LAS VEGAS—TV Technology asked a cross-section of NAB Show-goers a series of five questions regarding what they considered the main themes, evidence of those, whether or not these initiatives will take hold, and what promising technologies from past NAB Shows did not see daylight. (A complete list of quotes from respondents and links to their full 5Qs is at “NAB 2016 in 21 Quotes.”)

George Hoover, chief technology officer, NEP, Pittsburgh SMPTE section chair, chairman of NAB’s Exhibitors Advisory Council:
Q1.How many NAB Shows have you attended?
G.H. First was in 1974, but there have been gaps, as best as my memory serves me about 35.

Q2.What, in your opinion, were the main themes of the show this year?
G.H. Perhaps that the status quo technology-wise isn’t a bad thing rich now.
Equipment buyers expressed that interoperability with other manufacturers’ gear was a key product feature above all else.
There is no compelling reason, business or quality wise, for U.S. linear channels to invest in 4K distribution to the home at this time.
There may not be a real compelling reason for HDR, considering the compatibility issues with SDR displays.
If you are going to produce in 4K, growing interest in a 12 Gbps over coax connectivity without the I/P voodoo. 

Q3.What were some examples of these themes?
G.H. AIMS gaining significant traction, Sony and Grass Valley Groups agreeing to work together on I/P connectivity.
The many ways people are trying to figure out how to make HDR work for home distribution, none compatible with the other
The 4K train left the station with only a handful of riders, not a popular destination right now.

Q4.Do you foresee any or all of these technologies or initiatives taking hold?
G.H. Not widespread for 4K to the home distribution, HDR or IP for live.

Q5.What technology that impressed you most at a past show didn’t see the light of day?
G.H. Can’t really think of anything that should have, perhaps Sony SX in its day.

INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—The name of the remote game is pressure—the pressure to make live event television coverage instantly accessible, more effectively, for less money with no particular pipeline of trained recruits. That was the upshot of remote production panel discussion at the HPA Tech Retreat this week.

NEP elected the economy-of-scale model, making acquisitions that give it a global television production footprint, including, most recently, Consolidated Media Industries in Hilversum, Netherlands. Hilverum is 17 miles southeast of Amsterdam, home of Dutch TV production giant, Endemol.

“There is pressure to do production effectively and cheaply,” said NEP chief technology officer, George Hoover. Infrastructure is part of that. NEP also has 100,000 miles of phone lines in the Netherlands and operates two data center content delivery networks.

“Unlike some other places, the data center is part of our package,” he said.

LIVE TV OVER IP
The network presence gave NEP the ideal opportunity to deploy IP-based remote production. With trucks, when they’re in use, they’re making money. When they’re parked, they’re not. IP technology held the promise of a more efficient architecture versus the truck fleet, if it could work for live TV production.

NEP CMI division, DutchView Infostrada, aired “Carlo’s TV Café” live on RTL4, last November, using remote-controlled cloud production using SMPTE-2022 over Grass Valley IP camera technology. (SMPTE-2022 is the standard for encapsulating video signals for IP transport.)

“The control room can be anyplace,” Hoover said. “We’ve been doing two or three shows a week. We’ll probably be doing three or four a day.”

Michael Harabin, vice president of technology, engineering and media management for Pac-12 said the collegiate sports network televises 850 live events every season, now over IP transport.

“The challenge was how to produce field hockey and lacrosse and rugby… and break even,” he said.

“We have partners in the 12 consortium, so all we did was fiber the network,” he said. “Our farthest campus is Salt Lake City. Latency was 24 milliseconds. Everything’s about latency, routing and who’s the best provider.”

Pac-12 Network now has no other products in the field. The networks uses JPEG2000 with Nevion encoders. Everything comes out of San Francisco, to master control in Denver, he said.

Down the road Harabin said Pac-12 is looking at virtualizing master control, because they see the cable business going away, and they like the idea of spinning up as many networks as they want. The would like to get to the point where master control operator can go to Starbucks and operate playout. He said they’re looking to move everything from capex to opex.

$K
Philip Garvin, president of Colorado Studios/Mobile TV Group, thought they might get ahead of the competition with 4K, so MTVG built a 4K mobile unit, assigned it to HD productions and slo-mo, and “keep waiting for someone to call and say, ‘we’d like to use that 4K truck,’” he said. Garvin estimated that making outfitting a remote unit for 4K production costs an extra $1 million to $2 million.

Garvin said the the same cameras that do 4K can also do super slo-mo.

“That’s been extremely helpful to us, so we can invest in these cameras and use them while we’re waiting for 4K,” he said. “You’re looking way, way in the future when you build a truck.”

Garvin said 4K is not so hard, but that 4K high-dynamic range is not so easy. There are implications for the entire workflow, he said. For now, MTVG is working to recoup its 4K investment, and it’s not a seller’s game.

“The only place to squeeze is the truck companies these days,” he said. “We have to use all the technologies to provide a better fan experience, for less. They’re not just looking for 5 percent or 10 percent, but ‘big cuts,’” he said.

Joe Wire of flypack supplier Bexel said that when executives look at their investment cycle, they ask, “what are people going to do to improve the fan experience at home? That’s been a challenge for us… When we look at our investment, it’s really around how we can use our equipment best. Sometimes, you get a long-term contract for your truck. Sometimes, you don’t. So, for example, what is the lifecycle of HDR? What is the business case?

“It’s a struggle,” he said, with lots of hedging around 4K.

Asked if high-dynamic range 4K would be as compelling as the transition from standard to high definition, Garvin said it wouldn’t be quite the same.

“When we started HD in 2001, there were about 50,000 homes with HD sets. They were very expensive. Today, there may be somewhere between 20 million and 30 million 4K sets—they’re not HDR—and that tips the scale. Many are software-upgradable to HDR,” he said.

PEOPLE
Another issue in the truck business is finding qualified crew members. Harabin said it’s a challenge to get people in San Francisco, where a guy turned them down because he couldn’t bring a dog to work.

“It’s not glamorous to work at a television station,” he said.

Hoover said you have to “grow your own. Nobody else makes them. Harvard doesn’t graduate 5,000 of them every year.”

Harabin lauded NEP’s training program and said PAC-12 is doing likewise. Interns work for NEP for two years, then they’re sent out on the road as a third engineer on a three-person truck crew. Hoover talked about the necessity to balance personalities on a truck crew.

“Typically, an OB truck will send two or three people,” he said. “So those two people pretty much live together 220 days a year—you find the right personality mix, and it takes time to do it—it benefits both of them.

“It doesn’t take long. We’ve replicated this thing so many times, it’s second nature.”

SAN FRANCISCO—When it comes to integrating new audio and video technologies into a stadium, the fan experience comes into play more and more. And that demand for more camera angles and slo-mo replays that fans are used to seeing on their home TV screens is impacting the design of even bigger screens at the stadiums.

Particularly in a sports environment, the technology in front of the audience and behind the scenes have to work seamlessly hand in hand.

Systems integrators have taken that notion to heart. Over the last several years, companies like TSE Services in Scottsdale, Ariz., have devoted much of their audio/video services integration to sporting environments, from minor league ballparks to major league soccer stadiums.

To enhance the ballpark experience for fans of the Charlotte (N.C.) Knights, TSE partnered with Toshiba Managed Business Services to install one of Minor League Baseball’s most spacious and brightest scoreboards at the team’s home BB&T Ballpark.SOUTHERN EXPOSURE
Most recently, the company finished up two sports install efforts in the south, with audio and video installs at WesBanco Arena, home of the ice hockey team the Wheeling Nailers in West Virginia as well as a Minor League baseball park—Joseph P. Riley, Jr. Park—that hosts the Charleston RiverDogs in South Carolina.

The goal of both of those audio and video installations was to enhance the fan experience, TSE said.

The Nailers project in West Virginia was centralized around the addition of new digital ribbon boards and a high-definition center- mounted video board. Partnering with Cincinnati-based landscape lighting manufacturer LSI Industries, TSE was responsible for designing, relocating and installing a new high-definition production room to support the new displays. Technology included a NewTek TriCaster 860 video switcher and NewTek 3Play for instant replays and wireless fan cams.

Likewise, the RiverDogs project in South Carolina was focused on streamlining audio around the ballpark and enhancing the instadium communication and video systems. Audio amplifiers were installed to break the ballpark into multiple digital zones that would allow stadium A/V operators to change the sound level as needed in different locations throughout the ballpark. Technology additions included a Canon XU-81W HD remote PTZ camera in center field, along with new ticket window intercom systems.

The goal of the technological investment was to take attendees’ video and audio experience to a new level, according to Jamel Mallad, TSE project manager for the installation.

The common theme for many of today’s sports stadium installations is digital: largescale video boards, digital signage, menu boards, video walls and digital audio. That same focus went into TSE’s designs at stadiums like BB&T Ballpark in Charlotte, N.C. and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park in Durham, N.C.

But sometimes the technology has to take a less obtrusive role when it comes to preserving the atmosphere in a location— whether that’s a modern take on a slick new hockey arena or maintaining the rustic feel of a minor league ballpark in rural Vermont.

That was the case during the revamp of Centennial Field in Burlington, Vt., when TSE was tasked with installing a high-definition video board into an existing wooden structure that resembled an old mining shed far more than a modern billboard. The integrator worked with LSI Industries to install a 27x16-foot video board and integrated a new digital production room with TSE’s GameTime ScriptPRO game management system, a cloud-based event management SaaS solution designed to organize and execute event scripts.

The Durham (N.C.) Bulls Minor League Baseball team contracted with TSE to overhaul the team’s audio-visual system, which included a new HD game operations production room and improved sound system.FIXED VERSUS NON-FIXED
That same level of attention is required whether the game is played in a small stadium or within the big leagues. NEP’s rising prominence in covering major sporting events came from a two-fold happenstance: networks declining to invest in their own proprietary broadcast facilities in the field, and the real-world experience that outside broadcast production companies have continued to gain in sports-specific production.

That’s not to say, of course, that the experts don’t experience a blip from time to time: There is still discussion about what exactly caused a power outage during the World Series Game 1, though it’s been reported that when Fox lost power to its generators, it knocked out the signal from the NEP production truck that was responsible for airing the domestic feed for the World Series coverage.

In addition to herculean efforts to avoid on-air snafus, what defines sports productions is their similarity to one another, said George Hoover, chief technology officer of the NEP Group. In its 31-year history, which began humbly as part of the WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pa., the mobile production company has covered regional baseball, college football, tennis, soccer, ultimate fighting, professional golf and beyond.

“The biggest challenges are that you’re working in the field, and you have to build from scratch,” Hoover said, which can mean diverse challenges such as deploying fiber throughout an older stadium or outfitting HD cameras in locations where there is no connectivity.

“In regularly occurring venues—like basketball and hockey—this isn’t an issue, but for events like golf or NASCAR when there’s not a regular venue, we have to install cabling infrastructure and take it out afterward,” he said. “There’s a lot of logistics,” particularly for those sporting events that depend heavily upon instant replay, like NFL playoff games or the World Series.”

In an entertainment venue like the Grammys, there are multiple musical acts back to back to contend with, which offers its own challenges. But in a sporting event, there are also ancillary elements like large HD screens and scoreboards for playback materials.

During this year’s World Series coverage, NEP employed a larger number of high-speed slow-motion cameras. “When you’re capturing an image at the higher frame rate of 480 fps or 1,000 fps, it gives you the ability to freeze the ball to see if the runner hit the bag first, or if the fly ball was out of bounds,” Hoover said. “[A lot of our current setups] depend on higher-speed replay cameras and specialized POV cameras, like the ESPN goal-line cameras, or cameras on pylons,” he said, noting that NEP has been using Sony HDC- 4300 4K cameras and Vision Research high-speed cameras.

Sports production also has specific requirements when it comes to storage. “When you go to a higher frame rate, you’re storing more material, which means you need larger hard drives,” he said. It also takes longer to play that content back. “In reality you can’t get more than one or two high-speed replays in before [the play starts again].”

BeckTV is one company that has dived into the sports production realm as well, having completed an HD upgrade of a 48-foot expando mobile production truck as well as having designed a large-scale flypack used at the 2014 French Open tennis tournament.

Recently the Austin-Texas-based company completed a significant renovation of the Dr. Pepper Ballpark in Frisco, Texas. Home to the Frisco RoughRiders, a Class AA minor league baseball team, BeckTV provided design and integration work for the ballpark in an effort to enhance the fan experience, including an upgraded sound system and new Daktronics LED displays driven by a new HD video replay control room.