WHITE PLAINS, NY --

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) announced that the SMPTE 2015 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition (SMPTE 2015), Oct. 26-29, in Hollywood, California, will feature an array of sessions dedicated to over-the-top (OTT), cloud, and IP (Internet Protocol)-based technology and services. During the SMPTE 2015 Industry Luncheon on Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 12:30 p.m., Ted Middleton, chief product officer at Verizon Digital Media Services, will make the keynote presentation titled “The TV Everywhere Frontier — Where Broadcasting Meets the Internet.”

“This year’s conference will give attendees a unique opportunity to gain insight from top engineers, executives, and researchers from across the modern media industry,” said Paul Chapman, SMPTE Hollywood Region Governor and SMPTE 2015 program committee chair. “As the notion of convergence becomes a concrete reality, and as content producers and providers begin the shift to IP and the cloud, the sessions at SMPTE 2015 offer an incomparable wealth of expertise and intelligence that will illuminate the path forward.”

SMPTE 2015 will offer three days of technical sessions, with experts and thought leaders from motion picture studios, broadcast and distribution networks, the production and postproduction community, software companies, systems integrators, manufacturers, display technologies, distribution providers, OTT providers, and the evolving motion-imaging industry, as well as the information technology (IT), Internet, gaming, and the virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) space.

The Technical Conference program will feature 20 presentations across four sessions related to OTT, cloud, and IP-based technology and services: “IP and Networking Foundations of the Media Facility,” “Working in the Cloud — Practical Applications,” “File Based Workflows: Scalable, Efficient, and Here to Stay,” and “OTT — The New Frontier or the Wild West?”

The two-part “IP and Networking Foundations of the Media Facility” session will take place on Tuesday, Oct. 27. At 2:15 p.m. John Ellerton of BT Media and Broadcast will present a paper titled “Prospects for Software-Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualisation in Media and Broadcast.” At 2:45 p.m. Cisco’s Pradeep Kathail will join Charles Meyer of Grass Valley to present their paper, “Journey of 9s — High Availability for IP-Based Production Systems.” During his 3:15 p.m. presentation, “Design Elements for Core IP Media Infrastructures,” Al Kovalick of Media Systems Consulting will examine the technical elements essential to the IP-based media facility and offer examples of key concepts. Later in the day, at 4:15 p.m., Thomas Edwards of FOX Networks Engineering and Operations will present a paper titled “Elementary Flows for Live IP Production,” providing a recommendation for the carriage of elementary media flows for live IP production.

The session “OTT — The New Frontier or the Wild West?” will take place on Wednesday, Oct. 28. At 8:30 a.m. SMPTE President Robert Seidel of CBS will make a presentation on “CBS All Access,” describing the technical systems that ensure ready access to mobile devices and PCs while providing the broadcaster multiple new revenue streams, as well as audience measurement metrics that can be used to capture mobile and PC viewing. During his subsequent 9 a.m. presentation of a paper titled “Virtualized Segmented Streams in OTT Services: Decoupling Content Generation from Delivery Tech,” Yassar F. Syed of Comcast will speak on how OTT content generation can be integrated into existing on-demand/linear programming workflows through virtualized segmented transport streams. At 9:30 a.m. USC graduate student Arnav Mendiratta will present his paper, “Big Data Analysis for Effective Monetization of Over-the-Top TV Content.”

The two-part “Working in the Cloud — Practical Applications” session on Thursday, Oct. 29, will begin at 8:30 a.m. with the presentation of the paper, “Shoot the Bird: Linear Broadcast Distribution on AWS,” by Usman Shakeel and Konstantin Wilms of Amazon Web Services (AWS). At 9 a.m. SMPTE Governor Richard Welsh of Sundog Media Toolkit will present the paper “Utilising Massive Compute Resource in Public Cloud for Complex Image Processing Applications.” Welsh will explore the deployment of complex image processing applications in the public cloud in order to make massive processing jobs practical for post-production budgets and timescales. Erik Weaver, project manager for ETC@USC, will follow at 9:30 a.m., providing an update on the cloud. Jim Duval of Telestream will lead a 10:30 a.m. discussion on using cloud infrastructure for media production operations, and at 11 a.m. Tom Ohanian of Cisco will present his paper, “Zero Infrastructure Broadcasting.” Duval and Ohanian will join Shakeel, Edwards, and Welsh for an 11:30 a.m. panel discussion, chaired by Edwards, on working in the cloud.

During the “File-Based Workflows: Scalable, Efficient and Here to Stay” session on Thursday, Oct. 29, Heiko Sparenberg of Fraunhofer IIS will present “Introduction of a File-System With Integrated Scaling Capability” at 2 p.m. Simon Adler and Bruce Devlin, both of Dalet, will follow at 2:30 p.m., presenting the paper, “Using BPMN to Simplify IMF Caption and Subtitle Creation.” The two experts will explain the use of business process model and notation (BPMN) in an automated workflow controller to simplify the movement and migration of captions between media files and proprietary authoring formats, as well as describe multilanguage workflows using IMF to describe versions. At 3 p.m. Henry Gu of Green International Consulting will present his paper, titled “IMF in Mastering and Distribution Automation.”

The presentation by Verizon’s Middleton at the SMPTE Industry Luncheon will complement the papers presented by other notable industry leaders at SMPTE 2015. Middleton will discuss the shift toward TV everywhere, on devices ranging from smartphones and tablets to laptops and gaming consoles; the challenge of bringing traditional workflows into Internet-based delivery of content; and how forward-thinking media companies are using the intelligent integration of existing and emerging workflows to blend these two worlds seamlessly.

Tickets to the SMPTE Industry Luncheon are not included in the conference registration package but may be purchased with conference registration packages. Further details about SMPTE 2015 and the 2015 Symposium, including registration information and the continually updated program schedule, are available here. 

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