TKT1957’s Insider Scoop: Interview with Simen K. Frostad, Chairman at BRIDGE Technologies. 

• What are the main trends of IBC 2023, in your opinion?

While we’ve been incredibly busy and haven’t had the opportunity to explore IBC 2023 thoroughly, it’s evident that the “IP-fication” of production media is a prominent trend, with the rise of 2110 type technologies. We’re anticipating Blackmagic’s entry into this space, hoping for offerings at a lower price point compared to the current high-cost options.

The industry could benefit from more affordable options, enabling smaller, early-stage companies to explore 2110, not just large enterprises.

We’ve been involved in significant 2110 projects, such as the World Cup in Qatar, the Women’s World Cup in New Zealand and Australia, and the Tokyo Olympics. Looking ahead to the Paris Olympics in 2024, we anticipate it to be one of the first major global projects where everything will be IP-fied.

• What are the main directions of development most characteristic in your segment of the industry?

The development in our segment is steering towards three main technologies.

Firstly, the shift towards IP, or “IP-fication,” has been underway for years and is now accelerating with the support of 2110 and IPMX.

Secondly, 4K HDR is becoming standard for tier 1 sports productions like Formula One, the World Cup, and the Olympics, necessitating conversion techniques for SDR, among others.

Lastly, immersive audio, particularly Dolby Atmos, has surprisingly gained traction in the industry, especially in the music sector and device-based media consumption, prompting sports production to adopt immersive audio. We’ve developed numerous techniques and introduced various products, including the demonstration of SIDM, to facilitate the transition from production equipment to NDI encoders, ensuring we stay abreast of these technological advancements.

• What new products is your company showcasing at IBC 2023?

Well, we’re really sticking with the old way of media production. We’ve got the capability to monitor satellite, terrestrial, and cable distribution. We can also monitor and decrypt OTT and send it back for further analytics. And then for the production range, so that we can do uncompressed all the way up to unlimited type of bandwidth. It’s crucial for broadcasters to see the whole chain because they need the same system to correlate all the different data from the production inception to the consumer.

Here at IBC, specifically, we’re showcasing a lot of new features for the uncompressed production systems, especially for audio because audio is going to be a big headache when everybody suddenly has to create audio for Live events for Dolby Atmos and immersive audio is new to everybody. So, everyone has a lot to learn and monitoring to ensure that everything goes right.

• Are there any developments in integrating AI into your solutions?

I’m more inclined to use the term machine learning, to be honest. I think it’s more accurate for what we’re doing. Machine learning doesn’t really have anything to do with intelligence, but it’s a very powerful tool to be able to utilize for pattern recognition and it can automate a lot of tasks pretty well. But, of course, there’s a big deficiency with the technology because again there’s a limit to what the technology can achieve and it’s not limitless because if you feed it with information that is not of high quality, you may dumb down the quality. I’m hoping that people will come to understand what’s significant with it and what’s not. I think that it’s now very broad and that’s not very smart because it’s good for some things and not so good for others.

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