Spreading the news: iCR in broadcast
How AmberFin helps broadcasters break into new markets
In broadcast, the times they are changing
From the relatively straightforward model where news was collected and transported in one of relatively few SD digital formats, nowadays you face the challenge of a much greater range of formats and file types for both SD and HD.
This leads to a new set of challenges for your industry, with three in particular that might have a significant impact on your business.
Challenge 1: The Internet
You use the web every day. And as a content owner, the chances are you see a business opportunity there. Maybe you are already taking advantage of it, integrating production of internet content into your newsroom output.
But the question is always: how do you turn your video into internet-friendly content in the most efficient and cost-effective way, while retaining as much quality as you can? How do you go from producing content for TV news to producing content for every potential news outlet?
To be truly effective, you need your internet content repurposing and transcoding to be a core business process. But you can’t afford for your editorial staff to also be content engineers.
So you also need repurposing and transcoding to happen transparently with respect to your editorial process.
You need a system that can take care of the repurposing and transcoding process automatically and produce near-perfect results every time, without supervision. Ideally you also need a system that can also carry out its own quality control (QC) so you don’t have to.
Challenge 2: High Definition (HD)
If you are not currently collecting news in HD, the chances are you will be soon. It’s there on almost every new video camera and every TV available today. And it’s increasingly being demanded by today’s consumers.
This has largely been driven by the affordability of consumer HD-ready flat-panel television screens in the last couple of years. In 2007, revenues for flat panel TVs exceeded those for traditional TVs for the first time ever.
If you’re a small broadcaster, handling SD might not be too difficult. You can capture it relatively easily. And you can broadcast it without too many problems.
But as you grow, and start to rely more on HD feeds by satellite, as well as acquiring your own news in HD, then the business can become more challenging.
To complicate matters further, there are four flavors of a professional HD file. And consumer HD is becoming more prevalent, thanks to the rise of low-cost consumer HD camcorders.
How do you take all this diverse material and repurpose it all into a single, uniform HD file format for editing and distribution, without tying up valuable resources? You need a system that can handle HD just as easily as SD and this is where AmberFin leads the market in terms of offering the highest-quality, most reliable HD file-based system.
Challenge 3: Storage
Whether you are dealing with HD or SD, you will no doubt be glad that the move to file-based video content is helping to solve your storage problems. No more relying on expensive, perishable tapes. No more requirements for large, environmentally controlled storage spaces.
But file-based content carries its own particular set of challenges. Online and near-line data storage may be cheaper, but it isn’t free. So you’ll want to be sure that you can optimize the quality of your video files while minimizing the disk space they occupy.
The answer to your challenges
AmberFin’s iCR software tools are the most advanced in the market for ingest, mastering and repurposing of video content. They have been designed by some of the finest minds in the field of broadcast video manipulation, with 35 years of experience in flawlessly converting video and audio from one standard to another.
AmberFin iCR specifically aims to help you address the challenges of today’s broadcast industry, with:
- Automated repurposing to almost any file format or flavor, allowing you to turn the content you have into web, mobile or whatever content you need.
- Superior automation and integration capabilities, allowing you to incorporate iCR into your core workflows for fully transparent repurposing.
- Automated real-time QC capabilities covering almost any observable parameter, allowing you to review a report on the quality of hours of video in a matter of minutes, as well as exporting QC reports to give your content a ‘pedigree’.
- The best HD handling capabilities on the market today, including full HD ingest, output, repurposing and QC.
- The best picture-quality-per-bit ratio on the market for a range of devices, as demonstrated through independent research.
- Automated creation of low-quality proxies and other ways of reducing your storage and distribution costs.
- A modular architecture, allowing you to buy the tools you need for encoding, mastering, repurposing or virtual videotape recording.
- An easy-to-use graphical user interface, coupled with the integration capabilities to use iCR through any number of other industry devices and front ends.
- A 25 percent reduction in file size for equivalent quality video.