Outside Broadcast: Making It Live!

As action shifts from the production studio environment to a mobile one, an increasing need is discerned to deliver live, high quality, content-rich news coverage.

Broadcast has moved glacially toward finally emerging as a business focused around content. Gradually, broadcasters have divested themselves of operations, from outside broadcasts through to transmission. Content distribution earlier used to be a simple concept involving analog distribution amplifiers to send live video to multiple devices. Now it entails the complicated transport of digital content from one place to another. Content distribution today is referred to as one part of the media chain that includes contribution, distribution, and transmission.

ImageThe pressure to deliver live, high quality, content-rich coverage is huge. However, live production techniques have seen very little change over the past. Today, live content needs to be produced, enriched, and delivered instantly on various platforms. Live production has become more ambitious and challenging than previously, creating the need for a newer, faster production environment and a truly collaborative way of creating content. At the same time, financial pressures push broadcasters to find solutions that will reduce their production costs, including working remotely and reducing the number of onsite staff. These changes to the production workflow will not only help optimize the existing usage of content, but will also create new opportunities (e.g., multiple simultaneous productions, device-customized services, multi-platform distribution, repurposing, and archiving, among others).

Outside broadcast (OB), which moves the production studio environment into a mobile production vehicle, is becoming one of the largest markets today. Until very recently, traditional outside broadcasting was exclusively for large events with big budgets, such as major sporting fixtures and rock concerts. Only those events that commanded sufficient ad revenue could afford the mammoth cost of using dedicated OB units to broadcast live.

ImageProducers of smaller events with more limited budgets might be able to film proceedings on a consumer handheld camera and even make the video and audio available on demand through their websites, but the cost of hiring a professional OB van made live broadcasting unthinkable for all but those hosting biggest events. Even if a live event could have a potential audience, the cost of traditional OB units made it uneconomical, if not unaffordable, to broadcast live.

Microwave and...