IBC is just over and has demonstrated that there is plenty of innovation in the TV industry. The trade show took place on September 12-16 and welcomed a record total of 55,092 attendees from over 170 countries, a 4% increase from 2013, all flocking to the RAI (Amsterdam, Netherlands). This year’s edition enabled the industry to discover the latest developments in multiscreen, virtualisation and 4K content delivery, which were the three hot topics at the largest conference and fair for the broadcast and TV industry outside of NAB.
IBC 2014 saw the launch of IBC Content Everywhere Europe, a new feature of the conference giving special attention to the importance of content and its availability on a when and where basis across all consumer devices. The launch of this new section confirms ACCESS’ belief that video consumption is no longer limited to the primary TV screen. Instead, operators need to ensure that their services are compatible with as many devices as possible to engage consumers and increase their revenues.
This proliferation of content has been ushered in by the multiscreen era and discrepancies between browsers, device type and OS, interaction methods, payment options, screen size, security and control capability as well as advertising support have emerged. At IBC, we launched our solution to this problem, ACCESS Twine™, to provide operators with the simplest route to deploy and control true TV Everywhere services. On site ACCESS Twine demos at IBC showed operators how the solution offered a single point of content access control across multiple Conditional Access (CA) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems to manage video distribution from CDNs and PVRs whilst leveraging HTML5 to offer a seamless, unified TV experience on all devices.
4K content delivery was another highlight at IBC, especially in regards to sports programming. With demonstrations including UHD football, rugby and golf showing the part that high quality images play in immersing the viewer in sports programming. The IBC Awards even presented FIFA with a number of awards for the 4K broadcast of the World Cup. Sky Sports and Turner Sports were just some of the other winners indicating that the ability to provide high quality live content to every screen could hold the key to success in the future of the evolving TV market.
Browsers will play a key role in the delivery of content across all devices and it is essential that there are solutions in place to enable the delivery of 4K content. This is why we also launched our new NetFront™ Browser BE, built on the Chromium Blink engine and developed for high-end platforms at IBC. It extends the NetFront™ Browser family and is the ideal solution for operators seeking to deploy next generation hardware platforms and support the latest HTML5 standards on high performance DTVs, set-top boxes, game consoles and automotive infotainment systems.
Virtualisation hasn’t lost its lustre since 2013 and was still on everyone’s lips. With CDNs playing an increasingly important part in the storage and delivery of content, it is clear that cloud TV is set to become a must have in the next twelve to fifteen months. While security and quality of service issues remain, especially in regards to OTT services, operators are better armed than ever before to offer services that support multiple CA and DRM systems while ensuring that content delivered through their platform is of the highest quality. The launch of the new NetFront™ Living Connect 3.1 provides the most robust and secure media sharing solution while support for the new DLNA VidiPath guidelines ensures that operator services are compatible with the largest possible number of devices.
Industry focus remains fixated upon multiscreen TV and there is a noticeable thirst for 4K TV and virtual access to content everywhere, as consumers demand the best possible picture quality on any platform, in and out of the home. The ability to deliver all of these seamlessly is dominating the TV space at the moment and ACCESS solutions provide solutions that enable operators to deliver high quality content to any screen in and outside of the connected home.
IBC has once again provided an excellent environment to share knowledge and showcase the latest innovations in our industry. To keep up to date with our latest news and announcements, please visit http://eu.access-company.com/
