NEWS TECHNOLOGY CP Communications, Mobile Viewpoint bring next-gen IQ-Sports Producer Series to market
CP Communications announced its next generation of Mobile Viewpoint’s IQ-Sports Producer (IQ-ISP) family of automated live sports production systems. Powered by AI and supporting a range of outdoor and indoor sports, the updated series delivers several key technology enhancements and adds a new entrylevel model, the IQ-SP Lite that is built for customers focused on single-sport productions with one output system. • Designed to remove the need of an onsite camera crew, IQSP makes professional sports production affordable for minor leagues, training camps, universities – and now, with IQSP Lite – smaller colleges and high schools previously hindered by budget constraints. CP Communications is the exclusive North American distributor of Mobile Viewpoint solutions. • Mobile Viewpoint developed IQ-Sports Producer to easily capture, stream, and re-publish sports events with ease. Mobile Viewpoint has strengthened the AI capabilities in the new generation of IQ-SP systems, which will prove especially invaluable as live sporting events gradually return during the COVID-19 pandemic. • Amongst the new AI features is the automated highlight creation. IQSP automatically detects scoring plays, and create individual replay clips or post-game highlight packages for publishing to social media with minimal manual intervention, saving producers significant turnaround time, effort, and staffing costs. 4 October 2020 television asia plus
• Mobile Viewpoint has also added a scheduler to the cloud-based management platform LinkMatrix, which automates game schedules in advance without an operator. • The IQ-SP Pro and IQ-SP Premium configurations also leverage Mobile Viewpoint’s innovative IQ-xCam 180-degree cameras to deliver superior quality for higherend productions. Available with two or four 4K cameras in each housing, the recently released IQ-xCams capture panoramic images at a full 60 frames per second for demanding, broadcast-caliber requirements. • As well as the AI-powered, panand-scan main feed created by the virtual director functionality of the IQ-SP software, the Pro and Premium models support additional virtual streams that can be defined within the system to follow the action of choice. Users can drag and drop varied fields of view into the image, and add overlays including scoreboard content (clock and score), sideline and goal views, instant replay content, and automatic summaries and highlights. Operators can select and analyze other streams from the field of play during and after the event. • Other new upgrades include support for an additional microphone array to augment the cameras’ builtin microphones, enabling producers to complement their exceptional video coverage with higher-quality audio.
Upstream broadband usage, faster speeds spike higher in Q2 2020 Consumers are increasing their reliance on upstream bandwidth and are opting for faster speeds to meet dramatically changed usage habits, according to the Q2 2020 OpenVault Broadband Insights report issued by OpenVault in August, a market-leading source of broadband technology solutions and data-driven insights into worldwide broadband consumption patterns. The latest quarterly report showed that upstream consumption rose 5.3% from the end of Q1 to the end of Q2, likely reflecting increased use of videoconferencing for business, educational, and lifestyle purposes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The upstream rise continued even though overall usage actually declined by 5.5% during the same period. Upstream consumption is up 56% year-over-year through 2Q20. Demand for faster bandwidth tiers accelerated during the same period, as consumer usage increasingly extended across multiple devices simultaneously and operators offered complimentary speed upgrades and relaxed data ceilings. The 2Q20 OVBI shows that nearly 5% of subscribers now receive connections of 1 gigabit or faster, up 133% year-over-year, and up 75% in the last six months alone. About 61% of all subscribers now have connections of 100 Mbps or faster, a one-year increase of 27%. Among
other
findings:
• While total average usage declined from 402 GB to 380 GB in 2Q20, consumption is still well above pre-pandemic levels and up nearly 36% from the average of 280 GB at the end of 2Q19. • A similar effect was reflected in the power user category, where the 8.7% of subscribers consuming 1 TB represented a 13% decline from 1Q20 to 2Q20 – but was up 112% from 4.1% in 2Q19. • With usage quotas relaxed during the pandemic, consumption by subscribers on usage-based billing (UBB) plans increased nearly 42% year-over-year, from 262.9 GB in 2Q19 to 372.8 GB in 2Q20. • Average usage In Europe was 221.6 GB, down 10% from the 247.7 GB of 1Q20 but up 30% from the 170.2 GB in 2Q19.
