AV Specialist - Africa Edition Volume 95 - (Page 17)

viewing video, billions of downloads available. The second event that caused me to re-evaluate the industry is the You-Tube phenomonon. You–Tube is a site where people place content for others to view and download, and the revelation to me was the fact that you could download content on various subjects, in any order, and view them at your leisure on your mobile devices. This caused me to extrapolate my next prediction, which in the true sense of utopian spirit of You-Tube I will now share with you. Future of broadcast I see the future of our broadcast industry in programmes as well as news that is not stuck in the traditional news format but rather one embracing new technology. Integrating with the delivery style of You-Tube, where viewers can select what they want to see and in the order they want to see it. If you think this is all rubbish then search out a friend who has either a TiVo or an Apple iTV and ask them to show you how it works. It's basically a desktop computer with a very large hard drive that has a high bandwidth connection to the Internet. This lets them download information and view it whenever they want to. You could also ask your children what It’s broadcasting Jim; but not as we know it! When I was young I would watch a lot of science fiction onTV. Anything that would give me an insight into the future. All the gadgets, from Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver to Captain Kirk’s communicator, fascinated me. The future was going to be Gadget heaven. ver the years this use of technology for making mundane repetitive tasks easier has never left me and I am a great believer in using technology as a tool rather than just for the sake of using it. This is a credo I have always stuck too. So when I first worked in TV I was surprised at two major anarchic factors. One that the TV's where not portable and two, all programs were linear in their nature. This was especially true in the news arena except when there was live breaking news. So how has that analogy changed over the two decades I have been in the industry? O VTR cart machines using RS 422 protocol so they could sync to News Rundown, allowing the bulletin Chief to swap and move stories. These productions were however still linear events in that one person would decide the order in which the news was delivered to the viewer. World wide web Next off the back of the desktop computer came the World Wide Web. This allowed people to search and browse for their own choice of information, to read online news items and possibly view video. Also about this time came the mobile phone with limited single character line monochrome displays. As time has moved on it is now not unusual to find displays on a mobile phones with as good a resolution of that of a CRT, an example of such is the mobile phone I am using to write this piece. What’s even more interesting is the technology advances made in telecommunication and the everincreasing availability of bandwidth. This brings me to one of the major statements that shocked me in to writing this article, its claimed that the Apple iPod is the most used handheld device for 17 Introduction of desktop PC Certainly the introduction of the desktop computer has made a dramatic difference to most peoples working life. In the Newsrooms, it heralded the collaborated workflow, and paperless office - although the latter has yet still to be completely true- and in the postproduction environment it brought back the ability to edit non-linearly, which was lost when News went from film to tape. It also meant the ability to control their favourite web site is. Any guesses what they will say. The question for all you out there who are actually coming around to this way of thinking is, how do you move forward? It's simple. You keep transmitting as you do, but start to think about repurposing your content for mobile devices, TiVo's and iTV's. I don't just mean the headlinesI mean everything. Make it all available on line, front-ended by a website that allows users to register and build profiles of their particular interests. This way you could start to build a database of your viewers. Think about the potential audience you could reach and the revenue that could be available. Start to think outside the boxeven if it has a screen on it.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AV Specialist - Africa Edition Volume 95

Bumper product news
Outsourcing broadcast facilities
Panasonic drives EcoFuel World Tour
it's broadcasting Jim...but not as we know it
Tapeless workflow: Not as scary as it seems

AV Specialist - Africa Edition Volume 95