SVG Sit-Down: National TeleConsultants Execs Discuss Top Trends

National TeleConsultants has been at the forefront of the nation’s consulting services thanks to its ability to offer a wide range of services since its founding in 1981. And the current era of broadcast technology makes consulting services more important than ever as there are more potential missteps than ever. Key executives from NTC recently took part in an email Q&A to discuss the current marketplace, their business, and the road ahead.

SVG: NTC has a wide range of clients so you are clearly hearing a lot of interesting things with respect to where they are today and where they want to go. What are some of the areas of interest?

Frank Albano, Principal Consultant: NTC helps customers evolve to what we define as the “New Media Enterprise.” This concentrates on core challenges within the plant, supporting the addition of distribution channels.

Frank Albano, NTC, principal consultant

The transition from HD over SDI to High Bit Rate / uncompressed HD over IP has been the buzz for years, but this buzz has made the jump to become an infrastructure reality. Customers facing end of life on their routers and infrastructure are now considering hybrid IP-based router solutions which include encapsulation and de-encapsulation to support legacy HD-SDI signals. It’s natural to start here in this migration because audio-video routers are the heart of the technical operation.

Next is the content pipeline itself. Customers big and small continue to bring us challenges with their organically-grown workflows and installed systems. It is common for customers to have a mature linear infrastructure engineered with “bolt-on” third party systems to support media orchestration. These quick reaction solutions did their jobs, but today they impede the organization’s ability to scale as workflows and platforms continue to grow and evolve. New tools for cloud media processing, new revenue-driven media delivery requirements, and new platforms (all of which inevitably include unique delivery standards) have also presented challenges. These organically-grown systems are simply not scalable.

NTC’s approach guides organizations through a process of reassessment and identification of key goals, and then collaboratively creates a roadmap for realignment towards a future state that enables both scalability and agility.

SVG: It is an interesting time as the production potential (UHD, HDR, Dolby Atmos) is amazingly high but a lot of the distribution methods (most notably broadcast TV) has some catching up to do. How are your clients looking at this potential and then using it to shape their facility decisions today?

Eric Pohl, CTO: A major challenge for providers of traditional broadcast and MVPD delivered content is that their current distribution platforms are limited to a specific compression technology (MPEG-2 and MPEG-4). This prevents both 4K and HDR content from being delivered.

Eric Pohl, NTC, CTO

Entities that deliver their product via OTT have the ability to deliver a 4K and HDR experience to users that have 4K sets supporting HDR (ex: Netflix and Amazon).

We anticipate that a common practice for production of content that is expected to have a long life will be to maintain high resolution, high bit depth archives so that a subsequent 4K and HDR versions of the asset can be created. 4K and HDR require HEVC and 10-bit delivery methodologies, so programmers must release via an OTT platform or wait until ATSC 3.0 is deployed to enable delivery to the consumer.

SVG: And then there is the move from baseband to IP signal transport. What is the NTC position on figuring out whether or not IP is the right choice for a facility build today?

Pohl, CTO: It is clear that the technology trajectory favors using IP as the switching technology in the longer term. Everyone in the market should be factoring IP technology into their planning now, either as a component of current projects or as part of some future state.

At the same time, we believe it is critical to recognize that the transition to an all-IP infrastructure, certainly for most established businesses, will probably happen over time in planned phases. Much like the digital and HD transitions that preceded it, IP routers today are largely islands and isolated systems, wrapped by encapsulation and de-encapsulation devices. These IP islands will slowly grow as cameras, monitors, and other router sources and destinations operate as native IP devices out of the box.

Now that SMPTE 2110 has been agreed upon, it is expected that there will be a movement towards the use of IP encapsulation native inputs and outputs on sources and destinations. This will decrease the interoperability risk and make the movement to an IP core more economically favorable.

As we move forward, we will see increased use of commodity hardware with the ability to manage high bit-rate media.

SVG: Your company does everything from consultation to integration and also helping your clients define their initiatives. Obviously it helps if a new client has a sense of what they want to accomplish. If someone is thinking of reaching out to you is there any prep work they should do in advance? What kind of questions should they ask themselves before reaching out to you so that the relationship can flourish more quickly?

Steven Mendel, Account Executive: NTC provides consulting services for technology and business change. So, we want customers to bring us their most significant challenges. That being said, we do advise customers that in this era of change businesses need to be prepared to achieve the operational and organizational change that will accompany the technology changes.

One of the common threads we see that characterize true project success is building consensus and getting broad buy-in across the entire client organization. Getting that homework done first allows a project to move quickly and without false starts. When the broader team, including both operations and technical staff, are all in agreement regarding project responsibilities and goals, everyone is in the best position to succeed, regardless of project size or scope.

Equally important, clients must also be willing to let go of any preconceived notions about technologies and workflows. In the past, the technology changes were incremental and did not require the more profound changes that will be required as the media business model transforms.

We firmly believe it is important to begin each project with a clean slate. Much of our initial work with a client is to help them step outside of their environment and gain fresh perspectives on their challenges, as well as the various solutions that are available to them. Key to success in this process is an open mind.

SVG: Given all of the possible directions the industry could go (1080p, HDR, 4K, a mix, none of the above) do you feel the industry at large has a sense of what it is trying to do and where it wants to go?

Brad Williams, Principal Consultant: The industry knows their business model is to deliver a monetized product to the consumer. A broadcaster is not likely to think about HDR/4K in the same way as a cable or OTT content provider looks at it, because their method of monetization differs.

Brad Williams, NTC, Principal Consultant

The key is being able to understand how these changes will unfold and how to make technology investments to support these changes. Even though the industry knows the nature of the changes ahead, exactly how these changes will unfold and how to react to them is the challenge. Our industry requires thoughtful media futurists that have the multidisciplinary experience to guide them through this transition.