What is in this article?:
What we’ve learned from this past year is that consumers want to watch video in places other than their living room.
SOAs
At the higher end, service oriented architectures (SOAs) have begun to be implemented in larger multichannel facilities that allow many people involved with content creation and delivery to allow work collaboratively with the same interface connected via a fully redundant storage area network. This improves speed and productivity and, it’s been said, brings the staff together in ways that took a lot more effort previously. But it’s not so easy to do.
“I think a lot of people don't realize that deploying a SOA takes careful planning and a lot of customization work,” said Jimm Popowytsch, Vice President of Engineering and IT, AMC Networks Broadcasting & Technology.
Located in Bethpage, NY, the company operates a state-of-the-art technical facility that consolidates origination and satellite communications functions in one 62,000sq-ft facility and helps AMC Networks maintain both standard- and high-definition digital infrastructures.
To this end, Grass Valley’s Schubert said his company is focused on bringing the same flexibility that virtualization has brought to the IT world. He refers to it as an “abstracted infrastructure,” whereby the user does not care where their video server, or router, or video switcher is located, as long as they have access to the content.
“If you are able to run that function anywhere in your network,” Schubert continues, “You now have an enormous amount of flexibility. The infrastructure [physical systems] shouldn't be the thing that is stopping you from doing the work you need to accomplish.”
With 2012 now in the books, the traditional television industry will be looking ahead in 2013 to staying competitive in the areas of mobile video, multiscreen and even digital subchannel delivery. It remains to be seen whether that can be accomplished.
Editor’s Note: It’s always amusing (to me, anyway) to look at some predictions and see how stood the test of time. Here’s one: In 2008, Cisco Systems said that by 2013, annual global IP traffic would reach two-thirds of a zettabyte (that’s a trillion gigabytes). Cisco also forecasted that 90 percent of consumer IP traffic (which makes up the majority of total IP traffic) would be video in 2013 and that video consumption on mobile devices would reach 64 percent of total mobile IP traffic by 2013. We now know that these numbers were (and still are) a bit optimistic. Currently, according to Cisco research, video streaming represents 56 percent of all IP bandwidth usage.
