In this column, we provide interesting historical briefs from the Journal articles of days past. The purpose of this column is primarily entertainment, but we hope it will also stimulate your thinking and reflection on the Society’s history, how far we have come in the industry, and (sometimes) how some things never change. This column is sponsored by Television Broadcast Technology, Inc. since March 2001: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7257346

The transition from serial digital interface (SDI) to the All-IP studio has been happening more frequently, with numerous broadcasting facilities partly, or even exclusively, relying on this new technology. Accurate and reliable synchronization is a mandatory requirement for every broadcasting studio. Consequently, packet-based time transfer over Ethernet evolved into a crucial building block. The Precision Time Protocol (PTP) has proved time and again that it can deliver the required accuracy […]

Since the early days of broadcast television, there has been an ongoing evolution of the signal transmission between the camera heads and the camera base stations or camera control units (CCUs). In the 1970s, multicore cables were replaced by triax cables and more recently, with the introduction of ultrahigh-definition (UHD-1)/4K standards, SMPTE hybrid fiber cables became the de facto standard for most applications. At the same time, the signals transmitted over camera cables migrated from […]

CBC/Radio-Canada is finalizing its new Internet Protocol (IP)-based production center in Montréal. During the design and early deployment of this major facility, it became clear that the staging and configuration of the thousands of media devices should be automated and managed in a fashion similar to an information technology (IT) data center. In fact, these new devices require thousands of parameters to be configured, and there are more frequent updates than for conventional devices. […]

The emergence of SMPTE ST 2110 as a key technology enables flexible and scalable audiovisual (AV) over Internet Protocol (IP) infrastructures to be deployed. Until recently, a common control system was not available. Spearheaded by the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), the Networked Media Open Specification (NMOS) initially defined IS-04 (Registration & Discovery) and IS-05 (Connection Management), which was a great start to getting a unified control system in place and met the […]