WASHINGTON—The Government Video Expo, held Nov. 27-29, has an image of the U.S. Capitol building in its logo, but the reality on the floor is bigger than one building or just the federal government market alone. Indeed, a glance at attendee show badges on the exhibition floor or at the conference shows an eclectic mix of media professionals from many arenas.

While attendees included personnel from local, state and federal governments and all the agencies and contractors within that leviathan, this base was joined by representatives from state and local emergency personnel, defense-related contractors, educational institutions, houses of worship, and plenty of regional production types and broadcasters.

The conference schedule also reflected this. While many presentations and speakers were quite government-specific, broader topics such as live streaming, LED lighting advancements, SMPTE 2110, and high dynamic range video appealed to many modern media professionals.

TOPICS AND TRENDS

The SMPTE ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards has been the hot topic at trade shows of late, and it was on the minds of many at GV Expo. The importance of the new standard was reflected in the addition of the day-long SMPTE in DC: Essential Technology Advances for Media Pros Conference, which attracted a number of local broadcast and media professionals eager to dig deep into the implications of IP on their media operations.

On the exhibit floor, the big buzz words were 4K, UHD and IPTV, according to Tommy Goodson, president of AudioVideo BrandBuilder (AVBB) Corp. “What we’re hearing at this show in particular is a lot about IPTV, with 2110 on the agenda … everybody who has come by is preparing for 2110.”

AVBB—a master distributor and manufacturer rep primarily for test and measurement specialist Phabrix and streaming company Teracue—said it was seeing great interest in the 2110-friendly Phabrix line, including the Sx-TAG model and the Qx IP, a fully flexible 2110 rasterizer.

Also popular was Teracue’s iCUE Grid Video Wall, is an IP Video Wall Presenter for multiple content sources within the video wall. It allows complete on-the-fly control over visualized live and/or on-demand content in any resolution.

AR/VR was present on the exhibition floor within products and at the conference, but the technology is a bit less in-your-face at trade shows now. The same can be said for artificial intelligence, which also had a decent presence on the conference schedule, but was not plastered on every booth on the exhibition floor as has been seen at events over the last few years. This may reflect the technology maturation, as AI or AR/VR are now established products or part of established products.

An example is Quantum’s StorNext media workflow file system. More than a year ago the company had announced it would offer Veritone Inc.'s multi-engine AI platform in a StorNext-managed environment. At GV Expo, the incorporation was a reality and AI is now just part of an overall system. There were no flashy robots on display representing the brave new world of AI, but representatives from Veritone did attend Day One of the show.

StorNext has applications across broadcast, security, defense and other environments that generate lots of data that needs to be evaluated and used. NewTek’s Tricaster multicamera production system also has a broad range of applications. It was on show at the booth of Washington Professional Systems, a dealer/integrator from nearby Wheaton, Md., that is also a NewTek Elite Dealer selling the systems across several market areas.

“The Tricaster product line is versatile enough that it is not just a broadcast switcher, there is so much more under the hood that allows it to be used in many AV environments,” said Jeremy Morris, Sr. Engineer & Certified Tricaster Operator with WPS. WPS’s booth also demonstrated products from Crestron, Christie and others.

WPS also had Sony broadcast and robotic cameras on hand, but the media world has seen a merging of the consumer and professional areas over the last several decades, so it makes sense that Sony had its own consumer electronics presence at the show as well. Highlights at this stand included still cameras capable of shooting some impressive video, and high end consumer camcorders such as the FS5 Mk II and the FS7 Mk II, both of which can shoot in 4K.

Sony professional cameras, along with units from Hitachi and JVC, were also present at the large, central booth of Digital Video Group (DVG), a supplier and system integrator of broadcast and production systems.

Alex Martin, DVG CEO, said the company was looking to expand its government business with its offerings, which also included asset management and shared storage from Avid, bonded cellular transmission units from LiveU, and more. Martin said show trends that cut across customers included the real need for 4K and preparing for SMPTE 2110.

PRODUCTION AS BREAD AND BUTTER

Whatever the resolution of the video is, and whether it is sent around a facility as an SDI stream or as an IP packet, production needs will always include camera support and lighting. These needs were front-and-center at Vitec.

On display was the Vinten flowtech 75 set of two-stage carbon fiber tripod legs with a removable mid-level spreader, rubber feet, and a 44-pound payload. This established unit was joined by the flowtech 100, which was only launched a few months ago. Compatible with all major 100 mm fluid heads, flowtech100 supports a payload of up to 66 pounds, making it ideal for heavy-duty ENG/EFP and a wide range of wildlife, commercial, and documentary productions.

Joseph Teodosio, Training & Product Specialist for Vitec, said the first day of the show drew a nice mix of local TV stations, government and military and house of worship (HOW) customers: “The LitePanels Gemini has been a real draw with its very high quality light, and the new flowtech 100 is also attracting people.”

Greg Smalfelt, senior cable television engineer, Communications Production Division, and Josh Bass, cable TV engineer, both with Fairfax County, Va.’s Channel 16, came to see the 100. “We’re an existing customer but we wanted to see the 100 for our bigger cameras, and get some questions answered,” said Smalfelt.

Panasonic was also out in force with a range of production kit for needs ranging from broadcast to HOW to government video entities. The AU-EVA1 compact cinema camera and a new class of PTZ remote cameras and controllers capable of operating in 4K 60 and 50p were joined by the AV-HLC100 small switcher, which is capable of direct streaming to YouTube or Facebook Live.

Smaller scale routing and switching needs were also key at AJA, where the company’s affordable Kumo routers and KiPro Ultra+ recorders were on display. Eastern region territory manager for AJA Dan Wingard said the duo were perfect for many of the potential customers walking the aisles. “We see everything from Federal, state and local government people through to community colleges, really a little bit of everything,” said Wingard.

Barbizon, a distributor of lighting, rigging, projection kit and more, said there was a lot going on in the world of LEDs in 2018. One of the big things this year is that a lot of the LEDs are now IP-rated, which has nothing to do with packets of data but is a measure of the protection an item will have against solid objects (dust, sand, dirt, etc.) and liquids, according to Kearston Dillard-Scott, Outside Sales representative for Barbizon. “Variety is also a trend,” said Dillard-Scott. “Many of the fixtures that were bi-color just from warm to cool can now do full RGB.”

Project Manager for Barbizon Sam Herbig added that the quality of an LED fixture’s light was increasing, and consistency within a product line has greatly improved from a few years ago: “It’s boring, but for anyone lighting to a level it is important,” said Herbig.

IP packets play a large role in an interesting product from Comrex that was on display, and due for shipping before year-end after being launched at the 2018 NAB Show: The VoIP-based Earshot IFB. The hardware-based system delivers live audio feeds to callers and is designed to provide telephone-based live studio program and IFB audio to field-based remote broadcasts, like TV ENG reports or in other applications.

Comrex also had an app called “FieldTap,” which allows a user to connect to Comrex codecs in studio from a cellphone with high-quality wideband audio.

According to Chris Crump, senior director of sales and marketing for the Devens, Mass.-based company, the Comrex LiveShot Portable IP video codec for live wireless newsgathering are in use across government sectors, particularly emergency management and security entities, along with community broadcasters. LiveShot delivers live, two-way, HD video and audio over a range of IP and cellular networks at latencies as low as less than 200mS, he said.

MISSION CRITICAL

Many government and defense video applications are defined as “mission critical,” a niche Oregon-based Planar covers with its narrow pixel pitch direct view LED and LCD panels. “These are purpose-built for mission-critical and mission-command applications, with higher image quality for indoor applications," said Alberto Reyes, director of federal business development for Planar. “We’re now finding other applications as well, any discerning 24/7/365 application in a signage environment really.”

Advances in projection display were evident at the booth of Christie Digital Systems.

“We’re trying to take a leadership position on RGB laser phosphor technology, said Jon Litt, senior manager, Business Development, Government, for Christie. “We’re also trying to bring it to a price point where it would work for more applications.”

Litt said the technology offered tremendous image fidelity, quiet operation, and the ability to run for years with little or no maintenance. Longevity is also a key selling point for the company’s DirectView LED screens, which Litt said had an expected lifespan of 100,000 hours or more while offering exceptional contrast.

HIGH SECURITY CAPTIONING

Captioning is often a government requirement and EEG has been offering encoders that connect broadcasters to iCap, the largest closed captioning and subtitle delivery network in the world, according to the company. While iCap provides 24/7/365 connectivity to thousands of certified caption partners around the globe, new at GV Expo was an option that allows customers to connect to an iCap network via a private VPN, with no public internet connection as part of the process.

“Some customers don’t want any public internet as part of the network, and now that is an option with iCap On-Prem,” said Dave Watts, marketing manager for EEG. iCap On-Prem is a companion product to EEG’s cloud-based delivery network, and it enables the deployment of iCap to private on-premises clouds for customers who require this configuration to accommodate extremely stringent internal security policies. Also on display was an automatic captioning product that relies on Ai and context recognition, and a SMPTE 2110 product.

Security was also key for IBM Watson Media, the end-to-end streaming platform formerly known as UStream: The tagline on the product’s data sheet is “Engage your employees with security-rich video.”

S. Scott Grizzle, WW Cloud Video Solutions Engineer with Watson, said the use cases between a broadcast customer and an enterprise or government customer were different, but there was a lot of crossover. He added that many customers across product sectors were become increasingly interested in video enrichment, where software can identify elements such as scenes, people, animals, etc. and place this information in to metadata.

Equipment aimed at consumers can do a lot of what many media pros need done in 2018. It is perhaps with this in mind that show organizer Future US just announced the launch of The Video Show, a new dual-event venture for December, 2019. The Video Show will pair The Photography Show, now an established U.K.-based event, with the iconic Government Video Expo, which celebrated its 23rd edition this year. 

The event takes place Dec. 3-5, 2019 at the Washington Convention Center. 

What do leading voices from trade, business and journalism have to say about video in 2019?

They say that technology is a key metric for engaging viewers. That enterprise and education have to prepare differently for tomorrow’s video future. That journalism today finds itself part of a unique media climate.

At the 2018 GVExpo, Nov. 27–29 in Washington, attendees will hear from those leaders about what the future may hold.

[Read: “PBS NewsHour” Anchor Judy Woodruff Confronts the Challenge of Today’s Media Climate]

Kicking off the conversation will be a keynote discussion with PBS NewsHour Anchor and Managing Editor Judy Woodruff on Wednesday, Nov. 28. Woodruff will talk about future of journalism and the impact on journalists from today’s media climate. The conversation will be led by Paul McLane, the managing director of content for Future US, who will query Woodruff on technology, current trends in economics and the best ways to go about engaging audiences in today’s segmented media environment.

The status of journalism today continues with conversation on Wednesday with CNN’s Tom Foreman. What’s clear is that journalism — and the technology and tools that drive it — are evolving; that’s an issue that Foreman will cover in the session “From the ‘Situation Room’ to the Thailand Caves — Today’s Evolving Journalism.”

Foreman will talk about how new technology is helping media professionals tell stories more effectively. In July, Foreman used virtual reality technology to illustrate the situation facing emergency personnel attempting to rescue young members of a Thai soccer team from a flooded cave. The resulting VR 3D cross-section of the cave was an immersive, virtual environment that showcased the terrain and potential escape route in bold, visual terms.

On Thursday, Steve Koenig, vice president of market research at the Consumer Technology Association, will touch on key trends in the year ahead in the keynote address “2019 Technology Trends — What to Know, How to Prepare.” He will lead attendees through the potential developments in terms of production, consumption and delivery set for 2019.

The last day will also usher in the all-encompassing keynote discussion “The State of Video in 2018.” The session will look at some successful ways that educational institutions and governmental organizations have approached communication, collaboration, teaching and learning.

Jeff Rubenstein, vice president of Global Product Strategy and Business Development for the video platform company Kaltura, will look at the state of video in both education and enterprise in 2018. And he’ll discuss potential emerging trends that he expects will shape video over the next two years.

The complete schedule for the 2018 GV Expo can be found here.

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You've seen him on CNN stalking around a virtual environment and interacting with graphical representations of the SCOTUS process, North Korean missiles or Royal Thai Navy SEAL divers. Tom Foreman has established much of the network's work beyond video, playing a key role in the development and use of an immersive, 3D virtual studio that takes viewers to space to study satellites, onto distant battlefields to promote understanding of dangerous conflicts and down deep into the data of presidential elections.

Foreman will be a keynote speaker at Government Video Expo 2018. He spoke with Managing Director of Content Paul McLane for Government Video.

Government Video: You've done a lot of work in broadcast news with technology you've described as "going beyond video." What exactly does that mean?

Tom Foreman: We now have tools that allow us to visualize concepts that previously were not visual. We can turn data, we can turn ideas, we can turn trends, into interactive, touchable graphics, with which we can tell a story that adds clarity to our understanding of an increasingly complex world.

Previously, there were economic trends, crime trends, security trends that were difficult to visualize. But if you can turn it into an environment that you can stand next to, it helps people, who are visual creatures, to see what we're talking about.

GV: How did you become involved with the virtual studio?

Foreman: Hurricane Katrina was the birth of a lot of this. I had a deep and long understanding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from having worked there in traditional journalism — doing beautiful pictures, explanatory pictures and reports. And yet Katrina brought such a scope of disaster that no one picture could do it justice. Even a collection of pictures could not do it justice. You needed the giant view that we could bring through a graphic treatment. What we were using at the time was a giant wall-based projection of Google Earth, which I was controlling with a mouse in my hand, I was controlling it on set and we were flying in and out.

The real value, though, came from the combination of traditional on-the-ground reporting and photography video that supported it, then using this as a high-tech frame that let us add the meaning that said, "Okay, I just showed you a picture of a church halfway underwater. That matters because this is where that church is; and down the street is this school, and down the street is this government building, and over here is the streetcar line." It gave a context.

We did the same thing after the earthquake in Haiti. We were able to show, not only where the damage was, but by widening out and using some of these tools to show satellite images before and after, we were able to analyze road blockages and say why it was so hard for aid to get to people. The Army asked if they could get copies of our images, because they were having trouble figuring out how to get things to people, and our analysis with the satellite images worked for them.

GV: Why aren't more people doing this in such a visual world? Is it cost?

Foreman: I don't think it's cost, it's understanding. This is a very high-tech tool for a very traditional and old-fashioned process: storytelling. A lot of people mistakenly think that this is whiz-bang, it's all about amazing graphics and immersive graphics; that is not the case at all.

Almost everything we produce begins as simple paper-and-pen drawings on my desk, where our team gathers around, and we draw it; and as we draw it, we're saying, “What is the story? What is it we're trying to convey?”

I think one of the reasons people don't do it — or do it effectively — is they compartmentalize it. "Well, the graphics department will create this; and the show production team will create this; and we'll bring in a reporter at the last minute and plug them in." That absolutely does not work. You have to have the full team involved from beginning to end.

GV: Is there a risk that these tools could come to be used in place of live reporting, rather than to complement it?

Foreman: I don't think so, because everything we do is grounded in traditional journalism. Everything we do is grounded in finding actual facts. In fact, we steer away from doing it when we can get access that shows us what we want.

GV: You've used this technology for so many interesting projects. Are there two or three that particularly stand out?

Foreman: This has been tremendously helpful in giving a sense of scale, when we've dealt with natural disasters; in giving a sense of proximity, when we've dealt with war situations; and in helping us peek into places where we can't readily look.

As we've analyzed the North Korean missile and nuclear program, it's been tremendously useful to show exactly how much progress they're making — and what they still have not yet accomplished. Missiles involve almost incomprehensible distances and speed and force; this allows us to depict that.

In the search for the missing Malaysian airplane, this was an enormously useful tool. When you say to somebody "five thousand square miles of ocean," most people have no idea what that looks like. If somebody talks about something being 1,500 feet underwater, they don't really understand what that means either. We're able to depict that in ways that make sense.

GV: Look ahead five years, how is our experience of watching content going to change further?

Foreman: You see sports embracing this a little bit. Sports can do that in part because you're always talking about a very defined situation. The football field is this size, and there are two teams, and they play this long. Basketball, field hockey, arena, whatever.

We're going to see a lot more of this embraced, not just by news organizations but by anyone who's in the business of trying to tell a story. Because frankly the world we live in today is endlessly complex compared to the world we lived in 50 years ago. You can wake up in the morning and get an email from a friend in Indonesia, respond to a phone call from your office down the street, see photographs from a family member who's three time zones away, and search back 20 years for records of information that you might need that day. You are traveling time and space every minute, much more than we used to. That requires a new kind of understanding of that information.

We can't make our brains evolve that quickly, so what we have to do is have tools that allow our brains, as they are, to connect with this new reality.

GV: What about artificial intelligence, 4K, other technical areas?

Foreman: Willa Cather once wrote that art should simplify, that it's about simplifying ideas and making them understandable. All these technological things—the quality of video; the immersive nature of some of these systems—I think that's going to continue. The real secret here, for those who want to thrive in this environment, is to recognize them for just what they are: These are tools for a simple process of understanding. If you let it become about the tools, then it becomes more noise, more clutter that doesn't help you understand the world.

This world that we're going into is not for the faint of heart. There are huge challenges to making sure this technology serves us. But the rewards for doing that are absolutely immense.

Many years ago, when I was a very young person, I did a big, a big magic show with flying doves and floating ladies and fireballs and the whole thing. That has been enormously useful to me. The whole purpose of a magic show is knowing what's really going on, which can be incredibly complex. And yet remembering what the audience sees — and knowing you have to let them come along in the story, in a way that works for them — that's what we're doing here.

When I'm in the virtual environment, there is rarely a gesture or a step or a turn that is not carefully constrained by the technology that I'm surrounded by. Only if you do that properly does it appear real, in a virtual sense; and only then can the technology disappear and the understanding come through.

Key Takeaways

Who? Tom Foreman of CNN is a featured keynoter at Government Video Expo on Wednesday, Nov. 28, in the session "From the 'Situation Room' to the Thailand Caves — Today's Evolving Journalism”

Why? New technology is helping media professionals tell stories more effectively by leveraging "the one thing humans are really good at: visual interpretation."

Now What? Register now to meet and learn from CNN's Tom Foreman and other top speakers from PBS, The DC Visionaries, BundlAR, Creative Media Matters and more.