Eager attendees gathered outside the main entrance to the
South Upper Hall as the clock ticked down to the witching hour
of 9 a.m. It was a hurried mob that finally passed into the hall.
As the crowd spilled around the Avid booth at the entrance
to the hall, several attendees stopped to see the editing giant's
latest version of its Media Composer product, Version 5.5.
Deeper into South Upper Hall, the wide breadth of the
media industry is represented. What really seemed to impress
this reporter was the number of companies selling
solutions for handling video while on the go.
In the Destination Broadband Pavilion, Norbert Gierlich
of TV1 was dressed in camouflage fatigues and looked
ready for action. Demonstrating TV1's miniCaster portable
field video transmission product, Gierlich had the same answer
for everyone who wanted to know more about getting
video back from hard-to-reach locations.
"Life is a battle," he said. "Be prepared."
Small booths with mobile origination solutions were
busy demonstrating their products, including companies
such as DSI, LiveU and TVU Networks. Significant groups
of people crowded around the demos, which usually spilled
out of the booths and clogged the nearby aisles.
These systems use telecommunications networks such
as Verizon and Sprint, both of which have recently upgraded
their networks to faster "4G" data speeds that can
deliver better video with fewer compression artifacts. And
4G data cards require little setup, no special skills and can
be used by a mobile camera operator while on the go.
Sammy Geller at TVU stayed busy explaining the company's
TVU Pack mobile origination solution, and pointed
out that its TVU Pack Cloud can do a similar job at getting
streaming video live to the Web.
Jim Stanley, chief engineer at WLKY in Louisville, Ky.,
was on the prowl for studio production equipment, including
an HD switcher. WLKY has been broadcasting news in
standard-definition 16:9, but dropping prices and increasing
performance has made 2011 a good time to take the
local news broadcast all the way to HD.
"We have a great-looking 16:9 signal, to the point where
other stations in town have started advertising that they have
'real' HD," Stanley said. "But we think the time has come to
go to HD as well."
There isn't much TV production gear in the South Upper
Hall, but the aisles team with ancillary equipment, such
as test and measurement products, editing and distribution
systems. Stanley was last seen heading toward the mobile
uplink vendors.
Also in the South Upper Hall are transmission equipment
suppliers, such as Axcera and Thomson. Thomson
was keen to promote its Elite1000 "Green Power" television
transmitter, which the company says is the most efficient
solid-state system available.
Axcera has a new TV exciter targeted at low-power
broadcasters, which is the "final frontier" for analog broadcasting
in the United States. Sooner or later, those thousands
of low-power broadcasters will be going to digital.
-- Bob Kovacs, TV Technology