Telairity Provides Encoding for the XV Pacific Games

The start of the XV Pacific Games is just under a week away and we’re excited to announce that Telairity will be providing encoder and decoder lines to the Games. Our equipment will be provided by MiseOpoint, an Oceania-based systems provider.

The multinational games will feature athletes from 22 island nations and will take place in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea from July 4-18, 2015. The games were created in 1962 to foster friendship among the Pacific Islands by bringing together different cultures, ideas and interests all united under sport. Held every four years the Pacific Games has a wide selection of sports, including track and field, swimming, lawn bowling, and “va’a” or boat races. Some of the participating nations are American Samoa, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Vanuatu, Australia, and New Zealand.

More than 3,000 men and women athletes will compete in 28 different sports in nine separate venues throughout Port Moresby and the Games are viewed by attending athletes as a warm up for 2016’s Olympic Games in Brazil.

Telairity will be providing our BE7100 and BE8100 encoder lines as well as our popular BE5502 Integrated Receiver Decoder (IRD) to the nine different venues to ensure a multi-format, low-latency transmission path for the live game coverage. The IRD is a full-featured professional 4:2:0 MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) HD/SD integrated receiver and decoder for broadcasters, cable operators, and telecoms. The BE7100 encoder is scalable, fully programmable, low latency broadcast quality encoder for standard definition format. For HD video compression in real time we offer our 8000 series encoders.

Viewers around the world will watch the Pacific Games via the LiveStream Internet video service while Oceania Broadcasters will downlink a 4 channel multiplex from Intelsat 19. All signals will be transmitted via IP to the International Broadcast Center (IBC), and redistributed over the Pacific by satellite for video and Internet viewing. All broadcasts will be available in French and English. IBC will provide the English broadcast and the French-language feed will be from France Televisions to French-language territories.

To learn more about Telairity and our products and solutions, visit our website. We also post more broadcast news and company updates on our Twitter and LinkedIn.

Interactive Trends in TV Broadcasting

With all the recent advancements in technology, it’s an exciting time to be working in television. One of the newest trends is using Internet TV to engage audiences by making the viewing experience more interactive, using technologies like graphical analysis, animation and virtual reality broadcasting. This is particularly true in the sports broadcasting arena, where new interactive ideas seem to appear daily.

One new product unveiled at the 2015 NAB Show was LaunchPad, from Reality Check Systems in partnership with Vizrt. LaunchPad is an interactive touchscreen, which provides real-time predictive analysis, social media integration, and new enhancements to the tablet controller. This technology works with Vizrt’s Viz Libero 3D sports analysis, which allows soccer presenters to engage fans with real-time, illustrative replays, custom graphics, and more.

Another new technology designed to bring audiences a different viewing experience is NextVR, which provides broadcast virtual reality technology. Even the most avid sports fans aren’t always able to attend live games, and few among those that do attend are able to get premium floor seats. Via virtual reality technology, however, fans anywhere can experience live events from the best seats. Though NextVR is currently only available through the Samsung Gear VR virtual reality headset connected to the Samsung Note 4, VR technology seems destined for general cross-platform availability. NextVR has already been tested by the NHL and NBA for use in live sporting events and the NFL may use the technology to help quarterbacks study opposing defenses in a realistic environment.

At Telairity we will continue to monitor advancements in interactive and other technologies. To learn more about how we can help with your broadcast, visit our website. We also post more TV and broadcasting news on our Twitter and LinkedIn.

Telairity Unveils New Products at NAB Show

As we mentioned in our last blog post, in addition to attending CABSAT, we will also be exhibiting new products at the NAB Show located in Las Vegas, NV in April. The entire show runs from April 11-16, 2015 with the exhibits opening on April 13^th. The event is hosted by the National Association of Broadcasters and brings together broadcasting professionals from all over the United States as well as many other countries around the world. Attendees will also be able to attend conferences, workshops, and hear speakers such as John McAfee, Norman Pattiz, and Adam Carolla.

Telairity will be located at booth SU7516 in the Upper South Hall where we will be showcasing our next generation encoding technology, based on our brand new video processor, the TVP840. New TVP (Telairity Video Processor) technology, in conjunction with a complete redesign of our direct-execution AVClairity H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) encoding firmware (to maximize the efficiency of our new hardware), enables us to create a whole new generation of real-time encoders that are smaller, lighter, and far more powerful than any previous generation. Attendees can stop by our booth to see all our new products and speak with our team.

To view all our products, visit our website. We also actively post more broadcasting news on our Twitter and LinkedIn pages.

Meet Telairity at CABSAT

Telairity will once again be exhibiting at CABSAT this March at stand 218 in Hall 2. The trade show runs from March 10-12^th at the Dubai World Trade Centre and is one of the biggest broadcasting, satellite, and digital media events for the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia region. The event brings together some of the world’s leading content producers and connects them other industry professionals involved in capturing, exchanging, managing, distributing, and monetizing content.

In addition to seeing all the latest product developments in the exhibit halls, attendees also have the opportunity to attend a variety of conferences discussing the latest trends in broadcasting, such as the Middle East Post Production Training Conference, the GVF Satellite Hub Summit conference, the Content Delivery Hub seminar, and The CABSAT & NABSHOW Collaborative Conference. Attendees of the last mentioned conference will have the opportunity to see Telairity again during April 13-16, at the USA NAB show (held annually in Las Vegas, NV), at booth SU7516 in the Upper South Hall.

At CABSAT, Telairity will be unveiling for the first time anywhere systems using its next-generation encoding technology, based on a brand new generation of the Telairity Video Processor, the TVP840. Our new video processor, in combination with completely redesigned Telairity AVClairityä H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) encoding firmware, enables a whole new generation of encoders that are smaller, lighter, less power-hungry, and far more versatile than anything previously possible. To see the products we will be showcasing, be sure to visit our booth during the show, or contact us in advance for an appointment to secure a private visit with the Telairity team. We will also be tweeting about the show, so be sure to follow us on Twitter. 

Telairity Expands to Central Asia

As we’re about to bring 2014 to a close we’re excited to announce that Telairity has recently opened a Central Asia office in Tajikistan. This newest addition to our growing list of regional offices will help us better service the growing market for broadcast equipment in Central Asia by providing the latest and most cost-effective encoding and decoding technology, as the area shifts from traditional analog to digital television services.

As a global leader in the design and manufacture of high quality encoding systems, Telairity solutions are easily adapted to handle the rapidly changing mix of SD, HD, and mobile broadcasting typical of emerging markets, like Central Asia.  Equipped with our next generation video processor, Telairity gear also comes ready to handle the next generation of compression technology, adding years of useful life to any installation. To learn more about all Telairity products and services, visit our website. Our company is also active on Twitter and LinkedIn, where we post company updates and industry news on a regular basis.

Meet Telairity at Content and Communications World

Telairity is excited to announce that it will be exhibiting at Content and Communications World at New York City’s Javits Convention Center from November 12-13, 2014. The expo will bring exhibitors together with executives in the industry including content creators, managers and distributors. There will be over 300 exhibitors and over 7,000 attendees from across the country. In addition to the expo, the event will feature two full days of conference sessions which cover such topics as OTT and Rights Complexities, A Golden Age for VFX in NYC, Key Trends Driving Media Technology Investments, and more.

We encourage attendees to stop by our booth, #865, to learn more about our products and to view our new generation of H.264/AVC encoders which we will be debuting at CCW. The new systems are based on our latest Telairity Video Processor (TVP) generation, featuring six times the compression capability of our previous generation. This means our new systems will be far smaller, quieter, lower power, faster, and more versatile than any previous encoder—even ours. Of course, Telairity continues to be the only company dedicated to video compression that controls all its own technology, from the chip through the final system design. That means we remain the only company able to respond to your video compression needs on every level.

To learn more about our products, visit our website and be sure to follow us on Twitter while at CCW with the hashtag #CCWSATCON.

Wither HEVC Part 3

In our previous blog, we raised the problem of the relative rates of:

1. bitrate reduction, due to new generations of compression technology

vs.

2. bitrate proliferation, due to the introduction of higher-resolution broadcast standards

We can easily quantify this problem with a little simple math. Let’s start in 1994, with the introduction of MPEG-2, the original digital compression standard developed for broadcast technology. Let’s set 1994 MPEG-2 compression technology to 1 and, likewise, set 1994 720 x 480 SD resolution formats at 1. For present purposes, we can assume these two forces are roughly balanced: that is to say, MPEG-2 compression technology successfully reduces the bits generated by digital 720 x 480 SD formats to manageable levels for practical purposes of transmission and storage.

Given this 1 to 1 parity between SD formats and MPEG-2 compression, as long as SD formats continued to dominate TV broadcasting, there was no great practical urgency about developing better encoding technology. And, in fact, although better H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) compression technology became available as early as 2003, there was little interest among broadcasters in the new technology over the next several years – despite its ability to cut SD bitrates in half.

Widespread interest in better H.264/MPEG-4 compression technology only began to develop among broadcasters after 2007, when the replacement of 720 x 480 SD formats by 6X larger 1920 x 1080 HD formats first become common. But, while the flood of bits generated by HD formats made the inefficiency of older MPEG-2 compression patently obvious, even after broadcasters switched to next-generation H.264 compression, the bottom line was not a return to the old 1 to 1 (SD to MPEG-2) parity of 1994. Instead, with a 6X increase in bits due to new HD formats, balanced by a 2X reduction in bitrates from H.264 compression, the new HD to MPEG-4 parity level was reestablished at 3 to 1.

The industry now faces the prospect of a second transition to a new 2X better level of compression technology with H.265/HEVC (MPEG-5).  Although adoption of MPEG-5 for HD formats would practically restore the old 1994 parity level (1.5 to 1 vs 1 to 1), just as adoption of MPEG-4 technology waited on the spread of new, higher resolution HD picture formats, significant take-up of MPEG-5 compression is likely to wait on widespread adoption of the new 4X larger 3940 x 2160 4K picture format. With 4K formats, the bottom line will not be something closer to 1994 parity levels, but rather something substantially worse than current levels, with a 6 to 1 ratio of 4K bits to MPEG-5 compression capabilities.

Future developments seem more likely to continue this progressively worsening trend than to succeed in reversing or even slowing it. Projecting forward to a new 2X better level of compression technology with a future H.266/MPEG-6 step, this advance in bitrate reduction seems certain to be more than offset by a yet another 4X larger resolution step: the 7880 x 4320 8K picture format.   In the 2020s, then, the bottom line is likely to be a 12 to 1 ratio of bits to compression capabilities, measured by 1994 standards.

Is this decade-by-decade slide in bit ratio, from 1 to 1 in the 1990s, to 3 to 1 in the 2000s, to 6 to 1 in the 2010s, to 12 to 1 in the 2020s, a worry? And if it is not something we should worry about, then why not? That will be the subject of our next blog.