Antenna Systems & Technology - Winter 2016 - (Page 12)

FEATURE ARTICLE Bringing Live Events to the Television Screen By Mark Anderson, Sales & Marketing Manager | Acorn Technologes With the squeeze on spectrum availability becoming more acute, the need for more efficiency in the handling of roaming live video and audio is now more important than ever. This is where specialized transmit and receive antennas have to play their part. Live event broadcasting is now one of the last hooks that still brings viewers to watch their televisions at a predetermined time, the pressure to deliver compelling images in a way that will captivate and engage the audience is now even more important. The shift in television viewing has been growing for some time and more and more people are now watching programming in a way that suits them rather than the set time of the traditional broadcasters. Therefore the live sports or live entertainment event has become peak programing for the traditional broadcaster. When the first wireless cameras appeared in the early 2000s the broadcast and production community were sceptical. They were afraid that the signal would be dropped, that they would lose that vital shot and when you are shooting a live football game that can be disastrous. Over the past 10 years or so the technology has advanced to such a degree that most of the time the switch between a wired and wireless camera is seamless and not noticed by the viewer. As a basic explanation on how this would work, in a stadium environment the roaming camera will have a microwave transmitter attached, taking the video and audio in via the SDI output of the camera. This is then encoded, compressed and then transmitted via the RF antenna to a pair of receive antennas located somewhere in the stadium. The signal is then received and decoded and then outputted all in around 40 mS or one frame of video. Photo Courtesy of Broadcast RF Antenna specification and their placement can make this work or fail. It is something that is all too often taken for granted but is vital when making this operation deliver all the expectations that the production team require. Across the world the available spectrum has been getting smaller as the mobile operators push for more and more bandwidth to deliver the services that the vast majority of people now want. The mobile phone is no longer a piece of equipment to make calls, it has become the main device that is relied on for news, entertainment, photography, video and our daily social lives. Therefore governments and regulatory bod- 12 Antenna Systems & Technology Winter 2016 www.AntennasOnline.com http://www.AntennasOnline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Antenna Systems & Technology - Winter 2016

Contents
Editor’s Choice
Configurable Robotic Millimeter-Wave Antenna Facility
Antennas
Bringing Live Events to the Television Screen
Components/Subsystems
Software / System Design
Test & Measurement
Industry News
Marketplace
DAS Anywhere and Everywhere

Antenna Systems & Technology - Winter 2016