In Broadcast - September 2021 - 26

26
www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 11 - Issue 9 | September 2021
InFile
From AirBox to Cloud2TV
21 Years of Broadcast Media
Playout Innovation
T
By Pavlin Rahnev, CEO, PlayBox Neo...
elevision broadcasting must surely
be one of the most impressive
of all human developments, allowing
high quality graphics and sound to be
shared by a worldwide audience within
seconds of an event taking place.
The first known attempt to capture
an image dates back some 40,000
years: the Venus of Hohle Fels carved
figurine unearthed relatively recently
in Germany.
By 500 BC, Greek sculpture had
reached geometrical perfection - many
specimens also being brightly painted
though in most instances only a few
flakes of colour have survived. Roman
artists progressed sculpture to an
almost photo-realistic level though at
huge cost in terms of materials and
creative effort. Achieving comparable
reality on a flat surface required
many more centuries of artistic
refinement, eventually aided by optical
devices such as the camera obscura,
progressing in turn to photography
from around 1800 and the pioneering
work on cinematography from the
1830s onward. The development of
television as we know it today began
approximately 100 years ago.
When robotics ruled...
Television broadcasting in the late
1980s and most of the 1990s was
largely based on video tape playback
interspersed with live links and
promos. Channel managers were
increasingly using video cassette
decks with automated robotic loaders
programmed to play specific items
at a predetermined time. It was
a mechanically intensive process
needing careful maintenance to
safeguard against head wear and
tape path contamination. Installing
a backup robotic system, in case
the main one failed on air, was a
costly option. Another complication
with tapes was the need to ensure
programmes and interstitials were not
lost in their travels between storage
library, edit suite and playout room, or
damaged during lace-up.
PlayBox Neo traces its origin back
to a much more recent starting point,
1999, when we introduced what
would eventually become the world's
best-selling
television
channel-in-abox.
Building on our design team's
broadcast industry experience, our
original AirBox and its successors,
now at generation AirBox Neo-20,
made the whole process of broadcast
management more efficient and more
affordable than it had ever been.
Figure 1 shows examples of the 1999
AirBox and current AirBox Neo-20 user
interfaces.
Channel-in-a-Box
We took a different approach,
made possible by advances in the
affordability, compactness and speed
of magnetic hard disk data storage
drives. Our first AirBox allowed a
broadcast channel or network's entire
schedule to be sourced as digital files
and stored on its internal drive or a
dedicated
network-attached
storage
server. File-based content could be
sent over practically any secure data
line, dedicated or IP-based, regardless
of distance, eliminating the cost and
potential delay of using couriers.
Mechanical reliability
was another
advantage of HDDs. Yet another was
the ease with which our channel-ina-box
approach could be expanded
from a single channel to a practically
unlimited
multi-language
channel system.
multiFigure
1 - Examples of the 1999 AirBox and current AirBox Neo-20 user interfaces
Remote working was another key
feature. Channel managers were
quick to recognise the potential of
outsourcing all their playout activity
to a specialist service provider if they
needed to save space at inner-city
headquarters. The service provider
could be in a different country,
typically addressing expatriate viewers
in a different timezone.
Operational security is a vital
element of every broadcast operation
and much more economical to achieve
with CIAB than with a high-cost robotic
tape system. All PlayBox Neo systems
can be configured for single-unit
operation or twinned for use in main
and backup modes.
Schedule management
from a notebook
2001 saw the launch of ListBox,
a software module allowing
programme editors to create and edit
schedules days or weeks in advance
of transmission. Still very much a
current product (since upgraded
like most of our products to the Neo
series) ListBox also has a clip trimmer
allowing programme editing. It can be
installed on the main AirBox server
or on practically any third-party PC,
running flawlessly on a notebook, even
with software-based trimming and
previewing.
By 2002 we had achieved an
installed base of 250 playout channels
and were ready to start international
distribution.
Titling, graphics generation and
text management are a core element
of every TV channel. In 2003 we
introduced an option allowing all three
tasks to be handled within the main
CIAB user interface.
TitleBox provides total control
during
on-air
session.
The
feature
set includes horizontal crawling
text, vertically rolling credits and
messages, still and animated logo
graphics, analogue and digital clocks,
banner slideshows and chat text with
automated horizontal or vertical
scrolling.
Among the additional creative
facilities are pre-constructed graphic
components, video resizing (from
live source or file), window-style
display and website content ingest.
A companion module introduced in
the same year, DataBox is a highly
integrated SQL-based database for
media and content management,
allowing instant access to more than
20,000 records simultaneously. All
PBN modules obtain information
about visual content from DataBox.
This enables many tasks such as logo
overlay, archiving/retrieving data and
building/conforming on-air playlists, to
be simplified or completely automated.
As of 2004 we achieved an installed
base of 1,000 playout and branding
channels.
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