What does AV think of IBC? Three visitors share their views

At one time, there was a strict divide between the trade shows aimed at various sound and vision-oriented media sectors. Very few equipment manufacturers – and even fewer visitors – would attend both audiovisual (AV) and broadcast shows, with little or no intersection between the technologies used for the two disciplines. That situation is very different today, with an increasing number of broadcast technology developers exhibiting at ISE in recent years.

The speed of change is not quite as fast going the other way. Even though more AV brands are now taking stands at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC), the show continues to be predominantly geared towards television, radio and streaming. However, there is now more of a crossover between the technology used in broadcast and AV, brought about primarily through both adopting IT techniques and IP-based systems for control and networking.

Another important factor, explains Deborah Jones, AV/IT sales manager for QEII Live at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, is that every organisation – and even individuals – now have the means to transmit their message and themselves to a worldwide audience. “Broadcasting is no longer a niche part of audiovisual [because] these disciplines have merged and the pandemic has been the catalyst,” she says. “Suddenly, everyone could ‘broadcast’ globally, with the CEO going out to all employees working at home through digital signage, broadcasting advertising in the retail industry – once they’d re-opened, of course – and finally with the advent of programme streaming via Netflix, Sky, Amazon and iPlayer.”

This year’s Amsterdam show was Jones’ first IBC, as it was for a number of other people from the AV community. She explains that the main purpose of her visit was to look at ways the Queen Elizabeth II Centre could pass material over networks. “We are looking for a way to distribute content that can be easily received by our client base,” she says. “These are basically large files and I looked at ways to send them without either too much compression or latency and not losing too much information in the process. We are also looking at storage options both on-prem and in the cloud.”

Also shopping for technology at IBC to fulfil a specific requirement was Marcus Saunders, associate director of technical resources at the University of the Arts London (UAL). Unlike Deborah Jones, Saunders had been to IBC before but “not for a few years”. He says the show has “changed” from the last time he visited and now reflects the overspill of broadcast technology into other sectors. “We’re seeing the overlap with AV through PTZ cameras and the use of IP-centric workflows for distribution,” he explains. “In recent years I’ve been going to ISE and it and IBC now have a common footprint through virtual production, which has had a much larger presence at both shows in the last two years.”

Virtual production was the main focus of Saunders’ trip to IBC. He is involved in a project which provides an LED volume that will be part of a PhD research programme run by UAL’s Fashion Textiles and Technology Institute (FTTI). Earlier this year Saunders and his team evaluated volumes from three different manufacturers before deciding on the Sony Crystal LED VERONA, which was still in prototype form at that stage.

UAL was announced as the first organisation to use VERONA but Saunders explains he was also at IBC to see other technology partners and look at tracking systems to work with the LED displays. “We are looking at what to put in the volume, including digital cinema cameras, such as the Sony VENICE and ARRI Alexa Mini LF or Alexa 35, and lighting rigs.”

Virtual production, along with artificial intelligence (AI), were the expected highlights of IBC 2023 but other technologies and areas of the broadcast/AV infrastructure proved equally important, if not more so. This is particularly true for networking and distribution systems, which attracted the attention of Marc Risby, managing director and chief technology officer of both broadcast systems integrator Boxer Systems and AV-focused distributor DigiBox.

“NDI [network device interface] was one of my stars of the show,” he says. “When we go to IBC we’re looking for both new products and manufacturers but also complementary things that fit in the same ecosystems as the equipment we’re running. We do a lot in IP infrastructure, which includes NDI and Dante. NDI has been out for over five years but looking around IBC this year, one of the things I noticed was the number of exhibitors showing NDI branding on their stands. This IBC was relatively light on innovation compared to some years. There weren’t a whole lot of earth-shattering new products but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I think we’re seeing a lot more consolidation and things that show a definite direction, like IP.”

Risby observes that a trend in both AV and broadcasting is people “trying to do more with less”, plus the awareness – raised by Covid – that anything can happen. “When people are putting in facilities, they want them to be flexible, with the ability to adapt them to whatever may happen,” he says. “IP makes a lot of that easy, when you start putting in things like PTZ cameras that you can run on Power over Ethernet, with signal, power, tally and metadata as well as video and audio down one cable. It’s really flexible and easy to put in, plus you can use a standard office network with NDI to work with high quality video for Zoom and Teams meetings.”

Marcus Saunders agrees that NDI and IP in general were continuing trends at the show, something he says was not apparent during his last visit to Amsterdam. “In the time I have been away from IBC there has been a shift in the approach to signal distribution, with a move to IP, particularly SMPTE ST 2110” he says. “We’re at an interesting crossroads now because a 2110 infrastructure requires a lot of engineering experience but it is also close being a commodity or service that would be used by a university, for example. Similarly, NDI is a broadcast protocol for point-to-point video capture and signal distribution, which can be used for live production [in AV scenarios].”

Deborah Jones agrees that distribution is a key issue in both AV and broadcast, with discussions still to be had over how to solve inherent problems and which protocols are best for specific applications. “There is so much more video across the internet and this trend is across all disciplines and not just since the pandemic,” she says. “It presents a whole series of other challenges, including the usual latency, synchronisation and image quality that we’ve always had. Another is the introduction and rapid take-up of NDI versus SRT [secure reliable transport streaming]. I believe the current trend is to use NDI internally but SRT for out of the organisation. It could be that they will co-exist quite nicely for some time.”

Like other first time IBC attendees, Jones will be going back next year and feels it is an event from which others in AV would benefit. “I would recommend that IBC is for the audiovisual community – if not now, then soon,”she concludes. “I’ve attended ISE for years and on occasion Infocomm in the USA. I’d now like to also include IBC in my schedule.”