Clear-Com has appointed Marco Lopez as the company’s vice president of engineering. Lopez is the former president of Grass Valley and was also CEO of ChyronHego (now Chyron). 

Lopez brings more than 30 years of experience in the broadcast market to his role at Clear-Com, where he will spearhead innovation across key strategic areas related to product development, including strengthening the company’s leadership in wireless technology and advancing its IP-based intercom solutions, the company said.

In the mid-2000s, Lopez played a key role in the transformation of analog to digital signals with Miranda Technologies and helped develop the Active Format Description (AFD) standard that defined aspect ratio control between standard and high-definition broadcasting. The project won an Emmy Award in 2011 and was adopted and standardized by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). Later, he helped bring IP standards to the broadcast world through his work with the AIMS (Alliance for IP Media Solutions) nonprofit initiative, laying the groundwork for what is today SMPTE 2110. After Miranda Technologies was acquired by Belden, Lopez was appointed president and tasked with leading the acquisition of Grass Valley, where he eventually managed the company’s Live Production business unit.

“We are excited to have Marco on board,” said Mitzi Dominguez, CEO of Clear-Com. “He brings a wealth of technical expertise as well as an intrinsic understanding of the needs of our Broadcast users from his years in the industry, a unique and valuable combination for the business.  He shares our enthusiasm for customer service and the drive for innovation leading our next generation of products.”

Already during his first few months, Lopez has identified opportunities for Clear-Com to cement its competitive advantage by streamlining the user experience, furthering the adoption of IP standards, and reinforcing its already industry-leading wireless capabilities, the company said.

“Clear-Com offers me an incredible opportunity to learn about the audio side of the business, from a team of some of the most experienced engineers in the intercom field,” Marco said. “I am honored to be able to contribute to the company’s heritage of innovation and eager to bring my experience in virtualization of the Broadcast workflow to the team’s deep expertise in voice communications.”

Lopez holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Engineering from Concordia University and is based out of the Clear-Com Engineering office in Montreal, Canada.

ST. LOUIS—Belden and Gravity Media have completed a broadcast infrastructure project in four Qatar stadiums in preparation for the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

The companies were awarded the contract for the installation in 2010 when it was announced Qatar would host the soccer tournament. With less than a year till the tournament, work has intensified in equipping the stadiums with the latest broadcast technology.

Gravity Media partnered with Belden to design, supply, install, test and commission the broadcast cabling systems for the opening match venue Al Bayt Stadium, Al Thumama Stadium, Khalifa International Stadium and Ahmed bin Ali Stadium.

Gravity Media relied on input from local broadcasters as well as its own expertise in shaping the design of the project.

“It was an honor to be involved in such prestigious projects,” said Eamonn Dowdall, executive director for Gravity Media, “With the combined expertise of Belden and Gravity Media, the solutions provided will support the stadiums’ needs well into the future.”

The installations will leverage several Belden solutions, SMPTE, Triax, video, multi core audio and single-mode fiber cable, which will allow host broadcasters to connect their facilities to more than 50 camera positions in each stadium. 

The World Cup will last 28 days and culminate in the final on Saturday, Dec. 18, 2022, on Qatar’s National Day.

More information is available on the Belden website.  

MONTREAL—The deal for Black Dragon Capital to acquire Grass Valley from Belden Inc. is official, the companies announced on July 2.

Originally announced in February, Black Dragon now assumes full control of Grass Valley and all of its assets. Belden will maintain a financial interest in GV and has entered into a multi-year Transition Services Agreement to ensure the smooth handover of key business and operational systems to Black Dragon.

“Grass Valley’s strong client base, comprehensive product suite, advanced technology, outstanding service reputation and brand positions them well to lead and inspire the industry during a time of digital disruption,” said Louis Hernandez Jr., Black Dragon founder and CEO.

Grass Valley will continue its day-to-day activities under the leadership of Tim Shoulders.

“By leveraging Black Dragon’s experience, Grass Valley will be able to more effectively develop and deliver solutions that lead the media industry through its own digital transformation,” said Shoulders.

Shoulders continued that GV will continue to build on its AMPP, cloud-enabled SaaS platform for broadcast and capitalize on the growth opportunities with the transition to a software-defined future.

For more information, visit www.grassvalley.com.  

Last week, Belden announced the divestiture of Grass Valley, one of the broadcast industry’s largest vendors. What does this mean for the industry and the outlook for media and entertainment as a whole?

TV Technology Editor in Chief Tom Butts talked with Grass Valley CEO Timothy Shoulders to find out.

TV Technology:Why is Belden selling Grass Valley?

Timothy Shoulders: There are really two reasons: The first reason is that every time Belden bought one of these businesses, whether it was SAM or Grass Valley, they came into it thinking and seeing ahead that there were going to be positive market tailwinds that would carry the business through growth. And they could bring the businesses together, lean out the back office functions, lean out the go to market and put it in a position where they could reap the growth upside with a combined stronger portfolio and follow the market trend upward.

Well the market hasn't really trended upward. As a matter of fact, it follows pretty typical patterns of bouncing up when we have these big international sporting events, and then falling back. The market has never been positive over the last six years. After six years of expecting the market to grow and it doesn't, you just eventually lose patience.

The other factor that's a little more difficult is that this business—outside of our support agreements—typically doesn't carry a deep backlog. So we put to revenue what we record, what we book from customers in a given quarter. And a lot of that activity compresses around the end of the quarter.

So it's always difficult to give Belden management a good perspective on where the business is going to land in any given quarter, good or bad. We live or die by by landing large projects and oftentimes we think we've got something in hand and in the last few days for one reason or the other, it'll slip out of a quarter. You saw that with Harmonic this quarter in a very public way.

Those types of things happen and that's really frustrating. And Belden has a track record—over the 10 years prior to Grass Valley—of being very good at forecasting the cycles of the business and what their businesses in industrial and enterprise are doing. And we were never able to figure out how to properly forecast Grass Valley. So those are the negatives and the reason that the board of directors of Belden decided it was time to divest, but ultimately one thing Belden did do well was to build a strong, diverse, profitable business with a global footprint.

And frankly a product portfolio that I would put against anybody in the industry. Typically, if we play in a category, we're number one or number two in that category, and we just need to live up to our promise to build solution value into our own products so that customers want to buy more Grass Valley, incorporate more Grass Valley into their workflows.

TVT:How are you positioning this as a positive for your customers?

TS: For the Grass Valley business, it’s the chance to go through the business transformation we need to go through from a technology side—from a business that is primarily proprietary hardware business to a business that eventually needs to become a software and commercial-off-the-shelf as well as cloud. We've gone through part of that transition and I think part of that's what's frustrated Belden. But to be able to take the revenue impact that comes with going through that transition without the burden of hitting quarterly revenue performance targets set—when you're part of a publicly traded company—I think it'll help us innovate faster.

TVT:So you think being a part of a publicly traded company hurt the business in the end?

TS: Belden's a publicly traded company with quarterly commitments to its shareholders, and there's a lot of pressure on Grass Valley to deliver those quarterly commitments, and a broadcast market that is really moved by things like... it's a very niche market. It's moved by things like major events, the Olympics, the FIFA World Cup. It's moved by major contract negotiations for sports rights and that creates a lot of volatility in the business.

That was stressful for Belden, which is why they're separating from the business. But as you can imagine, in order to mitigate the impact of that, they put a lot of pressure on the Grass Valley business, so to a certain extent, you get a bit wrapped up in “short term, quarter to quarter thinking.” Under private equity ownership, we’ll be able to execute our strategic plan, which is all around evolving the business from proprietary hardware to software COTS and cloud. That it will be a breath of fresh air and give us the cover we need to be able to continue to evolve to take advantage of the solutions portfolio we have.

One of the challenges we have is that the solutions portfolio has been assembled from many different companies over time. And we operate under various software stack and software architecture principles in the different parts of the portfolio. Now we can combine all of that without these quarterly revenue pressures and really live out our destiny, which is to provide integrated solutions to broadcasters and media companies that help them improve their workflows, find efficiencies in their workflows and frankly maximize the use of their creative inventory, their rights and other properties they own.

TVT:When we ran the initial story, one of our commenters mentioned that this sale is symbolic of what’s happening in our industry right now, mentioning that "what used to require specialized knowledge and lots of rack space now can be done on a laptop." Do you agree with that statement?

TS: In some cases, yeah, that's true, although I would still argue that doing complex things like switching video over IP, that's rare—the companies who've been able to do that successfully. [Grass Valley being one of those companies].

But I don't think it's quite as simple as just baking it down into, "Well anybody can do what the broadcast industry needs." Actually, I think it's quite different because frankly I think what broadcast companies are searching for are vendors who can help remove risks from their projects. They're dealing with smaller budgets, they can't afford overruns. They've got, in some cases, IT overlords now or IT people in charge of their businesses. And what they're looking for is more certainty in their projects. One way to think about it is “less moving parts”—fewer vendors with more solutions, value, more stable platforms using common software architecture. Those are things that I don't think startups are going to be able to provide as readily as a company like Grass Valley.

TVT:Do you think the industry is moving to IP too slowly? Is it basically our expectations not panning out, based on what we hear?

TS: I've been with Grass Valley for the past two years, but I've been with Belden since prior to when they purchased Grass Valley and I've been part of the Belden leadership and management team through that time. And we're a close knit management team. So I saw what it looked like when Belden owned Miranda and then purchased Grass Valley, and then I was part of the Belden broadcast cable business in 2016, so I worked really closely with Marco [Lopez] [the CEO at the time] and the Grass Valley team. And you could see that there was an excitement around IP growing significantly year over year. That was the expectation.

And the reality was if we would have really understood where we were on the hype curve, we would've seen we were actually at the point where it was challenging two or three years ago, hell even last year, in some cases we were wrapping up projects that were challenging. Now we've gotten to the point where IP is becoming more simple to install. It's still complicated, it's still a challenge but it's becoming more normal and sort of standard operating procedure, and now we're seeing a significant kick up in our IP sales. But I suspect it's about two years too late for Belden's appetite.

TVT:What would you say is the most revenue successful division within Grass Valley now? As far as looking at particular markets?

TS: Our switchers business has been fantastic this year—that's the one area that we're really excited about. We've got some significant wind in our sails in switchers and we're excited to be launching some new products at NAB that I think are going to continue that trend. And in North America we're headed into another rights negotiation window, which I think will even be better. I think the truck manufacturers will also increase their purchasing down the road.

And IP is the other one, our IP infrastructure has steadily increased. We're up almost 100% over the prior year and it looks like if I look at the backlog and the funnel I have for the next two quarters, our IP infrastructure business is likely to double again. So I think we're finally hitting that inflection point with IP.

TVT:How do you envision this divestiture playing out? Will pieces and parts be sold off individually? Will GV stay intact on the sale block?

TS: I'm glad you asked, this is a really important point. The process has been going on for some time now and we believe we're close to the end of the process. As a matter of fact, [Belden CEO] John Stroup expects to try to get something done within the quarter to sell off Grass Valley in its entirety—everything from the cameras all the way through the distribution—all together as one.

We think there's a lot of power in the platform we have, the geographical reach that our scale gives us as well as the product portfolio being connected to one another. What makes me excited about Grass Valley and interested in leading Grass Valley into the future? It's that I think we know so much about these various workflows that as we migrate them onto a common platform using new software architecture principles, and we present our customers with new models to “pay as you go” and things like that. I think we really have the opportunity to be drivers of innovation in the industry and we can solve a lot of problems for our customers.

TVT:Grass Valley has a long history of being acquired and sold. What do you think this latest development says about Grass's reputation in the industry?

TS: Yeah. I will tell you the one thing that I'm not met with when I talk to my customers is surprise. So most of them have been around for a while and have been through a couple turns of the screw when it comes to Grass Valley's ownership.

I think it's not atypical in this industry I think for companies to change ownership. I think it honestly says something about the resilience of Grass Valley, the brand and the products and the loyalty that customers have to Grass Valley, to transfer regardless of who owns the business. But one of the things that I'm looking forward to is the potential private equity sponsors we're talking to, have a deep interest in the media technology industry. They understand it's a cyclical industry, that requires a lot of R&D investment to make it run and keep the innovation engine going. And you really need some patience and a long-term view, and I think we found some potential sponsors that believe that way.

TVT:There's been a lot of consolidation in our industry, including in the OB mobile production side, which has been a strong part of the Grass Valley business. How has that affected your business?

TS: To be honest with you, I would say net, the consolidation on the live production side has been pretty good to us, because we have good relationships with some of the larger players in that space. So as they buy up the smaller players, they're really disciplined in their purchasing and they look to well established companies like Grass Valley to serve their needs.

So I think that consolidation's been a net positive. We're looking as a business at ways to help them with innovative workflows, so they can do new and different types of remote production and extend the use of their assets as well. So if I look at somebody like NEP, I see them as a key customer for us that we want to innovate with. And I think our scale and frankly the depth of our product portfolio helps us in our relationship with them, because it allows us to simplify some of their purchasing and simplify their broadcast workflows.

TVT:What about on the side of the broadcast industry? As far as the changes going on there?

TS: That's been more challenging for us. If you think about the three businesses that Grass Valley includes—Miranda, Grass Valley and SAM—the single biggest disrupting factor has been the advent of the online video platform, i.e. Netflix. For the broadcast industry it's increased the cost of content and it's pushed our customers to invest in other platforms outside of linear television. And so that's constrained their budgets. They've had to spend less on linear television, which has negatively impacted the business over the last few years—which is part of the problem that Belden had with the results the business was producing for them. So that consolidation in the short term is very impactful because while it's going on, customers won't spend at all.

But regarding consolidation, over the long term I think it'll wash out a bit. I think where we stand as Grass Valley, the bigger our customers get, the more disciplined they are about purchasing. When they get disciplined about purchasing, they look for companies that have size and scale and stability. And while we're changing ownership, that doesn't change the fact that we're one of the largest media technology businesses in the industry, and we are a well-run, profitable business. And you can see that in the financials Belden included with their press release today. So we're top tier in the industry and profitability and certainly one of the top tier and one of the top companies in terms of size.

Over the last three quarters, Grass Valley revenue has actually been pretty stable—around $88 million a quarter, and our EBIDTA contribution's around 13%, and we always see a spike in the fourth quarter because of how budgets work with our customers. We expect fourth quarter to be about 10-15% better than those other quarters, and we'd see a spike in our EBITDA as a result. So you can see a very stable profitable business that—even when you add the last 12 months—is considerable size, larger than most other media technology companies.

The only types of companies we've been engaged with seriously so far are private equity groups that are interested in the media tech space. So I expect we'll be finished with the process in a matter of months, not quarters, and the net result will be a Grass Valley as the largest media technology holding in the portfolio. And there won't be any other businesses in the portfolio that have a technology overlap with Grass Valley.

ST. LOUIS & MONTREAL—As part of its third quarter 2019 financial report, Belden announced its plan to divest Grass Valley as part of its portfolio, a move that Grass Valley described as a positive in its own announcement.

“We completed a rigorous strategic review of our portfolio of businesses, and today’s announcement marks an important outcome,” said John Stroup, president, CEO and chairman of Belden Inc. “We concluded that it is in the best interests of our shareholders, customers and employees to separate Grass Valley from Belden. This will enable Grass Valley to more effectively execute its strategic plan and pursue growth opportunities. Further, this separation will simplify Belden’s portfolio and improve organic growth and revenue visibility.”

With this divestiture, Belden will label Grass Valley a “discontinued operation” on its income statements. Grass Valley stressed in its own statement that this phrase does not imply the company is going out of business, but rather is a standard accounting term when a corporation decides to exit a portion of its overall business.

“The move is a positive for Grass Valley, its employees and customers,” GV’s own statement read. “Grass Valley is a market leader in the media technology business and a profitable operation with top quartile EBITDA performance. Grass Valley is the world’s leading media technology supplier with uniquely strong customer and partner relationships. This makes Grass Valley an attractive investment to those interested in the media tech space and Belden has been actively discussing options with interested parties during 2019.

“Grass Valley does not expect this announcement to disrupt its current operations and will continue to focus on meeting the needs of customers, partners and employees.”

Grass Valley’s history goes back to its founding in 1959, when it was known as Grass Valley Group. It was acquired by Thomson Multimedia in 2001, but was divested by Thomson in 2009 following the financial crisis of 2008. After that it was purchased by Francisco Partners. Then, in March 2014, it was purchased by Belden.

Content Sponsored by Grass Valley

The ubiquity of mobile devices and the rise of social media have had a big impact on consumer viewing habits—and we are seeing this trickle down into news consumption. More and more viewers are going to social media and the web to find their news content as opposed to television.

This trend is backed up by a study by the Pew Research Center in Q3 2017, which found that 43 percent of Americans said they often get their news via websites, apps and social media, compared to 50 percent who often get news via television (down from 57 percent in 2016).

When Linear Meets Social

As the transition beyond linear takes place, the pressure is on news broadcasters to respond. In addition to addressing their existing market, they must also meet the needs of younger viewers who prefer to access content via a range of platforms from on-demand to social media. Broadcasters are faced with the problem that they cannot choose between linear and digital output—they have to deliver both. Added to this, in breaking news situations, live (linear) news is still the preferred medium for the majority of viewers—regardless of demographic—so linear is far from dead (the same is true with sports).

The big challenge is that the majority of news broadcasters have workflows that were not designed for social media; they were designed for presenting the news in a linear fashion. Additionally, many of these workflows cannot be easily adapted to the changing news consumption habits of viewers.

It is not enough for broadcasters to deliver content via a range of platforms—just pushing stories to reach those platforms' members; they also need to manage that content accordingly. Usually, this means adding complexity to their workflows, with additional silos for different applications. There are newsrooms where you can see anywhere from 15 to 30 different applications in use to manage output to online and social platforms.

The added complexity these additional applications bring is more than a little counterintuitive to the fast pace of a newsroom environment. Content often has to be separately uploaded to different platforms, to different Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts, and then managed. All of this costs time and impacts the efficiency with which a newsroom operates.

Creating Efficient Social Media Integration

What broadcasters need is to be able to seamlessly integrate social media management into their daily media management cycle, taking the number of applications needed to achieve this down to just one. By simplifying their workflows, each station is able to push the stories that are right for its viewers out in a variety of ways.

This is what Grass Valley helps them do with new solutions within the GV STRATUS production and content management system. As well as supporting linear content output, it now delivers powerful social media management capabilities.

Users can now post, track and delete any asset with a single click. Producers can pre-determine who can post content and within what parameters, while a new rules engine allows them to automate content delivery and management for social media and CMS. Content can easily be tracked and then deleted from all platforms when appropriate. Broadcasters can also use the new capabilities to maximize the value of popular content—for example, by automatically re-posting to other social media accounts without having to individually log in to multiple accounts or running the story as the lead item on the website.

With seamless integration and management of social and digital content output, broadcasters can keep delivering news in the linear manner that traditional audiences favor, but can also attract and engage younger viewers. By ensuring multiple engagements with their brand across a range of platforms they can build better relationships with consumers who access content digitally.

Less (Complexity) Is Always More

Reducing complexity has benefits far beyond allowing broadcasters to reach new audiences. Grass Valley has been re-tooling and re-designing solutions like our Ignite news production automation solution to address complexity within newsroom workflows. Ignite can now be paired with the compact Kula production switcher for smaller web-based and mobile production control rooms, which can be used to generate on-demand live weather and news updates/inserts.

Allowing reporters in the field to edit content anywhere with an internet connection using a laptop, phone or tablet saves valuable time and allows stories to be turned around more rapidly. Thanks to the additional integration of editing and post-production tools such as Rio, EDIUS and Go! they can do just that. Using the Ignite ASP, journalists can also do live inserts from anywhere using a tablet-based UI.

What Grass Valley is doing is giving our newsroom applications a greater degree of flexibility and scalability so that they can be deployed for large newsroom operations, but also smaller online and web-based control rooms.

The combined portfolio of Grass Valley and SAM solutions, together with significant investment from Belden, gives broadcast professionals the broadest selection of tools and technologies in the industry. By delivering real world solutions that reduce complexity, regardless of where content is being delivered, we are enabling our news customers to conquer today's news marketplace while giving them the flexibility to respond to future demands.

—Chuck Garfield, Director News Products, Grass Valley

To learn more about Grass Valley's news solutions, visit www.grassvalley.com.

This content is sponsored by Grass Valley.

ST. LOUIS—A week after it announced its acquisition of Snell Advanced Media, Belden revealed that it paid a litte more than $94 million for the company, according to an SEC filing.

The purchase price is $75.8 million, plus assumed debt of $18.4 million, totaling $94.2 million. Belden cautioned the SEC that it cannot yet report the estimated fair value of the assets because the accounting process is ongoing.

[Belden/Grass Valley Acquires Snell Advanced Media] 

“The acquisition includes a potential earn-out for which we have not yet estimated a fair value,” Belden told the SEC. “This acquisition was funded with cash on hand. We are in the preliminary phase of the purchase accounting process, including obtaining third party valuations of certain tangible and intangible assets acquired.

“As such, the purchase accounting process is incomplete and we cannot provide the required disclosures of the estimated fair value of the assets and liabilities acquired for this business combination.”

(This article has been updated to correct the purchase amount) 

ST. LOUIS—Belden has completed the acquisition of Snell Advanced Media (SAM). Terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but SAM will be incorporated into Grass Valley.

The company will be led by Tim Shoulders with the headquarters based in Montreal. Grass Valley said many of SAM's product brands will be retained, although full details are yet to be determined.

The company said the announcement enables them to improve their offering with "the most comprehensive, innovative selection of products and services and increases our ability to provide assured interoperability. It extends our ability of offer in region support to the global broadcast community."

The formal unveiling of the deal is expected to take place at NAB in April. Grass Valley said the two companies will combine in a single booth in Las Vegas.

SAM's president Eric Cooney will stay on as an advisor to the senior leadership team and will be part of the integration planning team.

Cooney said: "The team at SAM has worked hard over the past several years to deliver world class products that have met or exceeded the expectations and needs of our target customers. We believe that becoming part of the Grass Valley family within Belden allows us to give our customers an even greater opportunity to continue growing with us. 

"With the backing of Belden, our company has the stability and resources that the industry demands to continue innovating and meet the competition head on."

Tim Shoulders, president, Grass Valley, added: "With this investment Belden again demonstrates our commitment to the broadcast industry. Adding SAM's employees and products to the Grass Valley family extends our global reach, makes us more agile, and provides even more domain expertise to enhance Grass Valley's industry-leading solutions.

"Our customers face competition and uncertainty like never before, this transaction will help them navigate the technology options available to them with fewer concerns around interoperability and deployment complexity, while providing them greater access to the innovators that are developing the solutions of tomorrow."

MONTREAL—Belden is now a card-carrying member of the Software Defined Video Over Ethernet Alliance, according to an official company announcement. The signal transmission technology provider now supports SDVoE’s efforts to promote a standardized hardware and software platform for Av over IP.

AV over IP has been developed to meet the demand for high-definition, real-time engaging content, offering full hi-def capabilities with near-zero latency. Multi-point installations can reportedly be controlled and managed through a variety of devices, including laptop, smartphones and more.

Belden’s portfolio of audio, video and communication products supports the needs of cabling solutions, helping organizations integrate the delivery of hi-def, uncompressed signals.

“We’re pleased to become an active member of the SDVoE Alliances,” said Dave Geon, vice president of U.S. sales for Belden. “Years of research and development, spanning multiple levels of the OSI model, put us in a position to support the adoption of AV-over-IP platforms. Belden’s deep understanding of AV technology extends beyond cable and connectivity to include the active component brands in our portfolio—including Grass Valley, Thinklogical and Tripwire—which gives us unique insight into AV and IT platforms and how they can work together.” 

ST. LOUIS, MO.—Belden today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Thinklogical from Boston-based private equity concern Riverside Partners for $160 million. The transaction will be financed with cash on hand and is expected to close in the second quarter 2017, subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.

Belden said that among the highlights of the deal, it would “significantly” enhance Belden’s Broadcast Solutions platform “with one-of-a-kind, mission-critical solutions;” and gives Belden and entree into the secure KVM switching market.

It also adds Thinklogical’s numbers to the Belden balance sheet, and in 2016, Thinklogical generated $12 million in net income on $51 million in revenues for $17 million EBITDA, with accretive-to-GAAP earnings of around 4 cents and adjusted earnings per diluted share of around 27 cents in the first year of ownership.

Headquartered in Milford, Conn., Thinklogical is a developer and manufacturers of high-performance, fiber-optic-based video and switching equipment. The company’s products are used for real-time enterprise video management (including switching and transmission of high-quality video and peripheral signals) across a variety of end markets, including military, command and control, broadcast, etc.

“We are extremely excited to welcome the talented Thinklogical team to the Belden family,” said John Stroup, president, CEO, and chairman of Belden. “The business is uniquely well-positioned for success, given its numerous market growth drivers, industry-leading proprietary products, and difficult-to-obtain intelligence and defense accreditations. This is a very compelling opportunity for Belden that provides additional opportunities for profitable growth in our Broadcast Solutions platform.”

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Belden’s Steve Lampen told HPA Tech Retreat program organizer Mark Schubin he could talk about 4K over coax cable, and that Schubin said, “we’re tired of 4K. Talk about something besides 4K.”

Lampen said that made him realize that soon, they could talk about the next thing until everyone’s bored of it, declare victory, and then move on to the next thing, without actually making anything.

Ans so now, the next thing is data cable. Lampen said broadcast facilities are increasingly connected via data cable. He showed a new Category, 6A, or “augmented” Cat. 6, at 500 MHz per pair and with PAM 16 multilevel coding, a 10 Gb data rate and 10GbaseT compatibility.

Shielded or unshielded. That is the question, Lampen said. Neither is perfect. Shielding prevents alien crosstalk, ground loops and ground-induced noise, but it’s more work to install and is general more expensive. He said “telescopic shielding” is not a solution.

Unshielded cable is cheaper, easier to install, has lowest crosstalk between pairs, but the worst alien crosstalk when cables are bundled. Bonded pairing helps, but it’s a lot of work.

Lampen showed the Belden 10GXSxx series cable, a type of Cat. 6A, that has a layer inside the cable that absorbs the disruptive energy and attenuates it throughout the length of the cable. He said it was 25 percent smaller than regular Cat. 6.

And yet… the cable’s only as good as the connecter, he said, and so, voila! Belden REVConnect. Lampen said it’s the best they’ve seen in an RJ45 connector. It can be assembled in about a minute, he said, and the price is on par with most other Cat. 6A connectors. REVConnect contains a “cable manager,” a little housing on the end with color-coded dots for properly routing the individual wires.

The connector handles shielded and unshielded Cat. 5e, 6 and 6A—almost any type of cable—with no pair-splitting required for making bonded pairs. Performance was consistent across distances measuring from 10 to 90 meters.

He cautioned against mixing cable standards, and to choose one of the two, 568A or 568B, the most commonly used cable standard in the United States.

Also see...
Oct. 23, 2014
“ SMPTE 2014: Coax for 4KTV,”
Maybe Belden will build 4K coax cable. Maybe not if no one wants it. Steve Lampen of Belden, the industry’s cable sage, asked for a show of hands in a ballroom full of video engineers, who planned on using coax for 4K. One hand tentatively moved, but Lampen counted zero.

SEATTLE—The term future-proofing gets thrown around a lot when customers evaluate components for an installation. But when designing and specifying products that make up the skeleton of the infrastructure—cables, wire and connectors—it’s also a good idea to evaluate whether they will serve well into the future.

Steve Lampen, Belden On the subject of future-proofing, Neutrik product manager Fred Morgenstern quoted Yogi Berra: “‘It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.’” But Morgenstern did venture his own prediction: “In regard to broadcast signals on the acquisition and editing sides, the question appears to be not if facilities will move beyond HD signals at 3GHz, but rather when.”

He said it’s still up in the air how the industry will solve the challenges presented by these higher bandwidth transmissions. “Will the industry stick with tried-and-true SDI over coax?” Morgenstern mused. “Will we primarily migrate to Category [Ethernet] solutions? Or will fiber optics finally become the default option?

“Furthermore, as the industry migrates to IP-based workflows, allowing heterogeneous signals to be multiplexed over evermore powerful and inclusive hardware, what are the best physical carriers to transport those signals? Whatever choices facility designers make, we think that Neutrik has some compelling options.”

LEMO developed its 3K.93C connectors for SMPTE 304 standard 30 years ago, a standard that is still in use today.THE STATION OF TOMORROW
Bryan Carpenter, senior sales consultant for Bittree, said his company will introduce a new connector product at the upcoming NAB Show. “There is some momentum in the industry on trying to push UHD uncompressed video down a 12 Gbps coax line.”

According to Carpenter the new product will “be utilizing our MiniWeko-type plug. It’s re-engineered, because of all the high frequency and the precision involved in the parts. So this is where the miniBNC is gaining. It’ll be miniBNC on the back and Weko on the front end.”

Though the new product is being developed for uncompressed UHD transmission, Carpenter said customers will also find use for it in the HD world. “The advantages are that you not only run UHD across one single line, but you can also run eight 1.5 Gbps SDI lines or four HDSDI lines on that same coax cable.”

With the acquisitions Belden has made in recent years, its NAB booth has become massive. Steve Lampen, multimedia technology manager for the St. Louis-based company said the technical infrastructure to drive displays and demos is similar to the TV station of tomorrow. “We decided that the ‘Engine Room,’ [the part of the booth that houses storage and playout] which is traditionally out of sight, should be out in the middle of the floor so people could see how it’s wired up.”

He pointed out that while some have declared certain cable and wire to be “dead,” the booth will feature “equal amounts of coax, twisted pair, 10G data cables and fiber. And this is kind of the ‘station of tomorrow,’ at least at this point, some kind of amalgam of these three technologies. There’s no clear winner in any direction.”

In the future that may be less true, said Lampen. With the data world a hundred times bigger than the video broadcast world, “suddenly broadcasters are learning that this is a great way of putting stuff together because you could move the control room to the other side of the building by changing a couple of patch cords in a patch panel.” At its NAB Show booth Belden will show its new 10GXS CAT6a data cable, with a significantly smaller diameter and an absorptive layer to counter alien crosstalk, the bane of smaller diameter data cables.

OB Truck Market Demands Rugged Cables & Connectors

According to Shadath Shahid, engineering manager for Canare, preparing for the future means being able to handle higher bandwidths. “As technology’s evolving, everybody’s trying to get everything faster and quicker, and optics are one of the fastest ways to transmit signals,” he said. “We find that a lot of companies that used to use triax cable are now converting to complete fiber. That’s including some truck builders, stadiums and arenas that are using this fiber technology.”

For the rugged OB market Canare offers its SMPTE Tactical fiber. “It’s a more robust housing, with an outer jacket, and we use bend-insensitive fibers so it doesn’t break easily,” Shahid said. “It’s like a tough-shield cable, so it’s resistant to damage. It meets up with the conditions and comes out perfectly fine.”

The Fischer Connectors FiberOptic series is sealed to IP68 and can be cleaned with any water source for transmission without loss of data, making them perfect for mobile units and outdoor events regardless of the weather.Canare’s Tactical Fiber is slimmer, which allows for a lower weight per 100 feet.

One way to look at future-proofing is not just by meeting the future performance specifications of an installation, but also providing a product rugged enough to physically last into the future.

Rick Hobbs, director of business development at OCC (Optical Cable Corp.), a Roanoke, Va.-based provider of fiber-optic cable, says the company builds its products for durability. “Things are going to last, because we come from a military background,” he said.

But though OCC’s products like its B Series Mil tactical fiber cable are designed to meet military specifications, Hobbs said remote truck users of cable “are more harsh on the durability of the cable than military applications. They’re throwing things over the stands and pulling it through, and they have a short amount of time to set up in these venues, and when it’s set up they don’t want any issues to deal with.”

Connectors are a similar story. When system integrators at Mobile Studios saw a need for more robust fiber-optic cable and connectors, they formed Tactical Fiber Systems (TFS) to fill that need. “We saw more and more people going into high-definition sports production,” said Richard Rubin, president of the Deerfield Beach, Fla.-based company. Affordable connectors for fiber cable were often very fragile, so “we came up with our own connector and cable combination that was very robust for video production [and] field production.”

The weak point in many of these connectors was the exposed male fiber sticking out. “Our Magnum Connector is unique in that it’s a solid piece of machined stainless steel, and the connector itself has got female connections, so the fragile fiber tips are inside the connector,” Rubin said. This allows a stainless steel cap to protect the connector when the fiber is being pulled. Mud and water are a fact of life for OB broadcasters. “With all of our competitors, the mud will get inside all the mechanical components inside the connector, and it’s going to be a nice mess to clean,” said Jacques Miéville, product manager for Fischer Connectors. “So the broadcaster must send the whole reel back to the guy who supplied them.”

Fischer attacked this problem on two levels: “On the interface we have an IP67 ceiling, which prevents any water or debris or dirt to go into any of the mechanical parts of the connector, of the terminal, the fiber optic terminal.” With the mechanical parts isolated, a crew member “can really clean it properly in the field,” Miéville said. “And this is really interesting for broadcasters because when their connector is really dirty, they can have the first level of maintenance on the field for the connector.”

John Orona, sales and product manager for Lake Cable, pointed out the ever-increasing need for OB broadcasters to watch their weight. “Weight in the trucks is everything,” he said. “Every ounce counts on a truck.”

So Lake Cable set out to engineer a lighter ruggedized replacement for traditional 9.2mm SMPTE 311 cable that could carry the signal a similar distance. The STEALTH Special Ops cable is 7.8mm in diameter with a polyurethane jacket that’s flexible and more durable than traditional jackets while easily sliding over sticky surfaces. Lake Cable also replaced the 16-gauge steel conductor with a Kevlar strength member, “It’s stronger and lighter than steel,” Orona said. “In fact, it’s 33 percent lighter than the traditional 9.2mm cable overall.”
Craig Johnston

INVESTING IN PROTOCOL
Steven Lassen, manager of product and applications at LEMO, said that a good way of judging a company’s ability to make future- proofed equipment going forward is to look at how well they’ve future-proofed their earlier devices. Three decades ago, the Swiss-based company developed its 3K.93C connectors to meet the needs of the then new SMPTE 304 standard.

“That technology is still in use today, and we see it in support of 4K, UHD, and 8K UHD to the studio,” Lassen said. “So for futureproofing, we look pretty good with the existing connectors even today, 30 years later, and beyond.”

Lassen said that the company wanted a hybrid type of configuration, “so there are two fiber-optic contacts, what LEMO calls the ‘F2’ type, which is a 2mm, as well as two high-voltage contacts and two signal contacts.”

As to the future, Lassen said it starts with improvements in protocol. It’s up to “the industry to develop the protocol for the future, and we’re willing to work with the industry to do that,” he said. “Of course you can only get so fast over copper contacts, so eventually, at some point, for higher bandwidth type of things you’re going to have to change over to fiber. And we’re working on that.”

As the broadcast industry moves toward video over IP—where data cables replace traditional coax or fiber—Steve Cooper, vice president of engineering for Chicago-based Switchcraft, said the specifications of the cable and connectors are critical for CAT5, 5a, 6 or 6a cables to deliver future performance.

“We try to specify and obtain the best cable that we can with the least number of dB loss per foot, so that we can get the maxi-mum distance,” Cooper said. “So you have to look at your connectors, make sure your connector meets the spec, and also you need to verify the connectors when terminated with the cable you’re using still meets the spec.”

The most common RJ45 data cable connectors are built to withstand little more than air conditioner fluctuations in the single digits, with none of the environmental conditions OB truck crews are accustomed to. So Switchcraft has developed RJ45 Weathertight Connectors that are sealed to IP67 and IP68 NEMA 250 (6P) when mated.

Corning Cable Systems has traditionally been focused on fiber and cable manufacturing for the B2B market, but the company has looked into the needs and future needs of post-production houses and sees a market to address.

“Post production facilities and video production facilities use a ton of cable, especially to connect up with their storage devices,” said Sang Min (Joshua) Yoon, product line and marketing manager for the Emerging Applications team for USB and Thunderbolt Active Optical Cables for Corning. “Previously it was very hard to connect any sort of devices that actually were six or 10 feet away from the devices they wanted to connect to.”

With Corning’s Thunderbolt and USB 3 optical cables, “we were able to eliminate the inconvenience of multiple cables and connectors with one simple cable that is able to provide a ‘plug-and-play feature,’ and it works. A lot of the facilities are now running as much as 200 feet from PCs or laptops are to where the connected devices are located.”