CONTENT
Years of legal hassles, arguments and so on have now come to a conclusion—the Copyright Royalty Board has made final and released their license fee structures for satellite broadcasters, and XM and Sirius have certainly taken note. The main point of consternation revolved around a determination as to what revenue was to be used to measure the fees. Six percent of applicable revenues will have to paid through 2008. Then, in 2009, that jumps to 6.5 percent, to 7 percent in 2010, 7.5 percent in 2011 and (go figure) 8 percent in 2012. Given this algorithmic formula, by the year 2014 license fees will chew up 100 percent of a satradio’s income. And should the merger between XM and Sirius occur, what then? You can bet there will be further “discussion” regarding rates!
CONTENT & DELIVERY
Starting on December 10th, a new payTV platform named BIS will be launched by AB Groupe. The platform will be broadcast for two key video neighborhoods for satTV in France and will be available to customers from Eutelsat’s HOT BIRD neighborhood at 13° E and from Atlantic Bird 3 at 5° W. The BIS basic package, called Panorama, will offer as many as 25 channels. They will include a majority
of France’s longstanding national channels and Digital Terrestrial Television channels. There will also be an additional five film channel option.
Subscribers to BIS will receive a pack from regular high-street retailers. The pack contains a decoder equipped with Viaccess encryption and a smartcard. Home that already possess a Viaccess decoder will be able to receive BIS with the addition of the BIS smartcard. Plus, a number of manufacturers are debuting decoders into the market with a “Via Eutelsat” label, guaranteeing the availability of features developed by Eutelsat, such as automatic channel numbering, automatic software updates and parental lock—Paris, France
DELIVERY
HaiVision Systems Inc. has announced that DC-Sat.Net, a UK provider of VSat video transport, has selected the hai1000 series of MPEG-4 AVC / H.264 codecs to provide efficient video to IP compression for IP based satellite transmission. The focus of DC-Sat.Net is to offer affordable worldwide, occasional use video transport to enable broadcasters and webcasters to bring new content to their audiences. DC-Sat.Net provides event contribution feeds for both specialty broadcasters and larger organizations such as the BBC and The Press Association. DC-Sat.Net provides a complete video transport service from mobile vehicle to the broadcast center. Because they are housed within standard commercial vans or trailers, DC-Sat.Net couples a transportable VSat terminal with the hai1000 to provide mobile solutions that are about 10 times less costly than typical SNG (satellite news gathering) trucks, and four times less expensive to use and maintain. HaiVision’s encoder/decoder systems have extreme low latency and high reliability and their new MAKO-HD codec achieves a 70 millisecond end-to-end latency at high definition resolutions up to 1080p—Montreal, Quebec
DELIVERY
International Datacasting has reported their revenues for the third quarter grew from $4.3 million to $5.8 million representing an increase of $1.5 million or 37 percent growth compared to the same period last year. Key company highlights for Q3 included: a major order from CBS Westwood One; EchoStar uses IDC’s SuperFlex DVB receivers; new agreement with Sensio Technologies for end-to-end broadcast solutions development; development of CineLive for satellite delivery of 2D and 3D live events to movie theaters; a complete new line of SuperFlex DVB-S/S2 Duo receivers; wholly-owned subsidiary PROFline received new orders from TDF; relocation of the company HQ to new quarters—Ottawa, Canada
DELIVERY
Microwave Radio Communications‘ (MRC) new Advent NewSwift 1.8m Integrated Satellite System is a key component of WFTV Orlando’s live high-definition (HD) coverage of the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch on Thursday, December 6th. The STS-122 mission is scheduled to liftoff from NASA‘s Kennedy Space Center at 4:31 p.m. EST on a mission to deliver the European Space Agency’s “Columbus” science research laboratory to the International Space Station. WFTV will be use the NewSwift satellite uplink system to capture this event and provide live coverage to ABC affiliate stations around the country. WFTV selected the Advent 1.8m NewSwift system installed in a Frontline ENG/SNG truck because the NewSwift system delivers automatic pointing and acquisition capabilities, and provides multiple uplink channels. WFTV is transmitting HD coverage of the launch to Central Florida viewers; and providing feeds for ABC affiliates WLS-TV Chicago, KABC-TV Los Angeles and WFAA-TV Dallas under a partnership agreement with ABC’s NewsOne service—North Billerica, Massachusetts
CONTENT
Alvin Toffler author of Future Shock (which sold more than six million copies) will be a featured speaker at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show, April 11-17, 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada. This year’s show will focus on the content community within the media marketplace. Future Shock accurately forecasts the disruptive influence on global economics by transformative information and content delivery technologies. Show attendees represent all areas of the content life cycle that includes creation, management, commerce, distribution and consumption. This year’s show features a content theater, two pavilions dedicated to IPTV and mobile solutions, and a commerce area. Last year’s show generated (US) $51.4 billion in commerce with 1,600 exhibitors from 163 countries.
DELIVERY
NDS has signed an agreement with DIRECTV to extend the term of their relationship. NDS has been contracted to continue to provide conditional access technology and services to DIRECTV U.S. and DIRECTV Latin America until June 2013. Commenting on the news, Raffi Kesten, NDS Chief Operating Officer, said: “DIRECTV has set the benchmark for the pay television industry. DIRECTV has been highly innovative in developing its consumer offerings to provide the best range of television services available in the United States and across much of Latin America.” NDS Group plc [NASDAQ:NNDS] is a majority owned subsidiary of News Corporation and supplies open end-to-end digital technology and services to digital payTV platform operators and content providers—London, United Kingdom & Los Angeles, California
CREATION & DELIVERY
A major upgrade has been released by NewTek, Inc., for their TriCaster STUDIO portable live production and virtual set system. Included in the new featuers are additional preview options when switching live camera sources as well as greater flexibility when creating text and title treatments. There’s a full-featured character generator that includes scrolls and crawls, plus the abililty to produce title templates for live production. You can place titles up-stream of every input individually. A new 3A camera dedicated on-screen preview monitor display mode is available as well as an iVGA underscan button
for control over whether or not a VGA input fills the entire video frame. Other goodies include improved keying, a Y/C across BNC option, video editor improvements based on SpeedEDIT 1.5 and the creation of your own LiveSet virtual sets with Lightwave 3D v9. The upgrade is immediately available as af ree download to TriCaster STUDIO owners—San Antonio, Texas
CONTENT
Something new for digital photography afficianados… RocketLife.com. According to Visan, your photo content removes the frustration of creating photo products online by instantly creating artistic designs and collages in a matter of seconds, rather than hours. Using “Smart Arrangement” Technology, the site lays-out and designs photos automatically and you can also manually crop, rotate and manipulate with photo treatments with tints, blurs, lighting, textures, text and graphics—all with your mouse. You can create and personalize your photo book in about 5 minutes. You can download the RocketLife.com software at no charge at this link—Folsom, California
DELIVERY
One of Brazil’s largest networks, TV Bandeirantes, has once again invested in Ross Video equipment. This time, a Vision 3 Video Production Switcher and an OverDrive Production Control System will be used for the network’s TV Bandeirantes News and interconnected with their existing AP ENPS news system. The Vision Series is Ross’ nexgen multi-definition production switcher and handles standard and hi-def formats. OverDrive is a highly flexible production control system with a LiveLink MOS interface to newsroom editorial systems. This system extends the reach of the technical director to include control of video servers, audio mixers, robotic cameras and more. OverDrive offers consistent production with the necessity of increasing staff levels—Iroquois, Ontario
DELIVERY
Sinclair Broadcast Group is using GuideBuilder™ PSIP (Program and System Information Protocol) generator from Triveni Digital, as they are in the beginning stages of integrating its StreamScope™ RM-40 systems into its television stations to ensure the quality of DTV streams for the station group. With use of the redundant GuideBuilder throughout its station group, Sinclair ensures mission critical operational capabilities with FCC-mandated PSIP data. PSIP forms the foundation for ATSC digital television transport streams, and is important for digital cable carriage of over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts. GuideBuilder’s intuitive interface for managing program event information and flexible architecture ensures that Sinclair will experience a smooth operational integration. StreamScope is also now in the process of being integrated to monitor, measure, record, and analyze DTV streams, that provides an unusual depth of information enabling station engineers to drill down to any problem. Because issues with the bit stream often don’t manifest themselves in the picture and since different receivers handle the incoming stream differently, a problem not visually apparent to some viewers may cause picture degradation, or even loss for others—Princeton, New Jersey
