DTV Audio Group Sets Agenda for AES Show

The DTV Audio Group has announced the agenda for its annual Forum at the Audio Engineering Society (AES) Convention, which takes place Oct. 9-12 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in downtown L.A.

The event, titled “The Implications of Streamed Content Delivery on the Evolution of Television Audio Services,” will take place on Friday, Oct. 10 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. and will include panel discussions and presentations on these timely topics:

• This Is Not Your Father’s MVPD — A look into how the transition to IP infrastructure and streamed content is transforming cable and how this facilitates advanced audio codecs
• So Long, SDI and MADI — IP infrastructure for audio and video contribution within the broadcast plant and in the field
• Interactivity, Objects, and Spatially Immersive Audio — Mixers and technologist on the migration of object audio from cinema to the small screen and mobile
• Object Audio Toolbox — What are the essential monitoring and authoring tools required for object audio production?
• It’s All in Your Head — The state of headphone virtualization for immersive audio formats.

“Content delivery is converging on a streamed model whether for mobile, over the public Internet, within the walled garden of the MVPD, or over next-generation broadcast services,” observes Roger Charlesworth, executive director, DTV Audio Group. “Virtualized-delivery infrastructure for streamed content allows new services to be deployed with very short lead times. The rapidity of this transition to streaming has significantly accelerated the time frame for adoption of advanced object-based audio services offering spatially immersive sound, enhanced personalization, greater bandwidth efficiency, and improved audio quality.

“It is likely we will begin seeing these new features in our homes and mobile devices in months rather than years,” he continues. “This forum explores some of the tools and workflow approaches required to manage and exploit the capabilities of next-generation audio standards. It takes a look at the convergence around streamed-content delivery and transition to IP distribution and contribution that makes this rapid deployment possible.

“The explosive growth in streamed-content delivery over mobile and fixed devices has re-written the playbook for television media distribution. Streaming-delivery models are also inexorably finding their way into existing cable services and are being written into next-generation advanced television standards. The migration from traditional broadcasting to an IP stream-based model greatly simplifies implementation and, combined with tablet-empowered UI, frees distributors to pursue a range of formats and encoding solutions with sophisticated interactive and object-oriented audio services.”