Sports Graphics, QOE and Storage for Broadast
October 5, 2013 – At the Screen in the Home conference held by the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Communication Society and Consumer Electronics Society, the afternoon covered a range of topics from Bannister Lake on Live broadcast sports graphics, Tektronix on monitoring and managing the QOE and QOS of broadcast and cable, and David Schwaderer on directions and technology for broadcast storage.
Danny Ljubisic of Bannister Lake talked about the new system they have developed and implemented with most of the major live sports broadcasters to simplify the operation of and increase the viewer interest in sports overlay graphics. These are the scoring and statistics boxes and a both still and animated graphics that depict players on the screen. Historically, these were all built as one-up images for each player on every team, and a large collection of sports scores option graphics were created in a large library. These images were then individually selected to be put up on the screen and were placed in a fixed position on the screen frame. The system from Bannister Lake uses a layer based system that has insertable objects in a graphic database. This allows for the creation of background outlines and color blocks, and based on the action in the game, can overlay a score, a player name or image, or other information with a dynamic placement of the multi-layer object on the screen. This simplifies the operators job, as he can work with a very small number of objects, and just add information that is sent from the score keeper or statistician directly to the graphics to improve accuracy. This includes a link and synchronization with the official game clock.
Steve Holmes of Tektronix presented on the challenges of QOS and QOE in the broadcast chain. QOS is typically a quantitative metric that has to do with the delivery pipe for the content. This is manageable by test equipment and software for monitoring the lines and stops in the distribution system. QOE is quality of experience and is a qualitative rather than purely quantitative measurement. The presentation reviewed many technologies and measurements to insure that QOE is assuring that you deliver a picture and sound to the end point viewer that they are happy with. A good QOS does not always mean a good QOE. Finally that it is important to mesure QOE for both picture and audio at all the points in the broadcast distribution food chain.
David Schwaderer presented on the trends in broadcast storage and drivers for this area. Video storage is different from transactional as it is long run content and has a long life cycle of 50+ yrs. David’s presentation went through some of the sources and data rates for capture, transcode and and store and also mechanisms for long term low cost storage in data centers and the cloud.
The slides for the presentation by these speakers can be found at the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society Chapter web site for past event at –http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ce/meetings/comsec-ces/index.html
