Business Director Ian Valentine shows off Tektronix's new portable WFM2200 waveform monitor.

“For a lot of customers, if it doesn’t make money or it doesn’t save money, we have a problem,” says Ian Valentine, business director, video test product line. “What we are starting to see is that that is coming out in two forms. First, the distribution and delivery of content is becoming more and more important; second is the management of that content internally and cost reduction of moving from tape to file and the efficiency of that.”

Keeping pace with the evolution of the file-based environment, Tektronix was showing version 7.4 of its Cerify platform, which provides quality control of file-based video and audio. The new version offers a series of enhancements, including significant speed improvements that enable Cerify to test content at many times faster than real time. A growing list of supported codecs/wrappers enable Cerify to start processing files as they are being ingested. Staying with emerging new mezzanine standards, Cerify now supports testing of DNxHD and JPEG2000 mezzanine formats. The addition of teletext and DVB subtitling strengthens the existing 608/708 caption support.

According to Valentine, show attendees from the mobile-production-truck industry were very interested in the portable WFM2200 waveform monitor, the latest addition to the company’s line of waveform monitors and rasterizers. Making its debut at the NAB Show, it has a combination of features and the portability that enable those working in a truck compound to keep an eye on their progress on the go.

Broadcasters and video-content producers are no longer monitoring only basic SD-SDI video and analog audio and need to diagnose multiformat video, multichannel/multiformat audio, and complex ANC data supporting today’s modern broadcast systems. The WFM2200 incorporates the performance of Tektronix’s advanced waveform monitors in a portable unit. In addition, it is customizable via software, enabling customers to add capabilities to the base model to better suit their needs, rather than pay for a fully configured unit with unneeded capabilities.

On  April 17, members of SVG’s Women’s Sports Media Initiative took time away from the busy NAB Show floor to discuss this question. Nearly 40 women from all facets of sports production gathered at the Las Vegas Convention Center to network and participate in a discussion titled “Distribution Industry Trends From Creation to Consumption” and led by Jackie Donaldson, segment director of sports and media for Level 3 Communications.

Level 3's Jackie Donaldson led WSMI in a discussion on distribution trends in sports production.

The group discussed current trends in sports-distribution strategies and highlighted potential pitfalls in the path from acquisition through delivery to consumption and analysis. WSMI members targeted over-the-top distribution, expanded multiplatform content delivery, and an emphasis on the multitasking consumer as trends to watch, and engaged in a debate on the best techniques for storing this abundance of content. Many of the trends from the NAB Show floor found their way into the discussion, as the group considered digital rights, production quality, and monetization strategies for the second screen.

Prior to Donaldson’s presentation, Erin Thede, director of the Employer Partnership Office for the Office of the Chief Army Reserve, took the floor to explain why hiring a military veteran is more than the right thing to do, it’s good business. Thede, joined by Captain Rebecca Murga of the U.S. Army Reserve, led a dynamic discussion on the merits of hiring highly qualified, broadcast-trained veterans for any mobile-production need. Veterans are tech-savvy, responsible, physically fit, and leadership trained — not to mention, comfortable working in a predominantly male field — and make ideal candidates for sports-production employment.

For more information on joining SVG’s Women’s Sports Media Initiative, please contact WSMI Associate Director Karen Hogan at karen@sportsvideo.org.

Sweden-based Hego Group continues to make waves in the U.S. sports market, showcasing its sports-data solutions at last week’s NAB Show. From its earliest days as a timing company, Hego has focused on the capture, creation, and management of data. Its diverse product lines on display included the GS2 continuous-rendering engine, AKI virtual-graphics and telestration products, and TRACAB real-time tracking system.

“We’ve got the touchscreen product, we have virtual photo placement, augmented reality for studios [that can be used] for ad placement, object placement, [or] stats placement in sporting events like baseball [or] basketball. And we have player-tracking data gathering with TRACAB,” says Hego US President Kevin Prince. “We actually cover three very major portions from presentation [and] production through to team analysis and team data gathering.”

Anchoring the Hego booth was the AKI GS2 Multi-Touch, which integrates with major touchscreen technologies using industry-standard touch-protocol interfaces. Multiple live video streams, real-time 3D graphics, preproduced video clips, dynamic data-driven content, and many other graphic objects can all be implemented within an interactive multitouch solution.

“We’ve always been focused — because we’ve been a production company ourselves — on delivery,” says Ian Wray, group sales director, Hego Denmark. “We need to be able to take all these media files, all these different video codecs, these different live video screens, all these different data sources and present [them] on an interactive platform. It’s really important to be able to create the underlying architecture to make an easy way to be able to create the final masterpiece.”

TRACAB, which provides live 3D performance metrics for sports ranging from football to basketball to tennis, was also on display. With the ability to package captured data into different media products for different platforms — such as broadband, broadcast, print, and mobile — TRACAB has already found success with the FIFA World Cup, Spain’s La Liga, and Mexico’s Televisa. Even so, Hego unveiled several enhancements for this year’s NAB Show.

“We’ve now integrated [TRACAB] with our line-based tracking system: a virtual football system where it understands perspective,” says Wray. “It understands where the camera is in relation to the pitch, and, if we already know where the camera is in relation to the pitch, we know where the players are in relation to the pitch. What we can then do is some quite clever things, like put labels to all moving objects.”

From left: Carl Roszczybiuk, director of engineering, JFS; Yohay Hahamy, SVP/owner, Joseph Electronics; and Gideon Uys, director, JFS

“[The Booth Caddie] is an integrated hub solution for everything from announce booths to stages to pregame shows, postgame shows, [and] halftime shows,” says Gideon Uys, director, JFS. “[It] encompasses all video, all audio, all data, all cameras over fiber.”

The Booth Caddie runs on four single-mode fibers and features audio preamps, IFB and intercom interfaces, camera support and transport, full data transport, and video options. Audio runs on a full MADI-supported infrastructure and can be adjusted locally or remotely via IP.

In addition to its in-the-booth applications, the Booth Caddie can be expanded or shrunk to meet a wide variety of production needs. HDMI-integrated outputs of 3G/HD-SDI signals provide a range of interconnect options, and each Booth Caddie also provides connections for up to four SMPTE-based cameras and have 2X integrated OPTC ports.

“You can add small stage boxes to it,” says Gideon. “The small stage boxes can then run to a press-conference room, to a sideline, to anything else and plug directly into the Booth Caddie, so you’re basically only running one cable out to the Booth Caddie, or dual if you want to have dual redundancy. We also have a couple of on-camera fiber solutions, but, unlike a lot of on-camera solutions out there, these are true production centers because they all have fiber loop-through, meaning that you can take any stage box and plug it into the nearest camera [and have] full audio-video backing [and] everything else at every position.”

Sony’s NAB Show press conference put the focus on 3D production, announcing that the company will once again be sponsor ESPN’s Summer X Games in 3D as well as programming for 3Net and Sky in the UK. But it was the announcement of a multiyear, multicamera deal with NEP that topped the list of new deals.

Although AVC-Ultra will not hit the market until 2013, Panasonic’s new compression scheme permeated nearly every major announcement at the company’s pre-NAB Show press conference. In addition, Panasonic also briefly teased a 4K VariCam prototype.

Grass Valley’s presser debuted its latest fiber-to-triax converter while also unveiling notable upgrades: an updated version of its Stratus Media Workflow Application Framework software, a revamped K2 Summit Media Server platform, the 6.5 version of its EDIUS nonlinear software, and additional features to its Trinix NXT Multiviewer for SD, HD, and 3G.

One of the more interesting new companies represented at the show this year was Brevity, which offers a potentially game-changing technology for sports production. The New York City-based startup exhibited V3, a Web-based video-management system that it says can transfer encrypted video files over Internet, fiber, or satellite up to 30 times faster than otherwise possible.

At a press conference on Saturday night, Harmonic announced a deal that will provide its Omneon MediaGrid shared-storage systems and ProMedia Carbon enterprise transcoding software for NBC Olympics’ production of the 2012 London Games.

For the second consecutive NAB Show, Avid has boosted its Interplay system to the next level, with the introduction of Interplay Sphere. Following Interplay Central’s debut last year, Sphere promises to take remote content access to the next level, too. The cloud-based system allows journalists to acquire, access, edit, and finish stories from anywhere, “breaking down the walls of the newsroom,” as Avid executives put it during the press conference.

2012 was a big show for Germany-based console and routing-systems manufacturer Lawo. At its booth, Lawo North America President Herbert Lemcke ticked off several new developments.

Evertz jumped into the replay market with Dreamcatcher. Drawing from experience building the Mediator Content Management and Automation system, the company sought to create a replay server characterized by production quality, new compression technology, and codec flexibility.

At the NAB Show, Harris Corp. unveiled the Magellan Network Management System, a complete network-monitoring and -control solution that manages the individual components of broadcast from creation, through aggregation, and on to delivery.

If you thought the broadcast-loudness issue was settled, think again. The leadoff round of presentations at the DTV Audio Group’s NAB Show meeting focused on exactly that.

Producers and directors in the next generation of sports broadcasting are running around now wielding increasingly affordable DSLR video cameras, shooting hi-def footage of Pop Warner football and girls softball games. David Marsh at Audio-Technica thinks they’re going to want microphones to get the kind of audio they’ll need to match that HD video.

Ross Video may be known primarily for its switcher and servers, but the Canadian manufacturer suddenly became a major player in the robotic-cameras market after acquiring Cambotics, its second such acquisition in just three months.

At an early-morning press conference on Sunday, Chyron dove head first into the second-screen/social-TV pond. The company highlighted its new Engage platform (co-developed with ConnecTV) and announced the launch of Shout, a standalone software application that enables broadcasters to bring Twitter feeds live to air.

While much of the attention at the NAB Show focused on next-generation technologies like 3D, 4K, and improved second-screen publishing and content creation, EVS focused on a complete tapeless solution. The company has taken steps in that direction with advances for its XT3 server line, including more storage and the addition of automatic low-res–proxy creation, a feature expected to be available in the near future.

Another big headline from last week’s show was the release of Adobe Creative Suite 6. The latest version of Adobe’s production software, which will hit the market at some point during this quarter, includes major updates for Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro and promises “blazingly fast performance” and “streamlined workflows.”

Calrec demonstrated how its Hydra2 audio-routing system can interact with third-party control- and production-automation equipment, using a Ross switcher emulator in conjunction with Ross Overdrive technology, which allows visibility into and control over a number of settings.

Grass Valley was at the show with its usual wealth of hardware, software, and workflow options for broadcast professionals. CEO/President Alain Andreoli and his company tackle the challenge of refining product offerings to better serve existing customers and bring in new ones.

Sony Creative Software quietly showed an interesting new system that sports-audio post producers will find very useful. Spectral Layers displays audio in a frequency-spectrum format and allows the user to target a very specific part of it, isolate it, and flip the phase, essentially canceling it out without disturbing the audio frequencies around the target spectrum.

Telestream hit Las Vegas with what it believes to be the next great leap ahead in video processing: LightSpeed. Incorporated into the company’s two new Vantage transcoding products, Vantage 4 and Vantage Transcode HE Server, LightSpeed delivers five times greater performance to the Vantage product lines, according to Telestream.

At the forefront of Gepco’s offerings for the sports-broadcast market is a new line of ruggedized fiber-optic cables designed for portable applications in harsh environments. TactiFlex fiber-optic cables are both tough and lightweight, standing up to the rigors of mobile production while offering the flexibility of fiber.

Over the past three-plus years, Adtec Digital has gradually carved out a place in the sports contribution and distribution market. Last week at the NAB Show, the company showed off the results of those efforts with a series of next-generation product introductions, including a 1080p encoder and an adaptive-bitrate encoding option, and by teasing a series of 4K transmission tests set to take place this summer.

For outside-broadcast companies requiring rapid deployment of communication systems over long distances, Telecast Fiber is shipping the TR6442i CommLink fiber-optic transceiver system. Introduced at IBC last year, it is designed to carry two intercom channels over a single strand of fiber spanning distances of more than 40 km.

In live sports production, an integrated workflow from image capture to playback can mean the difference between getting the replay at the right moment and missing it. AbelCine is addressing this need for a seamless plug-and-play solution with its Live Sports System, shown for the first time at the NAB Show last week. Vision Research’s latest ultra-slo-mo Phantom camera, the v642, anchors the Live Sports System and was on display at the company’s booth.

The Mira instant-replay server has been on the market and in OB trucks across the country for more than three years, but, at the NAB Show, Abekas introduced a control surface for the device that promises to make life better for the person it affects most: the operator. With a specialized control panel and complementary graphical user interface (GUI), the Mira control surface simplifies operations and improves convenience and comfort for live–instant-replay operators.

At Storage Vision 2012, which coincided with CES, in January, Active Storage unveiled its mMedia Platform, an end-to-end workflow-storage platform for post and broadcast production. The system, which has begun shipping over the past couple of months, was available for demonstration at Active Storage’s booth.

Geir Skaaden, SVP of products and platforms at DTS, spoke about his company’s acquisition of SRS Labs. The two companies announced at the show that they had entered into a definitive agreement under which DTS will acquire all outstanding shares of SRS Labs in a cash-and-stock transaction valued at $9.50 per share, or approximately $148 million in aggregate equity value, including acquired net cash of approximately $38 million as of Dec. 31, 2011.

Since being launched half a decade ago, Civolution has largely been known for its content-identification and -protection services. However, over the past year, the company has used its watermarking and fingerprinting technology to become a pioneer in the synchronous-screen world with its SyncNow media-interaction technology. Last week, Civolution followed up with a new dual-screen video-ad platform based on its SyncNow technology.

At last year’s NAB Show, the big news for Dalet was the introduction of Dalet Sports Factory, a media-asset–management platform that also served as a logging, clipping, and replay tool for live event and postgame coverage. This year, the company showcased the latest version of Dalet Sports Factory.

Bob Boster, president of intercom manufacturer Clear-Com, spoke with SVG about how the transition to wireless and IP-based communications isn’t as simple as it might seem. He noted that sports is looking for simplicity and ease of use in communications systems. That, he believes, will be fostered by greater use of wireless-intercom capability. That was underscored by the introduction of Seamless Roaming capability for Clear-Com’s Tempest2400 digital wireless system

Visitors to the CAMERON PACE Group booth last week were bound to hear the term zero delta thrown around. But zero delta, or the point at which producing a 3D telecast adds no additional cost or disrupts none of the traditional workflows in the 2D production, is not just a hollow marketing term. CPG Co-Chairman Vince Pace believes it is a true possibility and is essential to the maturation of the 3D-production business.

Canon expanded the size of its booth to allow for a heavy emphasis on 4K products and workflows, and, given the interest in 4K cameras and related products, the expansion was more than justified. Canon’s C500 debuted at the show and is the company’s second 4K camera to be launched in less than six months.

Several new ultra-slow-motion high-speed cameras made their first appearance at the NAB Show, and Vision Research’s latest Phantom Camera, the v242, is among the most hyped for sports production. Although the Phantom Cam has been a regular production element for high-profile sports telecasts for years, it has recently made its way into more regional and second-tier sports shows.

Haivision reported that it has broken out of its LAN cage with an arsenal of new products, including the KulaByte Internet encoder. Acquired by Haivision last July, KulaByte delivers strong picture quality and uplink efficiency for streaming to Dynamic Flash and Adaptive HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) networks.

Azzurro Systems Integration’s AzzurroCam 3.0, the latest edition of the HD-camera series, features a completely new graphical user interface and gives users the ability to manage multiple remote sites equipped with single- or multiple-camera studio configurations from one or multiple locations.

First-time exhibitor Broadcast Sports Inc. (BSI) demonstrated its Dual Stream Mini Transmitter, which allows simultaneous transmission of two signals wirelessly and can transmit both as a live 3D feed. In 3D production, it ensures a synchronous signal from the two cameras responsible for capturing the footage for the left and right eye.

Australian DAW manufacturer Fairlight made some new-product announcements at the NAB Show, including the upcoming release of Version 4 of its Dream console software, which will incorporate such features as an integrated sampler designed for postproduction, mouse-based–editing enhancements, a dedicated single-screen GUI design for compact installations, and improved dynamics attack range, plus side-chains and MaxLinking across groups.

Quantum unveiled the Scalar LTFS (Linear Tape File System) appliance, which offers new modes of portability and user accessibility for archived content on LTO tape. It features a network-attached–storage frontend and is based on the LTFS open standard for content formatting. Since it works with existing application and file-system tools, LTFS-based content is safe for long-term data protection and archival storage.

At the NAB Show, Genelec released updates for its DSP systems: v.1.4.2 for the GLM system, making it Lion OS-compliant (OS X 10.7) for Apple computers, and v.1.3.1 for GLM.SE systems. Both systems are compatible for Windows 7.

For suppliers in the digital-asset–management business, one of the toughest challenges is selling a client on the importance of making the investment in a digital archive. Spectra Logic has seen a notable spike in interest in the storage and monetization systems it provides and highlighted its T-Finity and T950 data-tape libraries.

Music libraries are targeting sports-broadcast production with renewed emphasis via exclusively licensed music. Killer Tracks, one of the largest music libraries serving broadcast, announced at the NAB Show last week that it has been signing original-music artists and has been particularly seeking artists whose music pairs well with sports programming.

PSSI has begun to establish a serious reputation in custom-built satellite-uplink trucks, and the company highlighted the latest chapter in these efforts at the NAB Show last week. The 43-ft. CK-30 multidish mobile-teleport truck was built specifically for the transmission needs of WWE telecasts.

It comes on the heels of another dual-dish trailer built previously for WWE and the C-27 C-band dual-antenna remote-teleport facility custom-built to cover nearly 40 races per year for NASCAR Media Group.

“We started several years ago with the dual-dish trailer we built for WWE,” says Brian Nelles, SVP, PSSI Global Services. “Then, when we built the NASCAR trailer and now again with WWE, we are building vehicles specifically catering to clients’ needs. That has been very successful for us. We see that continuing and will continue to build large dual-dish trucks specifically for our sports clients.”

The 43-ft. CK-30 trailer is equipped with C-band and Ku-band antennas capable of supporting transmissions on four discrete C-band and Ku-band transponders simultaneously. PSSI has teamed with sister production company Strategic TV to provide all transmission and production needs for WWE’s Monday Night Raw, Smackdown, and monthly pay-per-view offerings.

The unit was designed with a spacious interior to allow for installing additional digital encoding/decoding and production gear later. With the WWE set to launch a dedicated network in the near future, CK-30 could take on an even more substantial role with the organization.

“If you’re going to get a network off the ground, you need to have plenty of content,” says Nelles. “So we built this unit with room for plenty of expansion. The fact is that you could make this into a production vehicle very easily by adding a switcher and a few other production elements. This could very well become a hybrid [production/satellite] truck in the future.”

At the NAB Show last week, Front Porch rolled out its LYNX cloud-based system and introduced the latest version of DIVAdirector, a Web-based MAM platform. Both attracted attention from visitors at the North Hall booth.

From left: Front Porch Digital’s Fred Vint, Phil Jackson, and Dave Polyard discussed cloud-based media-asset–management system at the NAB Show.

“One of the key target markets for us is the sports marketplace,” noted Chief Marketing Officer Phil Jackson during the show. “And we’ve already had several positive reactions from teams and other entities at the show.”

Front Porch Digital’s LYNX is an integrated environment for managing assets on a global scale, from any device at any location. The LYNX project represents the company’s largest R&D investment in more than a decade and offers media organizations a newer approach to  asset management.

LYNX applications and services are integrated with the company’s DIVA technology and are designed to fit the needs of media organizations facing not only the traditional pressures involved in managing mission-critical assets securely and flexibly but also the many additional challenges of operation today.

Meanwhile, DIVAdirector is a MAM system that enables operators to search, locate, and retrieve stored media assets directly from their desktops using a Web browser. DIVAdirector V5.0 offers a host of new features.

For example, it boasts HTTP-based adaptive-streaming support, whereby client Internet browsers can switch between video and audio bitrates depending on available network conditions and CPU power. In addition, DIVAdirector V5.0 offers portability across operating systems (Windows 7, Mac OS), browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, Firefox), proxy formats (WMV, H.264), and an increased number of concurrent users.

“Especially on the coaching side of sports, it’s a new offering,” said Fred Vint, director of sports sales at Front Porch Digital. “Teams have been stacking up videotapes since 1986 in some cases, and now they are starting to understand that they have to do something with it or they are going to lose it. So, by offering some services around the migration piece as well as offering the cloud services and some other workflow-flexibility options they haven’t had before, it’s really starting to ring a bell with them that they need to move forward outside of their traditional workflows.”

President/CEO Jim Jachetta shows off In-Net GoalCam.

“The video goes from the goal, up to the NHL rack in the replay room, [and] then gets transported to Toronto, where Head Official Mike Murphy looks at all the instant replays,” says VidOvation President/CEO Jim Jachetta. “If there’s a disputed call, they rewind the recorders and look to see if the puck is in or out.”

The In-Net GoalCam, which feeds HD, 720p video via RF transmitter, can be adjusted, panned, tilted, focused, and zoomed remotely. The system includes a receiver that can be mounted in the ceiling up to 150 ft. high.

Also on display at last week’s NAB Show, the SSFC100 Storage Protocol and File Accelerator was developed through VidOvation’s partnership with UK-based ARG Digital. Specifically designed for linking storage area networks without the performance penalties normally associated with long-distance connections, the File Accelerator lends itself particularly well to sports. Using the example of an NBA Playoff game, Jachetta describes a scenario in which the game video has to be sent to the NBA’s archiving facilities for metadata tagging and highlight creation.

“You run into problems moving these large files across networks, whether public networks or private networks,” he says, “It’s difficult for the Internet to handle these very large files. A device like the File Accelerator will reduce the time eightfold or more to move these large files. Say, a file took eight hours to get through the network using traditional protocols; the device will cut that down to 45 minutes.

“In our fast paced world,” he continues, “the quicker the video files can get through the network, the better.”