IBC2008: Thomson Touts HD Sports, News Strength
French conglomerate announces deals with MLB Network, ESPN, NBC.
By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 9/11/2008 3:05:00 PM
The all-HD production of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games made 2008 a watershed year for HD sports.
To highlight its role in providing high-end field and super-slo-mo cameras for the Olympics and other big-event productions, French conglomerate Thomson held its IBC2008 press event at the Amsterdam Arena stadium, home to the Amsterdam Ajax soccer squad.
Thomson demonstrated the capability of its LDK 8300 3x HD super slo-mo camera, which was used heavily at the Olympics by mobile vendors like Belgium-based Alfacam, by shooting live slo-mo footage of two Ajax players dribbling a soccer ball on the Arena field.
And Thomson senior vice president Jeff Rosica announced a major sale of HD production and playback gear to MLB Network, Major League Baseball’s start-up cable network, which is set to go live Jan. 1.
MLB Network will rely on a tapeless production and playback system consisting of some 36 Thomson Grass Valley K2 HD media servers, 25 Aurora HD editing systems and a comprehensive Aurora software suite of applications to handle the entire HD postproduction chain from ingest to browse to playout.
The K2 media servers will be employed in a RAID-protected (redundant array of independent disks) storage-area network for editing and accessing/sharing thousands of audio and video clips on a daily basis, and will be configured in two redundant paths -- 18 servers for “X” SAN and 18 for “Y” SAN -- with each SAN providing 1,000 hours of HD storage at 100-megabit-per-second highest quality.
Thomson also used IBC2008 to highlight its strength in HD news, announcing that TV Globo in Brazil invested $1.8 million to convert two of its local affiliates to HD-news production using the Infinity tapeless camcorder and K2/Aurora shared-storage production systems.
ESPN purchased two of Thomson’s Ignite HD automated news-production systems for its production-control rooms. MediaCorp in Singapore implemented a tapeless production system based on Aurora editors and K2 servers. And Australia Broadcasting struck a major deal to roll out Ignite throughout its major city and regional areas.
In the playout area, Rosica also announced that NBC -- a longtime customer for Thomson Grass Valley servers going back to the company’s seminal Profile product -- is using K2 HD servers for a fully automated playout solution across its eight owned stations. The system was launched last month to help support NBC’s Olympic coverage, and it is now being used to share promos between the network and stations.
On the product front, Thomson announced that the Infinity camcorder will now support bandwidth-efficient MPEG-2 HD Long GOP (group of pictures) compression as a codec choice, with bit rates ranging from 18 mbps up to 100 mbps. To better facilitate drama and documentary production, the Infinity camcorder will now offer digital-cinema-style shooting with a 24 frame-per-second option.
Thomson also unveiled a new line of K2 servers, including the K2 Summit, which has a slo-mo application and a replay controller, the K2 Dyno. With the slo-mo server, it appears that Thomson is trying to grab some share from the popular replay server made by EVS, which Rosica obliquely referred to as an “expensive, highly proprietary system.”
Rosica also used the press event to briefly discuss Thomson Grass Valley’s sale of its digital film-transfer business to German private equity firm PARTER Capital Group, which it announced late Wednesday. The deal -- which includes the Spirit film-scanning family, Bones digital intermediate work-flow tools and Luther color-space-management product -- is expected to close in October.
Rosica said Thomson decided to focus on the services side of digital film transfer through its Technicolor unit, not on selling the end-products.
“We’re always trying to find a good match between our business focus and the dynamics of the product line we’re supporting and the markets we’re serving,” he added, noting that Technicolor is a big user of the Spirit and Bones systems.
While Thomson’s divestiture of a noncore business was not surprising, since the company has faced shareholder pressure over the past year as it tries to integrate a number of disparate units, the unloading of the film-transfer business does seem in conflict with Thomson’s corporate mantra that its products touch every piece of the content chain.
But Rosica, who is based in Los Angeles and has close ties to the Hollywood postproduction community, confided that the unloading of the film-transfer business was something he had been pushing for.
“It’s really about the focus of the company,” he said. “The high-end post market is served by a few niche players. And as a large company, we tend to move a little slower than the niche-market players. Also, as we try to become more focused as a management team, it was a little too wide a spread of products.”
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