaming platforms were embracing a much more miserly approach to programming spending. In late 2022 and into 2023, major streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Max began cutting back on the library content on their services and some studios started expanding sales of their content to other platforms. Max, for example, took off series like Westworld and reduced its movie catalog by 390 titles or 15% between October of 2022 and 2023 according to Indie Wire.

Streaming Towards Profits

The combination of price hikes, new ad revenue and a more cost-conscious approach to programming may have irritated consumers but they were good for the bottom line. While many of the major streaming players continued to rack up eye-watering losses (the already profitable Netflix being a notable exception), Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Comcast’s NBCUniversal and Paramount all reported that they were reducing the red ink faster than expected. 

Warner Bros. Discovery, for example, reported that its direct to consumer segment lost 1.8 million subs in Q2 2023 but that it significantly reduced losses, showing an adjusted EBITDA loss of only $3 million, a $555 million year-over-year improvement from Q2 2023 on a pro forma combined basis.

This mix of sluggish sub growth, high churn rates, intense competition and more cautious content investment strategies might be interpreted as confirmation that the streaming industry was becoming a mature industry with limited growth potential. 

In fact, however, the industry saw continued significant growth in 2023 in both its share of TV viewing and its revenue.

Nielsen’s monthly rating figures for July showed that linear TV viewing’s share of TV viewing dropped below 50% for the first time as streaming hit record levels. 

Hollywood studios-backed Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) recently reported that streaming subscription rose 20.7% from $7.7 in Q3 2022 to $9.3 billion in Q3 2023. For the year to date, consumer spending growth for streaming also hovered at 20%, the group said. 

Tectonic TV Trends

All the turmoil in the streaming industry during 2023 over losses, price hikes and disgruntled consumers makes it easy at times to forget how much the streaming industry continues to roil the overall TV industry, as cord-cutting continued wreak havoc on the pay TV industry and the way content is produced. 

New forecasts from GlobalData suggest that the decline of traditional pay TV video services is only going to get worse, with only 32% of U.S. homes having one in 2028. That marks a further decline from the 42% penetration rate in 2023 and a steep decline from 2009 and 2010 when pay TV penetration exceeded 85%.

In response, pay TV operators continue to radically revamp their video strategies in ways that are having major financial consequences for broadcasters and programmers.  

In 2023 pay TV operators who had been offering packages of streaming content over their very profitable broadband offerings pushed further into streaming with Comcast’s and Charters’ joint venture Xumo launching its own streaming box to compete with Roku. In December, Comcast began rolling that box out to its internet subs. 

Charter has also been very public about its plans to radically revamp the economics of video distribution. During a recent landmark carriage and retransmission battle with Disney, for example, Charter successfully insisted on getting rights to Disney’s streaming services and was able to drop a number of Disney’s linear networks. 

All of this is likely to be hard on both broadcasters and cable networks. S&P Global Market Intelligence is predicting that cord cutting, a tougher TV ad market, competition from streaming services and lower ratings continue to cut into cable TV network ad revenue. It said that ad revenue will drop by 4.9% in 2023 and drop below $20 billion in 2027.

Broadcasters are in a stronger position, but disputes with operators over retransmission fees are getting more contentious and some analysts are beginning to argue that the pay TV golden goose that has allowed stations to replace lost ad revenue with high retransmission fees is becoming an endangered species. 

In a provocative note to investors, three analysts at LightShed Partners wondered if higher retransmission fees were going to go the way of regional sports networks. They concluded that it “[f]eels like management and investor expectations for revenue growth are inflated, with serious headwinds growing.”

Disruption and Strikes

Even with the streaming industry’s move to more cost-conscious content strategies, streaming continued to have a major impact on the way content is produced. 

One important manifestation of that trend were this year’s massive labor strikes that were prompted in part by the shaky economics of streaming program production and the massive shift in production dollars from traditional TV, where writers and actors once earned the bulk of their money, to streaming, which does not typically pay heft residuals to talent. 

Brian Wieser principal at Madison & Wall and a longtime top ad and media analyst estimates that “in 2022, linear networks accounted for 70% of content spend while streaming services saw 30%” and that by 2025 streaming will have around “46% of content spend – presumably with a similar amount of viewing.  Needless to say, as network owners look to shift more programming to streaming on a relative basis – top-tier sports content, for example – it’s possible streaming’s share of content spend and thus viewing could go up.”

That dynamic made streaming a major sticking point in the 2023 Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes. While the unions were able to wrestle “historic” pay increases and other improvements out of the studios, SAG-AFTRA was unable to secure a much larger cut of streaming revenues for its members.

In 2023, pay TV operators weren’t the only ones revamping their video strategies in response to trends in the streaming industry; many major streaming platforms were also rethinking how they programmed their services and how they packaged and bundled their content. 

One major trend has been towards adding more live sports programming, which would not only help them attract subscribers but offer lucrative advertising opportunities.  

Warner Bros. Discovery announced that it was adding a CNN live stream to its Max service and that Max and Warner Bros. Discovery Sports launched making live sports offering on the Max streaming service as an add-on tier priced at $9.99 a month. Meanwhile Paramount, Amazon, NBCU and others continued to add more live sports  and Disney is reportedly working on a plan to transition its ESPN cable network into a direct-to-consumer streaming service over the next few years.  

As Warner Bros. Discovery was bunding news and sports content with Max, 2023 also saw Paramount bundle its Showtime and Paramount+ offering and Disney strengthening its existing bundles by making Disney+ and Hulu in the same app.

Such bundles could address major consumer complaints about managing subscriptions and finding content in a very fragmented streaming landscape. 

Faced with rising costs for streaming services, fragmented content offerings and the difficulty of navigating a sea of different apps, streamers seem to be looking for a modern iteration of an old idea—the pay bundle—to improve the user experience. 

The Hub’s semi-annual “Battle Royale, survey, for example, revealed that 88% of consumers say streaming video subscription services are raising their prices more often in the past, and that that nearly three out of four consumers said it is too hard to keep track of shows what shows are available and where to watch them.

In response, 59% said they would be willing to pay for a “one-stop shop” app that would allow them to manage, use and pay for all of their subscriptions in one place—even if it meant an additional charge above the cost of their subscriptions, the researcher found.

Those results were confirmed by a 2023 study from Horowitz Research. It found that six in 10 (61%) streamers would be likely to switch to a bundle of subscription streaming services from one provider if this option were available. “The recent announcement of Verizon’s +play bundle with Netflix, Paramount+, and Showtime is an example of where this industry has to go to meet the needs of consumers and help stabilize churn” notes Adriana Waterston, chief revenue officer and insights & strategy lead for Horowitz Research. “But this is just the beginning. We know what consumers really want are universal and integrated menus, programming guides, and recommendation/search functionalities, which will mitigate the challenges of content discovery in today’s fragmented media environment. In short, we are seeing renewed demand for a multichannel, managed services solution in the streaming ecosystem.”

What’s old–the pursuit of profits, consumer gripes about the TV experience and the return of pay TV content bundles–were in many ways what was new about 2023. 

At 22 Frith Street in London there’s a plaque commemorating the first demonstration of moving images not involving film. A purist might point out that John Logie Baird’s television system was a mechanical monstrosity which could never have achieved even standard definition. Either way, those early experiments produced a dim, low-resolution image which was updated at less than ten frames per second—and was portrait in aspect ratio.

So, the fascination with tall, thin movies on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat might seem less like a new idea than a reincarnation of a very old one. The demand for material which works in those portrait frames isn’t really new, although a lot of what’s been released in portrait formats has been repurposed, sometimes rather approximately, from conventional landscape pictures. 

It’s perhaps inevitable in 2023 that AI has been pressed into service to automate conversions. When new material is being shot, meanwhile, it’s increasingly normal to target a portrait frame—or even derive both tall and wide frames from a single camera.

‘Just for Social?’
Leonidas Jaramillo is a DP and creative director with a background in camera and the allied trades of real-time interactive simulation for entertainment and virtual production. Jaramillo’s experience dates back to an experiment—not followed up—for Marvel in 2012. 

“There was a movie called ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ and we were going to make living portraits for the movie posters,” Jaramillo explained. “The plan was to have all these TVs flipped vertically in the little windows you have in front of movie theaters. I came from photography, and I was an IATSE member as well, and they enlisted me. I created movie posters of each of the characters, moving in the frame.”

Jaramillo quickly realized that the demand for sheer picture quality might not be much less than that facing the main unit of a major motion picture. 

“We couldn't shoot it 16:9 and then hope to crop in… I didn't know how big the poster displays were... there are displays inside theaters too,” he said. “At the time we were shooting 4K, 6K maybe, so I had to mount everything sideways and that was difficult because our tripods are not meant to take weight that way.” Since then, Jaramillo goes on, things have become “a little bit easier. Cameras are a little bit smaller and more modular. You can use an [Alexa] LF and crop out the 9:16 versions from that.”

Budget-conscious producers might wince at such thoroughbred equipment on a job that’s often described, Jaramillo recalls with chagrin, as “just for social. I could come back and say: Because it's for social, if you're not using an LF or an 8K Venice where you can dig into the resolution, I'd recommend a C300 mounted sideways. 

“I did a commercial [and] we had three [RED] Dragons all on custom made L-brackets,” he continued. “Sometimes they want to do both 9:16 and 16:9 and sharpness is an issue…  you can't compose someone on a third in a vertical format and hope they can compose it in a 16:9 as well. However they chop it up, you'll end up having them in the feather of the focus, which means you have to shoot deeper to get out of that, an f/5.6 or an 8. Now you're fighting light, how many photons do you have.”

“These mechanics are often lost on someone,” Jaramillo reflects. “You'll have a producer say ‘it’s only for social!’ There are a lot of regions of the Venn diagram where I'm going to fail, and the one we want is the one where it’s going to cost a lot of money. So much is riding on it. If Harrison Ford looks off of what people think he looks like, you get in trouble… you're saying ‘it's for social.’ That's our battle. The filmmakers of the 70s and 80s had to deal with pan and scan, things going to TV—‘oh man, don’t even look at it like that!’—and we have to deal with this.”

Dual Framing
Someone who’s become particularly used to dealing with it is Anna Gudbrands, a London-based cinematographer whose work includes short-form pieces for Relentless, Wonderbra and Zegna’s campaign with Jose Mourinho. Gudbrands’ recent projects have, she says, heavily involved dual framing. 

“I've been doing a lot of fashion and skincare in the summer... almost every single job I do now, they want an option for 9:16 which is Instagram, but they want the hero to be 16:9. The latest was Shoreditch Ski Club; another was for Augustinus Bader.” 

It’s a situation that inevitably involves compromise, so Gudbrands emphasizes collaboration. “If I see a challenge come up, I ask the client or the director which one really is the hero… and the decision is made on the spot—but I've never really had any problems with it, it's just a need to communicate well.”

Modern conveniences are helpful, but Gudbrands is careful to keep both frames in mind. “Most of the time I operate my own stuff, and I put up framelines in camera so I'm always aware of what's going on in the portrait format. I have the two brains and I go between them, always looking at my framelines for both. You do have to be a little bit wider—super-closeups can work well, but you have to keep in mind your lens choice. You want there to be some breathing space. You can do some close-ups, but not for the whole thing or it becomes confusing. It kind of becomes second nature.”

Gudbrands concurs with Jaramillo in that shooting for both portrait and landscape inevitably means creating a landscape image for later cropping. “If you lock the camera sideways you have the full frame but you won't have the [landscape]. Most of the time people want both,” she said. 

At the same time, working in the know-ledge that someone else will decide the frame makes the post experience particularly useful, according to Gudbrands.

“I don't sit in on edits, but I have experience of edits, so I know what cuts and what doesn't,” she said. “It's really helpful. But once you come on board, you know what the deal is. You and the director both know there's the two cut-downs, it's not a surprise.”

Enter AI
For the uncountable hours of material already in the archives, there’s artificial intelligence. Systems such as Videoverse’s Magnifi are built not only to produce a highlights reel of sports games, but also to re-frame the picture to suit any of several aspect ratios which might all be required. 

Doing either of those things by hand might be hopelessly labor-intensive; doing both without human intervention is genuinely disruptive, making new use of material that might otherwise have stayed dormant for no better reason than that it was difficult to use.

Meanwhile, consider broadcast camera operators. There’s not so much portrait here, but anyone capable of following a golf ball in flight is one of the more skilled people to lay hands on a moving-picture capture device. AI is emerging here, too, although it’s currently only mildly alarming to those people, possibly because AI cameras are mainly being deployed at events which might not otherwise have been covered at all. Pixellot’s camera system, for instance, has created whole new businesses by collapsing the cost of producing school sports for the small screen.

Still, for the time being there seems no immediate threat to the livelihoods of people who rely on their ability to keep a person, a ball, or an attractively-lit branded item inside a nicely-composed frame—no matter what shape that frame is. 

The term “live production over IP” covers a lot of territory, but the basic idea is that IP circuits are used for at least some of the signals in the production. In some studios that are built for IP production from the ground up, IP circuits are the primary pathways, and the gear directly connects to these IP circuits.

Just about any type of production can work with IP technologies. Examples of productions that use IP techniques range from the highest-level sports and events, down to local news and talk shows. Although more traditional SDI systems are still practical and in wide use, IP-based systems are here to stay.

One huge benefit from IP techniques is the ability to get remote feeds very quickly and at low cost. What used to take an expensive satellite feed can now be set up in seconds inexpensively from anywhere in the world using an IP feed.

“On my way home from [a major sporting event in] Australia, I could not help marveling at how much has changed over the last decade,” said Karlheinz Amberg, director of global events for Lawo. “Each event has become a milestone, as cutting-edge technology is deployed at the request of host broadcasters. ST2110 IP and remote production have become the de-facto standards for today’s international broadcast centers.”

Smaller Footprint
One of the benefits of increased use of IP technology for large-scale broadcasts is that the gear has a smaller footprint.

“One might argue that thorough planning allows operators to prepare enough hardware for global events, yet last-minute requests and changes of plans are difficult to address in this way,” Amberg said. “Besides, who wants to justify the carbon footprint of shipping additional devices to where they are needed in a matter of hours? 

At this year’s global events, Lawo’s HOME Apps took center stage, according to Amberg.

“For one recent event, it was decided to run them on 10 Dell servers (10U in total),” he said. “We used them for 60x HOME UDX apps to downconvert 3G ST2110, 1080p HDR streams to 3G ST2110, 1080p SDR, 1080i SDR and other flavors of broadcast video.”

Amberg said that when the entire planet is watching, the slightest glitch may trigger tirades of irate remarks by the director, the CTO, the organizing committee, and the sponsors who pay substantial amounts to be associated with a flawless experience.

“I think it’s fair to say that any match, race, hockey tournament, motorcycle event, etc., of global interest you have watched over the last 20 years has involved a considerable amount of Lawo gear,” Amberg said.

Stepping in When Satellite Can't
BBC Studios, the commercial arm of the BBC, used Matrox Video’s Monarch EDGE encoder technology, coupled with GlobalM’s SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) distribution platform, to televise the state funeral of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II across the U.K. a year ago. 

The workflow began with Monarch EDGE multichannel encoders. Most live content ready for distribution entered master control as SDI feeds, and an EDGE E4 quad-channel, 4:2:2 10-bit encoder captured and contributed four high-quality, low-latency streams—main and reserve domestic feeds, and main and reserve international feeds—to the GlobalM streaming platform.

The GlobalM orchestration network then distributed and transmitted the SRT-enabled feeds, including backup and redundant paths, to international rights-holders across the globe, while the master control monitored all streams in real time with the GlobalM web dashboard. During the 12-hour broadcast, GlobalM did not drop a single packet, providing worldwide BBC audiences access to 12 hours of high-quality, uninterrupted event coverage.

Spending associated with satellite contribution and distribution has historically been restricted to events that warrant its expense and complexity, and fewer and fewer broadcasters are equipped with the necessary satellite-receiving equipment. In the case of the queen’s funeral, rights-holders with no satellite capability still needed to access the signal in the same quality as satellite would provide.

“The BBC would not have been able to meet the demand for the content without the EDGE/GlobalM combination,” said Paul Calleja, chief technology officer and co-founder of GlobalM. “Matrox Monarch EDGE’s high-quality and low-latency encoding support on the GlobalM private IP backbone gave BBC Studios complete stability and quality for each stream, ensuring international rights holders near and far got exceptional event coverage.”

In this case, GlobalM chose SRT, and Monarch EDGE performed flawlessly with this transport mechanism, according to Calleja. In rapid response setups like the queen’s funeral, commissioning is key. Monarch EDGE proved easy to set up and deploy, so that the broadcaster could focus on capturing the event, and not struggle with network configuration.

The highly competent broadcast staff that operates at the highest levels needs to get experience and training in a challenging learning environment. One such program in the United States is at Fort Hays State University in Hays, Kan.

At FHSU, a faculty-led student crew is tasked with the official television production of all the school’s NCAA Division II sports, which go to paying customers. Therefore, there is no room for error or equipment failure.

FHSU broadcasts everything from football to volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer, and men’s and women’s basketball. The college also has a partnership with a local high school, where the high school pays FHSU to livestream scholastic athletic events that include football, volleyball, boys’ and girls’ basketball, and track.

“To capture all this sports content across the schools, we use about 10 cameras routed into a NewTek TriCaster TC1,” said Nick Schwien, director of Tiger Media Network at Fort Hays State University. “We use Vizrt/NewTek equipment for all our live productions in-house and off campus, including a TriCaster 2 Elite, a TriCaster TC1, a TriCaster Mini 4K, Viz Engine, 3Play 3P2 and 3Play 3P1, and other components by Vizrt.”

For cameras, FHSU uses a mix of Panasonic, Blackmagic Design, NewTek PTZ and JVC equipment. Much of the gear is mounted in a custom-made Bigfoot cart.

“Our TriCasters handle anything we can throw at them, and they are a great way for college students to learn about productions,” Schwien said. “We are even currently in the process of developing a sports production emphasis at FHSU, which works out well since the gear has been so easy for the students to learn.”

Ease of use and reliability are critical in a learning environment, and Schwien said that the TriCasters and associated gear have really worked out well in that regard.

“The TriCasters also help us stream to many different platforms using an easy setup process that expands our opportunity to reach audiences,” he said. “It helps us engage our loyal audiences and fan bases as well.”

Adapts Better to Last Minute Changes
JAB Holding is a behind-the-scenes corporation that invests in many well-known name brands, such as Panera Bread, Tiffany, Lacoste, Cover Girl and Burberry. With offices spread across the globe, it is time-consuming and expensive to have company-wide face-to-face meetings. For its annual gathering this year, JAB hired Gradient Experience to produce a two-day conference on video using high-quality IP links that featured LiveU encoders and decoders.

“The use of LiveU allowed our team to adapt to last-minute changes in scheduling,” said Corey Protin, head of livestream & studios for Gradient Experience. “When a guest could no longer fly to our London green-screen facility, we simply used a LiveU encoder alongside the LiveU LU4000 4K/quad HD rackmount receiver to bring him/her into the production. We were able to meet the presenters’ needs, without sacrificing our production quality.”

Products for live IP production are among the fastest growing categories in the video industry. Although broadcasters have been able for decades to do remote broadcasts via microwave, IP remote devices give users far more mobility and flexibility. 

An example is the TVU One from TVU Networks, which just debuted at IBC 2023. The TVU One is a portable 5G cellular modem that can work at resolutions up to 4K/60 fps in HDR quality. In addition to supporting 5G cellular modems, the One can also be fitted up to work with Starlink, Wi-Fi, Ethernet and satellite.

The Power of 2110
A major network-owned station on the East Coast recently upgraded its news production to a Ross Video Hyperconverged solution. This included two Ultrix-FR5 platforms featuring integrated Ultrix Acuity production switchers, connected to the station’s existing ST 2110 production network. The Ross gear has been deployed as the heart of two live production studios, which also use the company’s routing systems and multiviewers.

“As rack space was limited, Ultrix delivered a full production solution for two studios in a compact 10RU, connecting easily into the existing ST 2110 network,” said Alun Fryer, technical marketing lead for Hyperconverged Solutions at Ross Video. “The system integrated a full-size Ultrix Acuity production switcher for each studio with the flexibility to repurpose the hardware to multiple smaller Ultrix Carbonite switchers on demand for smaller production jobs.”

Fryer explained why the Ross Ultrix solution was the right for this large broadcaster.

“[Ultrix] integrates video and audio production, signal processing and routing into a compact, adaptable platform,” he said. “The software-defined features allow the customer to adapt the capabilities of the platform to the needs of the facility dynamically, giving them the production flexibility they needed.”

The tools for live IP production cover a lot of turf in the television industry, incorporating everything from familiar-looking devices like production switchers to cloud-based services that were just thought of a few years ago. The competitiveness of the live broadcast business—especially news—means that broadcasters are always going for the gear that will get them on air with news in the fastest, most flexible way possible.

This in turn spurs manufacturers to develop products and systems that give broadcasters that “faster-than-now” capability. IP systems, with their easy integration of wireless and wired devices, is the platform on which faster-than-now is built. 

Want to learn more? Attend TV Tech's free October TV Tech Talk: Advances in Live IP Production, Oct. 19. Register here. 

Part I

This month I conclude my coverage of the centennial NAB Show with a look at the impact of content protection on ATSC 3.0 test equipment, transmission system innovations, the disappearance of RFS, and compatible MIMO for ATSC 3.0.

ATSC 3.0 Equipment and Content Protection
Broadcasters introducing ATSC 3.0 content protection noticed their test gear stopped displaying audio and video. The good news at the NAB Show was that Sencore is working with A3SA, the ATSC 3.0 security authority, and will add the ability to decrypt protected signals to their ARD3000 series ATSC 3.0 receiver/decoders. Triveni will also support display of content protected video and audio in its ATSC 3.0 Streamscope XM products. 

At its booth in the West Hall, Tolka showed its new ATSC 3.0 set-top box and dongle being sold by ADTH with support for content protection. It wasn’t clear if the dongle would work on a laptop, but with the right application it should work on Android devices using the Stagefright media playback engine that supports Widevine L1. 

The ADTH set-top box uses Android and is the NextGen TV-certified to support ATSC 3.0 with content protection o the U.S. market. Widevine is also supported in the Chrome and Firefox browsers. I haven’t seen any ATSC 3.0 devices using browsers to display protected content and wouldn’t expect to until there is more support for Dolby AC-4 audio. 

Airwavz is working on support for content protection on its Redzone ATSC 3.0 tuner and associated TVXplorer software but was not ready to say when it would be available. 

Last year I reported on the Promax ATSC 3.0 and ATSC 1.0 analyzer and 6 GHz spectrum analyzer. The “Atlas” is now available for $10,800 and was on display at the show. While there are less expensive options for ATSC 3.0 signal analysis, the unit’s spectrum analyzer capability and features could be useful in some applications. I was able to use the spectrum analyzer in the unit on display to find one of the ATSC 3.0 signals in the West Hall and tune to it to see what it contained. Content protection was not available but video and audio demodulation isn’t the main use of this unit.  

Transmission Innovations
Although I spent little time with transmitters, Anywave’s “all-in-one” DTV exciter caught my attention. It can generate ATSC 1.0 or 3.0 signals and seems ideal for broadcasters looking for a simple way to deploy ATSC 3.0. The exciter is available with ATSC 3.0 gateway as well as GPS reference options. It pairs with Anywave’s new ATSC 3.0 H265 route encoder. It was hard to believe Anywave had squeezed that much capability into a one rack unit enclosure.

At mountain-top transmission sites and where interference is an issue, optimizing coverage can require different beam tilt in different directions. One way to achieve this is through an array of panel antennas. However, as Dielectric’s John Schadler described in his paper “Broadcast Travelling Wave Antenna with Azimuthal Beam Tilt,” Dielectric’s solution using four pylon cylinders, each of which can be designed with different amounts of electric beam tilt, allows a much simpler feed system. 

This antenna would be ideal for locations like Farnsworth Peak in Utah where less tilt is needed north and south to cover Ogden and Provo and more tilt is needed to reach the populations in metro Salt Lake City to the east and Tooele to the west. The white paper provides more detail than was what was presented at the Dielectric NAB breakfast and is available at www.dielectric.com/technical-resources/.

Dielectric demonstrated its Apollo monitoring service for RFHAWKEYE, which provides an in-service TDR (time domain reflectometry) sweep of a station’s antenna and transmission line. Resolution is sufficient to see individual line flanges. While the RFHAWKEYE has been available for a few years, the new Apollo service remotely monitors a station’s antenna and transmission line for small changes and is capable of alerting the station. 

I saw an example of this in Los Angeles on Mount Wilson after heavy snow and ice bent a rigid transmission line but did not break it. Dielectric’s remote monitoring detected the small change and the location of the change and alerted the station so that the snow and ice could be removed from the line. Because the RF sweep takes place in the high-VHF TV band I was concerned it wouldn’t work in a high RF environment like the Los Angeles Mount Wilson site where there is a full power station on every high-VHF channel except 8 and 10. So far that hasn’t been a problem. 

What Happened to RFS?
One name familiar to TV transmitter engineers was absent from this year’s show, RFS which announced that it would shut down its broadcast division at the end of 2022 and put its intellectual property up for sale. As of the show, no one had purchased it. Fortunately RFS developed a very good step-by-step procedure for tuning its filters and engineers who have learned the procedure are available to re-tune filters if needed. Most of the full UHF power stations in New York are transmitting on an RFS antenna fed from an RFS combiner at One World Trade Center. Fortunately the filters are rugged passive devices that will likely outlast the transmitters. 

When I asked some of the companies I thought might be interested in the RFS IP why they hadn’t purchased it, I was asked how many high-power filters and combiners I expected to buy in the next few years. The repack and subsequent upgrade of non-repacked stations in the last five years has resulted in most stations being set for the next decade or so, which means far fewer sales of high-power equipment. Low- and medium-power sales may increase if the ATSC 3.0 roll out leads to more construction of distributed transmission systems to increase coverage and data capacity. 

RFS also made microwave dishes, semi-rigid coaxial cable and waveguide at its plant in Meriden, Conn. The cable manufacturing business was sold to Amphenol, which sells the products under the RFS Technologies name. Alive Telecom bought some of the dish manufacturing equipment, but not the intellectual property, and is now selling microwave dishes as well as broadcast antennas. 

ETRI's DEMO of ATSC 3.0
One item that I did not mention in my previous article was ETRI’s demonstration of compatible ATSC 3.0 MIMO. Last year they showed a system using dual polarized transmit and receive antennas that was capable of delivering data rates near 100 Mbps. However, it could not deliver content to non-MIMO receivers. This year, ETRI in cooperation with KBS, Cleverlogic, and Televes showed how LDM could be used to provide a low data-rate, very robust signal in addition to the high data-rate MIMO enhanced layer. 

The parameters demonstrated would only provide enough capacity for one 720p program stream, 1.3 Mbps, in the non-MIMO core layer but it was using QPSK and a 2/15 code rate which resulted in a less than 0 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) threshold.  A robust layer with less error correction would allow more program streams. The MIMO enhanced layer required an SNR of 30 dB and provided 64.7 Mbps data capacity. 

Broadcasters and engineers are still discovering what’s possible with the ATSC 3.0 standard. Look for more on the technology and products in future columns. 

Interest in over-the-air reception of TV in the U.S. continues to grow as evidenced by sales of antennas, with CTA estimating that the total antenna marketplace in the U.S. will exceed 53 million homes by 2025. While the ATSC 3.0 build out continues, a new concept, “5G Broadcast” is now being considered as another option for high-power, high-tower “next generation” TV broadcasting. 

There is already one experimental 5G Broadcast station on the air (WWOO-LD in Westmoreland, NH, announced in July), and broadcasters in other parts of the world are testing 5G Broadcast deployment. 

Will it replace ATSC 3.0 as the “next generation” broadcast technology? The major factor, in my opinion, will be whether or not consumers and broadcasters drop over-the-air TV in favor of streaming programming over the internet. 

5G Broadcast is targeted primarily at mobile devices, where data capacity for video distribution is still a concern. Consumer adoption of ATSC 3.0, so far, has been limited to fixed TV sets. While more people are cutting the cord and discovering (or rediscovering) over the air broadcasts, far more of these sets are connected to the internet alone than to antennas. 

Will wireless operators, who largely control distribution of mobile devices in the U.S., allow reception of 5G Broadcasting without a government mandate? If there is a government mandate, perhaps that mandate could require ATSC 3.0 devices instead. 

That raises some questions: Which technology is better? Which is easier to implement? I’ll provide some information and links to resources to help you answer those questions. 

A 3GPP Standard
5G Broadcast today is defined in 3GPP Release 17 (for an overview on the evolution of 5G Broadcast within 3GPP, check “Broadcast, multicast technologies,” by Dongwook Kim, 3GPP MCC. 

The current standard has features that support high-power, high-tower broadcasting. These include Receive-Only-Mode (no SIM card required) and a cyclic prefix of up to 200 microseconds, allowing larger distances between sites in a single frequency network (SFN). 

The major components of the 5G Broadcast signal are the CAS (cell acquisition subframe) which contains the PBCH (physical broadcast channel); PDCCH (physical downlink control channel), and the PDSCH (physical downlink shared channel) necessary to decode the PMCH (physical multicast channel). In order to receive a 5G Broadcast signal, a receiver must be able to decode the PBCH, the PDCCH, the PDSCH, and the PMCH. 

The PBCH, PDCCH and PDSCH are control channels that can be compared to the bootstrap, L1-basic and L1-detailed in ATSC 3.0, while the PMCH is similar to the PLP subframe in ATSC 3.0. The coding and modulation of  these components determines the robustness and capacity of the system. 

More information on the 5G Broadcast physical layer is available in “ETSI TS 103 720 Technical Specification” and in the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting paper “Evaluation of ATSC 3.0 and 3GPP Rel-17 5G Broadcasting Systems for Mobile Handheld Applications.”

5G Broadcast Hardware/Software
Rohde and Schwarz has developed a 5G Broadcast platform that has been used for tests around the world. Fig. 1, taken from the company’s “5G Broadcast for Automotive” presentation by Dr. Nik Dimitrakopoulos, shows a R&S BSCC2.0 (broadcast service and control center) feeding a R&S SDE900 (the same model number unit used for ATSC 3.0 signal generation) into a TCE901 exciter and THU9evo transmitter. 

With the exception of the BSCC2.0, this configuration will be familiar to U.S. broadcasters. Fig. 2, from the BSCC2.0 product brochure, shows the internal architecture of that unit. 

The OpenAirInterface5g initiative has developed software that will run on a UHD/USRP based SDR. The last information I have on this is from 2019 for a configuration based on 3GPP Release 14. Details are available in the “FeMBMS/eMBMS E2E Prototyping using OpenAirInterface5G” presentation by Javier Morgade at Vicomtech. 

Fig. 3 shows a system using two Ettus B210 SDRs, the same model used in the GNU Radio ATSC 3.0 transmitter I described in a previous article.  

Comparing 5G Broadcast and ATSC 3.0 Performance
As in the 5G Broadcast system described earlier, ATSC 3.0 has elements that allow receivers to lock to the channel, get information on how to tune the channel, and decode the data. How these elements are implemented affects performance under different conditions. 

Table XI in the IEEE Transactions on Broadcasting paper Evaluation of ATSC 3.0 and 3GPP Rel-17 5G Broadcasting Systems for Mobile Handheld Application shows ATSC 3.0 performance gains for TU-6, India-Urban, India-Rural, and Seoul-SFN-3 channels for ideal estimation and linear estimation at speeds of 3, 40, and 120 km/hr. 

Performance gain of the ATSC 3.0 bootstrap versus 5G PBCH varied from a worst case -4.1 dB for linear estimation of a TU-6 channel at 120 km/hr to a best case +10.5 dB for linear estimation of the Seoul-SFN-3 channel at 3 km/hr. Bootstrap performance was better than PBCH in 20 of the 24 scenarios.

A comparison of PDSCH versus L1-Detail showed ATSC 3.0 performance gain varied from -3.0 dB to +5.0 dB. PDSCH was undecodable in 3 of the 24 scenarios. L1-Detail was worse than PDSCH in 8 of the 24 scenarios, although in six of these the difference was less than 1 dB. 

When comparing ATSC 3.0 subframe with PMCH, the subframe performed better at 5 Mbps, 10 Mbps and 15 Mbps in every channel, with PMCH undecodable in 8 of the 24 scenarios at 15 Mbps. The performance gain ranged from +15 dB linear estimation in a 10 Mbps TU-6 channel at 120 km/hr to +0.6 dB ideal estimation at 10 Mbps at 3 km/hr and 40 km/hr in an India-Rural channel. 

The study presented in the IEEE paper explains the ATSC 3.0 performance gain comes from the superiority of its BICM (bit interleaved coded modulation) components and, depending on the propagation channel, the time interleaver. The bootstrap performs worse than PBCH in non-line-of-sight channels with high mobility but otherwise bootstrap has better performance. In the comparison of PDSCH, L1-Detail performed better over line-of-sight but PDSCH was able to take advantage of the diversity provided by combining two PDSCH in non-line-of-site situations. 

Practical Implications: 5G Broadcast vs. ATSC 3.0
Broadcasters have ATSC 3.0 transmission infrastructure, but at this time don’t have consumer equipment beyond fixed TV sets and gateway devices. Qualcomm is adding 5G Broadcast support to its mobile device chipsets but no devices supporting 5G Broadcast are currently available to consumers. Prototype devices are available for both standards. When will consumers be able to purchase these devices? 

ATSC 3.0 broadcasts are already on the air in more than 70 markets in the United States. Currently there is only one 5G Broadcast station in the U.S., the experimental LPTV mentioned earlier. The 5G Media Action Group’s web site has details on 5G Broadcast trials as well as links to a GITHUB with 5G Broadcast reference tools. Expect to hear more about 5G Broadcast deployments around the world at the 2023 IBC Show. 

5G Broadcast can build on existing modems and 5G mobile device components. This should make it relatively easy for manufacturers to implement in mobile devices. ATSC 3.0 has an incompatible physical layer and requires additional hardware, which implies extra cost for mobile devices. Many ATSC 3.0 performance advantages come from time-interleaving which requires more memory. I’m not aware of 5G capability in any TV set. If 5G Broadcast is required in TV sets, what will that cost?  

The IEEE Broadcast Transactions paper shows ATSC 3.0 has a significant cost advantage for network deployment—fewer transmitters are required for equivalent or better coverage. Will that matter in the U.S.? 

5G Broadcast & ATSC 3.0 Together
What if we end up in a scenario where 5G Broadcast is available on newer mobile devices but not in TV sets and ATSC 3.0 is available in TV sets but not on mobile devices? What about automobiles? We’ve seen interest in using ATSC 3.0 for delivering content to automobiles and as shown in the IEEE paper, ATSC 3.0 has a performance advantage there, but if 5G wireless devices are already in the vehicle, that may give 5G Broadcast an advantage.  

One solution would be for a TV station to transmit both 5G Broadcast and ATSC 3.0 on the same channel. This would require using time division multiplexing (TDM) to share the channel. I described the demonstration at the 2023 NAB Show in my two-part review of the show in my June and July columns. 

For this to work, either or both the ATSC 3.0 or 5G Broadcast standards will require changes to their frame structure. Given the number of ATSC 3.0 TV sets already in use, any change to that standard will have to be compatible with existing TV sets. 

Will it Become a Reality?
FCC rules require broadcasters to deliver at least one free channel to the public in standard definition. During the transition to ATSC 3.0, the FCC has required broadcasters to ensure programming remains available to all viewers, including simulcasting on ATSC 1.0. It is unlikely the FCC will allow broadcasters to shut down both ATSC 1.0 and ATSC 3.0 and move to 5G Broadcast any time soon. Assuming interest in OTA TV continues, the number of ATSC 3.0 sets will continue to rise making a full transition to 5G Broadcast difficult.  

Without new spectrum, I don’t expect a significant number of 5G Broadcast signals on the air in U.S. broadcast bands until enough ATSC 1.0 spectrum has transitioned to ATSC 3.0 to allow 5G Broadcast to share spectrum with ATSC 3.0. At that time, some stations may be able to move to 5G Broadcast entirely while other stations carry their programming on ATSC 3.0 channels, similar to the way stations are transitioning to ATSC 3.0 now. Stations may also use TDM (time division multiplex) to share their channel between ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast. Both assume FCC approval. 

Several visions for the future for 5G Broadcast/Multicast Rohde and Schwarz described in their presentations could apply to the ATSC 3.0 system. In the end, the choice will likely depend as much on marketing, business plans and consumer preferences as it will on technology. 

5G Broadcasting is continuing to evolve. 3GPP Releases 18 and 19 should make it easier for high-power, high-tower broadcasters to begin 5G Broadcast, either by itself or time shared with ATSC 3.0 when (and if) 5G Broadcast reception becomes available in mobile devices. 

SDI is on its way out, right? I mean, anything that’s been around for three-plus decades in the television industry must be either in a museum or just waiting for the final switch to be turned off. Right?

In an industry that has had its technology turned on its head and disposed of at astonishingly fast intervals, somehow the Serial Digital Interface has been one of the few islands in a churning sea of change. First standardized in 1989 as SMPTE 259M, SDI was created to support uncompressed standard-definition television at data rates up to 360 Mbps. It was immediately accepted in high-end products and systems, and eventually found its way down to lower-cost products—as just one example, today you can get an SDI-to-HDMI adapter for less than $40.

Not Dead Yet
Over the years, SDI was modified surprisingly quickly to adapt to changing television standards. Today, the latest version is known as 24G-SDI (SMPTE ST 2083), which supports 4K video at 120 fps and 8K video at 30 fps, using a data rate of 24 Gbps.

Is that enough? As other connectivity options push their way into television systems—and as a new crop of technology specialists with their roots in the IT world become broadcast engineering managers—will SDI’s sunset come anytime soon?

“I remember being at IBC years ago and seeing signs with the slogan ‘SDI is Dead’ or something to that effect,” said Todd Riggs, director of product management at Ross Video. “While eye-catching and a bit of marketing fun, obviously that was an exaggerated statement that has proven to be inaccurate. I don’t believe we will see the end of SDI any time soon, as it is still the dominant transport for most customers worldwide and easiest to deploy.”

Ross Video is a major manufacturer for the broadcast industry, and Riggs has a window into the company’s product planning.

“Manufacturers are still spending a lot of money in R&D to develop new and very powerful products using [SDI] as the primary transport,” he said. “There are certain workflows and system designs that will become more and more IP- or cloud-based, as they lend themselves really well to those topologies. However, I think we are going to live in a hybrid SDI/IP world for a very long time.”

High Comfort Level
Other manufacturers see the same thing.

“SDI still plays an essential role in providing A/V connectivity for many broadcast facilities and mobile production trucks,” said Deon LeCointe, director of networked solutions at Sony Electronics. “Although the industry is already in the midst of implementing IP and cloud technologies for various applications, there’s still a high comfort level with using SDI for ad-hoc applications like flypacks, where the simplicity of SDI allows for faster deployments with minimal configuration.”

And there are additional factors that endear SDI to video facility operators.

“When it comes to professional workflows, SDI is fast, reliable, secure and never buffers,” said Bob Caniglia, director of sales operations for the Americas at Blackmagic Design. “This is especially important in television facilities and broadcast studios where live programming means professionals can leave nothing to chance.”

Yet, we all know that SDI is not the only connection standard in the broadcaster’s toolkit. 

The strongest competition probably comes from SMPTE ST 2110, which defines how professional media can be distributed over managed IP networks. The SMPTE ST 2110 standard specifies the carriage, synchronization, and description of compressed and uncompressed video streams over IP for real-time production, playout and other professional requirements.

Since SMPTE is the standardization body for both SDI and ST 2110, it makes sense that the two standards play well together. Yet as the use of ST 2110 grows, some in the industry see that there is nowhere for SDI to go but down. John Mailhot, CTO and director of infrastructure product management at Imagine Communications, has thought about how the end of SDI might happen.

“SDI will continue for as long as the supply chain produces the transceivers and crosspoint chips—ultimately that will be the limiting factor,” he said. “As SDI use declines over time, some of these chips may become harder to get.”

Mailhot sees ST 2110 as the technology of choice for larger facilities, especially if UHD or HDR is in the requirements.

“The ability to scale to very large, and to integrate best-of-breed offerings across the spectrum of vendors makes ST 2110 a winner,” he said. “[Where there is] a need to integrate some SDI equipment, our Selenio Network Processor has a high-density synchronizing gateway application that allows customers to integrate SDI and IP. This provides a path into IP at a pace that suits the customer’s overall system strategy.”

Yet, not everyone is positive that a future of ST 2110 and IP connectivity is coming quickly.

It Simply Works
“SDI is definitely NOT winding down,” said Joshua Vanarnhem, product manager for routers at Evertz. “We are seeing an increase in SDI router sales, and we are still actively developing SDI solutions and products to answer the needs of our industry. For example, our latest SDI router—the NEXX—leverages the latest technology and provides a full-featured routing platform to meet the demands and workflows of an enterprise-class routing system. Yet it still maintains the simplicity of SDI, where customers can just plug in their SDI input or output and are good to go.”

Vanarnhem pointed out the benefit of SDI that makes it still highly useful in a world where technology specialists so often sing the praises of network topologies: SDI is simple.

“Simple is a great word to explain SDI, as it just simply works,” he said. “Simply plug one wire for one signal; simply patch in a waveform monitor to troubleshoot, and simply be able to meet all the industry’s functional workflow needs. SDI can simply support SD, HD and all the way up to 12G for UHD. HDR? No problem.”

What we can make of this is that SDI is still here, it still works, and it works at the highest-quality signal levels used in professional facilities today. Manufacturers are not only still making SDI products, they are designing new SDI products to meet the growing and changing demands of modern television production and distribution. That a 34-year-old technology is slugging it out and still relevant is impressive—it speaks to the good work done by SMPTE and its technology groups.

So many things have disappeared since SDI was first standardized: SD broadcasting, CRT displays, cameras with tubes, robotic devices that used a grabber arm to pull a videotape from a rack and feed it into a player. And remember necessities like timebase correctors, proc amps and delay lines? They have all vanished into the cloud of modern video production and distribution… which is often described as “in the cloud.”

However, SDI is still with us, modified along the way to keep pace with our rapidly improving quality and production standards. It would be interesting to know if the product that was once marketed using the slogan “SDI is Dead” is still being made. Wouldn’t it be ironic if that product struggled and died, while SDI is still meeting the needs of broadcasters?

Apple’s interest in virtual and augmented reality has been fairly clear for a while. It started acquiring companies with expertise in the field at least as early as six or seven years ago, perhaps most prominently the startup Vrvana in November 2017. Whether it’s fair to call Vision Pro a “Vrvana Totem” evolved by Apple’s vast R&D budget is necessarily speculation, but the purchase was certainly part of a trend. 

A few months earlier, the company bought SensoMotoric Instruments for its eye-tracking technology. Apple had owned environment-tracking specialists Flyby Media since the beginning of 2016 and augmented reality startup Metaio since the year before. It’s hardly rare for large companies to make that kind of acquisition, but it didn’t take much to connect the dots even then.

The Legacy of Evans and Sutherland
The concept of head-mounted displays in general dates back to at least the 1960s and the work of Ivan Sutherland, whose later collaboration with David Evans would yield things which are still fundamental to computer graphics. Evans and Sutherland equipment would be key to Tron, for instance. Apple, meanwhile, would quite rightly object to the idea that its Vision Pro device is a mere display. It incorporates several displays, loudspeakers, cameras for conventional imaging, motion tracking and eye tracking, as well as all the computing resources to make those things useful. 

(Read: I wore the Apple Vision Pro — and it's truly amazing (and a bit unsettling))

The company has been particularly keen to emphasize the system’s low latency, with sub-ten-millisecond numbers suggesting that it should be capable of avoiding the lag between real-world movement and display updates which sometimes make devices like this distracting to use. Ultimately, latency in digital imaging affects everyone from video gamers to camera operators watching a viewfinder. Back in the days of analog electronics, the time between a photon entering a lens and another exiting a display was often mere nanoseconds—the propagation delay of a few dozen transistors, but no longer.

There’s an argument that digital technology has made hardware designers too relaxed, waiting for an entire frame to be downloaded from a camera’s sensor before starting work on it. Do that, and the minimum delay is one full frame, or about 17 milliseconds at 60 frames per second. It doesn’t take much for that to become a few frames, which is sluggish enough to risk seasickness in the context of a headset.

This is particularly relevant to Vision Pro, which creates its augmented reality by taking pictures of the real environment, superimposing virtual elements, and then displaying the result to the user. The advantage is that virtual objects appear solid, without the ghostly transparency of augmented-reality devices which reflect virtual objects into the user’s field of view. The disadvantage is that latency must be low, and considering there’s 3D rendering to be done, that’s not necessarily easy.

There’s nothing preventing a camera from sending the picture in much smaller pieces, for vanishingly low latency. It’s just rarely done like that. Exactly how far into the weeds Apple has gone on this is something only its engineers know, but it’s no surprise that Vision Pro uses some custom hardware. The semiconductor Apple calls R2 presumably incorporates quite a lot of digital signal processing to handle the eye, feature and gesture tracking from the device’s twelve cameras, but we can guess with some confidence that the whole architecture of the device is designed, wherever possible, for low latency.

Micro-LED
As to Vision’s CPU, notice that Apple recently moved its last computer range to linger with Intel processors, the upscale Mac Pro, to its own ARM-based M-series device. There are both business and technical reasons to do that, but the company has probably been most vocal about reduced power consumption for its laptops. Some promotional hyperbole was inevitable, and when the first M1 CPUs emerged there absolutely were Intel-compatible options with competitive power-to-performance numbers (the surprise was that they came from AMD.) 

Power concerns are less relevant to a performance-centric, mains-powered workstation like Mac Pro, but they certainly are relevant to the M2-based Vision Pro. With the device relying on external power, every joule saved is worth its weight in lithium ions.

The displays being driven by this combination of hardware are described by Apple as “micro OLED,” which is a comparatively recent development. The term “micro-LED” is a more common term for highly miniaturised arrays of LED emitters; essentially a microscopic version of the video walls used for virtual production. Micro-LED is a promising technology that might replace LCD and OLED entirely, offering more brightness and contrast than either, but it exists outside the lab. An OLED emitter, meanwhile, is still a diode that emits light, but it involves some rather different physics. The terms are not interchangeable.

So “micro-OLED” means a very small OLED, possibly based on Sony technology. A lot of head mounted displays use LCD display panels simply because they’re available, and they’re available because of the huge demand for marketable resolution figures in the cellphone market. 

The problem is that even the best LCDs aren’t really what a headset designer really wants. 3800 by 1440 pixels and 500 pixels per inch, as achieved in the Galaxy S23 Ultra, is more than enough for a phone. It’s still too few pixels, and in too large a format, to be ideal for a device like Vision Pro, which wants to fill the observer’s field of view using small, lightweight hardware.

The compromise is between field of view and resolution. Like most headsets, with a 100-degree field of view, Vision Pro does not fill the user’s entire visual field. Vision Pro’s 4K displays are competitive for a current release, but the human visual field is almost 180 degrees wide. That’s a lot to cover considering there are speculative designs which discuss 35 pixels per degree. That’s the number discussed by Pimax’s Reality 12K QLED, which was intended to hit CES 2022, though it’s now projected for 2024. The 12K number, in that case, means one 6K LCD display per eye.

An Impressive Piece of Technology
If 12 cameras seems like a lot, consider that many of them will be in at least stereo pairs. The inside-out motion tracking, which locates the headset by observing the environment, might account for several. The eye tracking requires cameras, and the gesture recognition too. 

Add cameras for general-purpose visible light imaging and it’s not hard to reach a dozen. These will presumably be cameras of the general type used on cellphones, representing another technology which has benefited hugely from advancements in that field. 

Vision Pro is an impressive package of technology. There’s a lot in it and what’s there is high end, as it should be for the price. While it’s a cutting edge VR/AR device, the cutting edge is in rapid motion and it’s certainly not the first such device to be cutting edge at launch. In the end, the success of any computer hardware ultimately depends on what the software does with it. It depends how reliable the gesture recognition is, how accurate the motion tracking is, how well those displays work, and what developers do with them.

Apple certainly knows that the price tag precludes Vision Pro becoming a mass-market item, and that might make success difficult to identify, let alone predict.  What matters is whether the hardware works well enough for the software to be popular and effective. The company has certainly given itself the best possible chance.

Perifery, a recently launched division of DataCore was created to provide compelling content management solutions for the broadcast industry. At NAB 2023 in Las Vegas, Perifery CEO Dave Zabrowski shares the company’s vision and development of a product that will dramatically streamline workflow for video producers. It’s a critical time for media producers, given the rise of AI and the vast amounts of data they must now juggle to create content efficiently and effectively. In addition to data stored on traditional local servers, producers are increasingly utilizing AI and storing and retrieving data-rich content from the cloud and streaming sources. “Imagine having to search endlessly for the right piece of content. It holds up the creative process and makes the job more difficult than it should be,” Zabrowski explains. Media producers need to get at the data fast and in an organized fashion to complete projects quickly—the new award-winning Perifery AI+ announced at NAB is the enabler. Meta-aware and intuitive, Perifery AI+ accelerates content searching, browsing, reviewing, and previewing, enabling users to rapidly locate content clips and objects based on specific topics. It’s THE missing link to maintaining productivity in today’s data-rich environments. “Plus, it’s ready for the future,” says Zabrowski, as he describes how producers may one day also have access to new sources of content, such as data from consumer wearables. “The M&E market is in the golden age of disruption and Perifery is poised to lead it with products like Perifery AI+.”

During an exclusive interview with Perifery CEO Dave Zabrowski, we learn how the needs of media producers have advanced to a point requiring a more sophisticated means of content storage and retrieval. The company’s new Perifery AI+ was created to do just that. Watch the video below to hear how.

For more information about NAB’s award-winning Perifery AI+ and how content producers can benefit from integrating it into their workflow, please visit  www.perifery.com.

There’s a big difference between what the human eye sees versus what the brain can perceive. Neoti’s new line of dvLED displays has been designed, engineered and customized to shorten that gap, delivering rich, vibrant, realistic images that look great not only in person but when shot on camera. A manufacturer focused on the broadcast market, Neoti has taken huge technological strides to be a premier provider of on-set LED displays. At NAB 2023, Neoti CEO Derek Myers describes how the company continues to evolve its line to stay ahead of the technological curve and provide the burgeoning virtual production industry with highly immersive, realistic imaging solutions. “Bottom line, our goal is to ensure that the content presented on our LED displays, including our flagship Ultra High Definition UHD89 Series, is delivered precisely how the creator intended,” Myers explains. “Content is king and delivery is queen.” High refresh and low scan rates are key contributors to the pristine images delivered by Neoti’s new dvLED line, but as senior technician Joe Kipfer points out, innovative design features play a critical role in overall performance. “Large LED modules comprising the UHD89 display result in fewer seams and therefore, an exceptionally flat surface. We’ve also made the modules fast and easy to change. This is particularly important for live broadcasts where technicians only have a couple of minutes to swap out a module during a commercial break.” By embodying a unique combination of cutting-edge performance and design, Neoti’s dvLED displays are helping the broadcast industry prepare for the delivery of next-generation VR, AR and XR content.

During an exclusive interview with Neoti CEO Derek Myers and senior technician Joe Kipfer, we uncover the magic behind the glass of the company’s broadcast-focused dvLED displays. Watch the video below to learn how Neoti is pushing the technological boundaries of content delivery for the broadcast industry.

For more information about Neoti’s new Ultra High Definition UHD89 Series and how a dvLED display can be customized for specific broadcast applications, please visit https://www.neoti.com/.

This post is sponsored by Matrox Video

While content stored and derived via Cloud platforms holds great promise, it also introduces a host of new challenges for broadcasters. It’s all led to a profound paradigm shift in the way broadcasters create content and a necessity for new types of technology. At NAB Matrox Video VP of Sales and Business Development Francesco Scartozzi painted a vivid picture of where the industry is, where it’s headed and how broadcasters can best exploit new opportunities by utilizing Cloud-friendly technologies like Matrox Video’s new ORIGIN software development kit. “For 47 years we’ve focused on developing customizable software solutions for OEMs and third-party providers to overcome some of the common technological challenges of utilizing the cloud to produce live broadcasts,” says Scartozzi. “The broadcast industry’s move to the cloud can’t be denied, but there needs to be a framework to successfully transition. ORIGIN is it.” Adding perspective to the need for a solution like ORIGIN is Matrox Video product manager Marwan Al-Habbal. “ORIGIN will help broadcasters optimize the cloud as well as their legacy IT equipment to evolve the level and caliber of their live broadcasts. We’re thrilled to be paving the way.” 

During an exclusive interview with Matrox Video VP of Sales and Business Development Francesco Scartozzi and product manager Marwan Al-Habbal we learn just how critical software like its ORIGIN SDK is to the seamlessly integration of compelling Cloud-based content in live broadcast productions. It’s the plumbing that connects equipment and content together.

For more information about Matrox Video's new ORIGIN solution and other innovative technologies for the broadcast industry, visit https://www.matrox.com/en.

Directed by S.S. Rajamouli, RRR (Rise Roar Revolt) is reported to be the most expensive film ever made in Indian cinema. It tells a fictitious story about two legendary revolutionaries and their journey away from home before they started fighting for their country in the 1920s. It stars two of Telugu cinema’s biggest screen idols, Ram Charan and N.T. Rama Rao Jr.

It has become a worldwide sensation, so far making $145m worldwide since its release in March, with great success in North America, Australia, Japan and the UK and Ireland. It’s also competing in various categories at the 95th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Visual Effects. The winners will be announced this month. 

A True Collaboration
The film was finished at Annapurna Studios in Hyderabad and graded on Baselight by colourist Shiva Kumar BVR, who worked closely with well-known cinematographer, K.K. Senthil Kumar, to achieve the desired look. The pair have worked together on many occasions, and they have a very similar mindset when it comes to colour. 

“I have worked with Senthil for almost all projects of mine,” comments Shiva. “We both have a similar line of thinking and vision in finding the same color density out of millions of color shades. His vision is so powerful that he can find a minute error and color jump from a micro second timed frame. I get a clear idea of what is expected from a detailed discussion with him. Moreover, he does not compromise at any point on quality.”

Shiva was involved in the film process early on, in the scripting stage, when he began working on the look of the film with Senthil. “Senthil narrated the story before going to shoot and we exchanged some references in relation to color palette, lighting scheme and mood boards to meet the required looks in post,” adds Shiva. 

“The workaholic nature of Senthil is the secret behind getting extensive quality in every frame. His motivation brings us out of the pressure of work and keeps our efficiency healthy throughout.”

Creating an Organic Period Look
The movie is set in the early 1900s and Senthil and Shiva worked closely to achieve a look and tone that suited this period. Shiva would take one close-up shot, one mid and one wide-angle from a particular sequence, and then work to achieve the pre-selected look.  

“I am against the usage of LUTs because it decays the organic feel,” said Shiva. “Using Baselight’s Colour Crosstalk and Colour Mix tools in combination with the Hue Angle tool, we achieved the early 1900s look along with the specified organic feel. And using the Diffuse and Texture features allowed me to create a wonderful, classic and glossy diffused sharpness.”

“For each sequence we would give four to five look options to the cinematographer,” explains Shiva. “Out of those options, he would choose one palette. We would then create a separate new look out of all the other reference layers in which 50-70% would be successful towards getting a new look. Once finalized, we would apply the same look for the entire sequence, and then it would go for final approval.” 

The two main characters in the film represent two opposing elements – Ram Charan’s character represents fire, while N.T. Rama Rao Jr. represents water. 

“In the initial stages, we were successfully able to highlight the separation between fire and water,” recalls Shiva. “Later, we realized that it was going to create confusion for the story and to maintain that separation we highlighted a certain element according to the character's emotion.”

“If I had to fix a particular tone of a character, Senthil would give me the complete detailed narration,” Shiva explains. “Mr. Senthil is hands down a great narrator. The way he explained the details of the characters and the story prevented us from going towards many references allowing us to achieve it with the character emotions and arc.”

VFX Challenges
RRR is in the running for the Best Visual Effects Oscar at the 95th Academy Awards, to be announced in January. Shiva and the team had immense support from the VFX Supervisor, Mr. Srinivasa Mohan, and the rest of the VFX Studios, but – as with any VFX-heavy movie – the film’s effects didn’t come without challenges. 

“Color correcting a normal movie is one challenge, but correcting a CG orientated film is an entirely different ball game,” comments Shiva. “Mr. Srinivasa Mohan always foresees the quality. We consumed approximately 250 hours for the VFX QC. Whenever there were complications, we were able to control the errors by calling the VFX studios and ensuring all were corrected and updated on time.”

One of the key VFX challenges was the climax sequence as, due to temperature conditions on location, it was delivered on unbalanced footage with unmatched lighting and exposure. 

“After placing the VFX on the timeline, we realised the majority of the VFX shots were not matching with the live raw shots,” recalls Shiva. “By then, we had already finalized the look for the sequence. This is when the real challenge began.

“Spending a lot of time tweaking sensitively is too risky, in case of an issue popping up after rendering. I had to maintain both a cool and a golden warm temperature for the entire sequence. With the unbalanced shots, it was very difficult to catch both the blue and the warm tone. Therefore, in order to achieve it successfully, I used a combination of Baselight grading tools to get the exact required look for the entire climax sequence. After repeating the process multiple times, the cinematographer and the VFX supervisor were satisfied.” 

“The cinematography on this film has gained lot of appreciation from the cinema industry all around the world,” concludes Shiva. “This is a rare achievement and I see it as a proud moment for Indian cinema.”

SAN FRANCISCO—It’s a technology that continues to prove its worth and defy its detractors, boasting of speed and touting reliability as a high-capacity storage vault, a means of disaster recovery and a way to share content. 

And now, as archiving in the cloud continues to mature, the technology continues to win over large broadcasters and small production houses alike. It has proven to be secure, the capacity to handle massive amounts of data, and support for collaboration between geographic locales separated by continents. 

The next steps: Driving long-term value, improving search functions, meeting the needs of different types of customers and addressing thorny issues like cost of egress and long-term adaptability.

Not Just a Simple Migration
“People have become much more comfortable with the reliability, security and affordability of the cloud for content archives,” said Geoff Stedman, chief marketing officer of SDVI. “But what people are also realizing is that simply lifting and shifting an archive to the cloud is not [always] the right approach.”

While the explosion of SVOD, AVOD and FAST channels offers new opportunities to monetize content, that scenario only works if the content can be found, accessed and transported through a media supply chain and then prepared for a distribution partner, Stedman said. “[Migration to a cloud archive] presents an opportunity to standardize and normalize content file formats, clean up and enrich metadata and create an archive of golden masters that can be monetized across many different distribution outlets.”

In addition, it’s not just important how you migrate your content into the cloud, but rather if you have visibility into cloud—and the ability easily retrieve it. 

“An organization’s cloud environment can be a bit nebulous,” said Brett Beers, vice president of technology for TMT Insights, a professional services and software development company. “I predict there will need to be more of a focus on investing in productivity and operational tools that will widen the net in terms of the user type that can both interact and manage cloud technology.” 

Plus, customers moving their archives to the cloud are not just looking to migrate a tape library; they are looking to derive more long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during the ingest process, said Evan Statton, senior principal architect of M&E for Amazon Web Services. 

“When cloud archiving first came on the scene, simply moving massive amounts of content to and across clouds was the clear challenge,” said Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer for Signiant. “The tools provided by those early cloud systems simply weren’t cut out for massive media archives.”

Today’s software can now effectively move petabytes of content into and out of cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and Wasabi.

Migration Trends 
Across the content creation marketplace, there is new, significant interest for companies of varying sizes to consider migration to the cloud. For some, a lift-and-shift approach might be the right step, particularly for an organization new to the technology. For others, designing a digital supply chain from scratch is a more valuable approach. 

“Regardless of the path you pick, the first step is visibility,” said Beers. “What do you have, and then the next step is action: what am I going to do with it?”

TMT Insights faced such a scenario when working with a post house in Burbank, Calif., that was moving from a fully on-premise operation to a 100% cloud-native digital supply chain. “For this engagement, they were able to decrease the time to market and enable rapid innovation by not having the challenges that come with having reliance or integration [with] their legacy systems,” Beers said.

The next challenge: How to help customers easily find and access content archived in the cloud. Several companies, including Signiant, have solutions that automatically index assets and create preview files so customers can perform simple searches across their archives—whether those be on-prem or cloud—without having to move the assets. “Archives need to be actionable,” Finegold said about the company’s Media Engine software. “Accessing them must be quick, easy and cost-effective. When asked for a clip, users need to be able to search, preview and send those assets anywhere, fast.”

TMT Insights also sees increased demand for this type of functionality. The company’s Polaris operational management platform allows users to manage their end-to-end cloud-based media supply chains via a file manager module within Polaris. That module enables enhanced visibility and gives users controls to manage their ingest and prequalification workflows. By providing users access to the cloud in a purposeful way, one of TMT Insight’s clients was able to increase their on-time delivery from an average of 65 percent to 99 percent, Beers said.

Mining Your Value
Another key trend in the cloud movement: Ensuring customers derive additional long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during ingest. AWS helped Formula One (F1) achieve this using the AWS Media2Cloud solution when it migrated more than 4 petabytes of archived video content to Amazon S3 and now uses artificial intelligence/machine learning services to reduce the time it takes to catalog content. 

“Additionally, we’ve learned from our customers that ‘one size does not fit all’ for archive retrieval patterns,” Statton said, referring to the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class and Flexible Retrieval storage class, which are designed to help customers fine-tune retrieval performance based on the needs of archive usage.

The cloud is proving attractive to organizations of all sizes. Giving small creative groups the ability to easily access the cloud was the impetus behind a new release from Quantum that integrates a media asset management module and shared storage software. The goal was to remove the complexity that can often hamper a smaller creative group when it comes to configuring separate devices and setting up separate production workflows.

Quantum’s H4000 Essential provides a standard set of features—automatic context indexing, shared storage—but doesn’t require specialized IT skills to support. That was the case for the creative agency Switch, which works on multiple projects simultaneously via the StorNext collaborative shared storage system and the Quantum cloud-based analytics software. 

The benefit: A small creative company can quickly deploy production-ready shared storage in the cloud, allowing for collaborative, remote video editing in the cloud.

SDVI is seeing this as well, as companies of all sizes realize they can become more efficient and agile when they take advantage of cloud technologies, Stedman said. “Moving their archives and media processing to the cloud, even at a relatively smaller scale, frees them up to focus on their core creative business because they no longer have to spend time procuring, deploying and managing on-premise infrastructure.” 

AWS is seeing demand from all types of customers, from TV stations to larger broadcasters looking to migrate hundreds of linear channels to AWS. The company was recently awarded an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) for its “Color in the Cloud” cloud-based remote service that enables customers of all sizes to perform high-fidelity color grading in
the cloud.

Egress Costs
Challenges remain, however. While the cloud has proven its mettle at handling shared content with speed and reliability, there are instances where a cloud gateway linked to a high-capacity storage infrastructure may be a better fit. As veteran media and entertainment tech companies have long known, storage on LTO data tape can be lower in cost per terabyte than primary disk storage.

And in some instances, the best archiving solution is a combination of the old and the new. Software from companies like XenData can be used to create a hybrid archive that links together on-premise storage with the cloud so that file-based applications can write to and read from cloud storage. Using a XenData S3 Server interface with a XenData LTO archive creates a private cloud storage solution allows an organization to keep the attractive aspects of LTO storage onsite. In this scenario, files can be remotely downloaded free of any egress charges.

And that’s another lingering issue for archiving in the cloud to address: The cost
of egress. 

Though the industry is moving in that direction, workflows requiring heavy visual effects and editing work are still not fully realized within the cloud to run at scale. So files sometimes must be pulled down and worked on outside of the cloud, with a heavy price tag to boot.

Understanding those types of cloud economics continues to be a key challenge for customers when it comes to archiving in the cloud. “Customers are capturing so much more content and want to preserve all of it,” Finegold said. “But for how long? How much content will be retrieved? When will it impact things like egress costs? These and other questions make predicting costs a real challenge.”

Others say the cost of egress is generally not an issue for content companies moving their archives to the cloud since content deals can be struck between content owners and cloud-based streaming services that are fulfilled without content ever leaving the cloud—with a majority of local, on-premise editing accomplished using proxy files that are a fraction the size of the original master in the cloud. 

The most important priorities in an archiving system will be familiar to anyone navigating the modern content creation space: Agility. Adaptability. Visibility. Ideally, as Beers from TMT Insights put it, “Our goal is to make the shift to the cloud less intimidating, to show clients the way and give them the tools they need to navigate that path themselves.” 

75 Years Ago – December 1947: Limited connectivity to television network centers in New York continues to hamper the rollout of new U.S. television outlets. (At year’s end, only 18 stations were on the air). And while AT&T Long Lines has committed to constructing coast-to-coast coaxial cable and microwave video circuits, widespread delivery of network programming is still years away. 

As a workaround, Westinghouse announced that early in 1948 it would begin the second phase of an experiment for delivering television over wide areas from airborne broadcasting platforms. This concept—dubbed “Stratovision”—was initially demonstrated in 1946, but that trial uncovered several “bugs.” The company says that these shortcomings have now been addressed and is now ready for a second round of testing. 

Modified military B-29 bombers will be used, with Westinghouse foreseeing as many as 14 of the aircraft in the skies simultaneously for relaying network TV programming received from a terrestrial source to serve other population centers and to also provide network connectivity from coast-to-coast. 

The planes will fly at altitudes between 20,000 and 30,000 feet, allowing reception of ground-based TV transmitters from as far away as 200 miles and retransmission to homes within a 400-mile-wide area beneath each plane. The modified bombers will carry enough fuel to remain in their holding patterns or “orbits” for half a day. TV Ch. 6 (82-88 MHz) has been chosen for the downlink transmissions, allowing set owners to receive them without any special equipment. 

Also in the final month of 1947 comes GE’s announcement of its first “large screen” television receiver—a monster 30-inch model, designated the “901.” As available cathode ray tubes are mostly in the 10-inch or smaller range, GE is using a projection system with a special 5-inch CRT coupled to a Schmidt optical system to achieve the necessary magnification. 

Suggested retail price is $2,250 (antenna and installation extra), which is equal to about $30,000 in 2022 money! Typical of most all early projection sets, the pictures were quite dim, requiring viewing to be done in darkened rooms. However, there was an upside to the GE set—owners needn’t worry about thieves making off with the expensive sets, as the 901 weighed in at nearly 400 pounds!

OTHER NEWS FROM TV’S PAST:

100 Years Ago – December 1922: Television is now starting to progress beyond patents for theoretical systems which may or may not work. The Dec. 2, 1922 New York Times reported that a French inventor, Édouard Belin, had just demonstrated a “Tele-Vision” (or “long-distance sight,” as the Times explained the term for its readers) device at the Paris’s Sorbonne. 

According to the report, Belin, who had previously transmitted still pictures by wire, had moved to a wireless platform and succeeded in capturing (dynamic) “flashes of light” via selenium cell and then sending the resulting electrical impulses via radio to be reproduced as flashes on a mirror. The report, termed the showing a “preliminary experimental demonstration,” but stated that it proved “that the general principle of sending a stationary scene had been solved.”    

50 Years Ago – December 1972: In yet another approach for providing consumers with in-home recorded video entertainment, MCA (Music Corporation of America) offered the first public demonstration of its “Disco-Vision” videodisc player that was under development. The device was intended to complete with the “CED” (capacitance electronic disc) video player system (“SelectaVision”) being developed by RCA. Disco-Vision technology—which utilized a low power laser for recovery of information from optical discs—was viewed as superior to RCA’s player, which relied on a mechanical stylus tracking groves embossed in a disc. 

Both systems eventually went into production, but they were soon eclipsed by Betamax and VHS videocassette machines as neither the MCA nor the RCA products allowed consumers to make their own recordings.)

25 Years Ago – December 1997: Although broadcasters are committed (albeit, some reluctantly) to making the conversion to digital (and high definition), and new DTV studio and transmitter equipment is now becoming more and more available there is still at least one missing link—a means for transporting bitstreams from studio to transmitter. 

Upgrading existing STL microwave systems to handle the 19.39 Mbps compressed DTV signal is pretty much a non-starter, and while microwave manufacturers are aware of the situation and have been developing new models, these are still in their relative infancy (Harris had only showed an initial prototype at the NAB Show that April.) Fiber is not a viable STL option for many either. As an industry writer described the situation: “…stations want to get on with it and transmit ‘real’ HDTV from the studio without having to bicycle tapes to the transmitter.”