Broadcast value chain transforming significantly

The movement is creating immense challenges and opportunities for broadcasters as they fight to adapt to multi channel and multi platform distribution.

“The broadcast value chain market will see significant growth over the coming years as broadcasters look to upgrade their equipment to handle file-based workflows and HD content, says Chris Khouri, Datamonitor's media and broadcasting analyst and the report's author.

“By the end of 2006, broadcast value chain market revenue in Western Europe and North America totaled US$6 billion. Western Europe accounted for US$2.8 billion and North America for US$3.2 billion. Between now and 2012, the market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.4%.

Rapid transition

Traditional media-based workflows, involving the physical movement of video assets from one point to another and affectionately known as 'sneakernet' by some in the industry, are being rapidly transitioned to digital 'tapeless'-based workflows. This transition creates a variety of enterprise-wide benefits for broadcasters, including a reduction in operational expense, a reduction in production times and enhanced repurposing opportunities.

The broadcast space is particularly complex and is becoming ever more challenging as workflows and processes evolve. Managing, tracking and handling digital assets are becoming some of the most important aspects of a modern broadcast system. Implementing transparent asset management systems reduces operating margins, eliminates redundancies and ultimately boosts competitive position.

Furthermore, aligning broadcast engineering with commercial operations through enterprise wide management solutions will be a key source of competitive advantage in the near term.

Key strategies

As broadcasters continue to migrate more of their mission-critical systems to automated file-based workflows, there are both opportunities and challenges with regards to complexity. Theses challenges primarily arise through a lack of interoperability and changing organisational structures, including personnel, management and physical movement of systems.

Over 65% of respondents to Datamonitor's Customer Focus survey of 150 broadcasters consider standardising infrastructure technologies and simplifying their current broadcast systems as key strategies for 2007. Transparency is crucial for broadcasters as the depth and breadth of file-based workflows develop. Moving towards central archives and architecture is expected to provide a significant opportunity to combat systems silos and eliminate redundant functions.

There is still a considerable addressable market for moving towards a fully tapeless environment. In most cases, assistance is required to help broadcasters simplify and standardise their current systems to boost efficiencies in their IP-based workflows. This will prove a lucrative opportunity particularly for professional services and systems integrators (SIs).

Challenges remain

One of the primary challenges associated with the looming transition to an HD-based broadcast environment is the integration with standard definition (SD) infrastructures. The use of multiple new signal formats is a major issue with the move towards a hybrid infrastructure, with broadcast facilities forced to handle a plethora of audio, video and aspect ratio formats.

Moving towards a hybrid infrastructure will require the careful re-evaluation of current workflows, particularly with the necessity of up-converts and down-converts from SD to HD, and vice versa. As broadcasters look to transition towards SD/HD infrastructures, there will be strong opportunities for those technology providers and integrators that can address the challenges presented with multiple formats.

Furthermore, as broadcasters grow their content portfolios, the physical constraints and costs of storing this content increases by several orders of magnitude. Digitally storing content allows broadcasters to alleviate these costs, and benefit from an increase in usage and a reduction in time-to-air.

Back catalogue digitisation will create increased need for both storage solutions and video servers (particularly with the looming transition towards HD and MPEG-4/H.264), as well as for strong asset management systems. Enhanced asset management systems, coupled with increased transparencies within the archive management function, will prove important as back catalogue digitisation intensifies.

Change creates risk, but it also generates opportunity. This is particularly true with regards to the broadcasting sector.

“Broadcasters are at a critical position where adapting to a fragmented media landscape is crucial for survival,” says Khouri. “As they move towards file-based workflows and HD, there is considerable risk in implementing an architecture in-house that is difficult to adapt to new standards, technologies and systems upgrades.

“Furthermore, broadcasters are looking for the 'whole package' rather than just a single hardware or software solution. This means that professional service providers, most notably SIs, are in an advantageous position by being able to provide holistic and managed packages from a variety of technology vendors.”