By Nick Mitsis
Today's broadcaster is highly sophisticated, educated on satellite products and services and expects more from a contract than mere satellite space. Many content service providers within the satellite industry have answered that call and provide the broadcasting community with tools necessary for a successful, diversified transmission. This, in turn, is working well for both the service provider and the broadcast client.
Regardless of the broadcast--athletic, entertainment or news--it has to be more than just a seamless transmission today. Broadcasters want rich media, at times interactive content securely transmitted to the desktop, to the television and around the world. "Broadcasters today want to use technology that offers them true two-way communications for both content, IP and voice," says Bill McNamara, general manager of BT Broadcast Services, the Americas. "They also need the capability to get feedback in real time."
Recently, BT Broadcast Services (BTBS) produced the live video Web cast component of Oscar.com, the official site of the award ceremony for the 76th Annual Academy Awards. During the live event, BTBS provided the signal acquisition and encoding for the online pressroom interviews, the backstage interviews with the winners of each Oscar category, as well as the Red Carpet interviews and the Governor's Ball.
Prior to the awards, BTBS encoded all movie trailers for the nominated films. During the event, BTBS provided the signal acquisition from backstage at the Kodak Theatre to its Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. media centers for monitoring purposes. The signal was then digitally encoded in Windows Media format in Washington, D.C for delivery to the Akamai network, for distribution on the Oscar.com Web site. Likewise, viewers were able to view the Academy Awards coverage on demand.
"In working with our partners for the Oscars, we looked at Web casting requirements that ABC had and were able to offer a solution from the camera to the desktop while partnering with a content distributor," McNamara adds. This year, 9,100 viewers accessed the Web site content concurrently and streamed a total of 7 terabytes, averaging nearly five minutes online.
Even so, Web interactivity surrounding a live event seen globally is not the most paramount for broadcasters--making sure the transmission is seamlessly delivered to the viewer defines the difference between success and failure. Like others in the satellite industry, hybrid solutions are now a part of today's complete package offered by satellite service providers and broadcasters welcome the redundancy. In the case of the Oscars Web cast, BTBS used fiber plus satellite links for backup ensuring ABC there would be no content or signal loss.
But doing a simulcast to the desktop is but one of the many options broadcasters may want to have when partnering with a satellite service provider. "A complete package is what they are looking for--satellite space, camera crews, SNG trucks, downlinking, etc.," says McNamara. Broadcasters simply want to know that there are more options available to them than merely satellite segment.
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