Topic:              NAB Paper Preview Night

Date:                Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

Time:               7:00 PM

Location:         Rogers Communications Centre, Room RCC-361

                         Ryerson University

                         80 Gould Street, Toronto

Arranged By:  Paul Briscoe, Leigh Whitcomb

Sponsor:          Toronto Section Technical Seminar

Interactive Content Authoring for A/153 ATSC Mobile Digital Television Employing Open Source Tools

Brad Fortner, Ryerson University

The A/153 ATSC Mobile Digital Television (DTV) Standard defines a framework to create interactive content for the medium. This paper chronicles the work of Ryerson Universities ATSC M/H group to discover how to author interactive content for this environment. The presentation will delve into the common, open and non-proprietary tools to construct interactive prototypes investigated so far. The presentation will also cover the group’s experimentation with open source multimedia IP server platforms may be used to develop content and will highlight www.openmobiledtv.org which has been developed as a knowledge base related to content authoring for ATSC Mobile Digital Television.

IP Network Security for Broadcast

Leigh Whitcomb, Harris

Today, IP is being used to transport more of a broadcaster’s critical information, including product controls, video and audio essences, and intercom communications. The risk of potential damage, such as theft of content and denial of service, increases as more critical information is moved to IP. To make things worse, in the past, signals were carried on dedicated wires, and attackers needed physical access to the wires. In the IP world, however, an attacker can be thousands of miles away. With today’s facility-to-facility links and the Cloud, more of the IP network is now outside the broadcaster’s direct control. This paper discusses different kinds of threats and examines what can be done to make your network more secure.

Making Redundancy Cheap and Green

Leigh Whitcomb, Harris

Broadcast facilities are 24/7 operations and cannot afford to go off-air; however, equipment in the facility will, at some point, fail. On one side, there is Murphy's Law: ""Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."" On the other side, there is the belief that redundancy will increase cost and power usage. Today, new architectures and integration capabilities allow more options in designing redundant systems. However, these new architectures add new challenges. For example, processor-based products can have much longer recovery times than older, simpler products. In addition, solutions that work for baseband video may not work for networking. This paper will examine the problem of keeping a facility on-air and discuss different options for redundancy that are cost- and power-efficient.

Disaster Recovery Starts With Effective Backup Strategy

David Lafleche, Stan Moote - Harris

A  broadcaster might not have the budget for elaborate disaster recovery systems, such as duplicate systems or alternate sites, but a good backup strategy for all application and configuration data can be helpful in getting back on the air quickly. This paper will examine configuration and user data storage methods — locally on devices, in files on a remote device or in databases — and the methods of retrieving the information.  The author will discuss creating strategies for backing up files and database information in multiple places to keep on- and off-site using current hardware- and cloud-based technologies.

The SMPTE Board of Managers will meet in Room RCC-102 starting at 4:45 PM.

 Pizza & Pop Dinner is provided at 6:30pm, there is no break between presentations