Sony

The Long Island newspaper has remade itself as a multimedia news producer with a two-studio, multimillion-dollar production operation and a team of MMJs ramping up extensive video coverage. (Newsday photo)

Major set manufacturers Samsung, LG and Sony glanced over NextGen TV in their presentations, although Hisense and Tablo unveiled new NextGen-enabled products in this year’s heavily slimmed-down event.

Recent supply chain issues notwithstanding, newsrooms are embracing LED video walls for their dropping prices, ease of use and improved quality over older, LCD options. Above: WRDW Augusta, Ga., included a large video wall in its new facility, designed by FX, that it moved into earlier this year. (Source: WRDW)

Sony has announced that it is withdrawing as an exhibitor at the 2021 IBC Show, slated for Dec. 3-6 at the RAI in Amsterdam. In a statement from a representative of Sony Europe, the company cited the ongoing pandemic as well as logistics, adding that it will have representatives at the show.

Theresa Alesso, Pro Division president, Sony Electronics, said “we’ve considered the unprecedented circumstances and made the difficult decision that we will not be participating in person at next month’s NAB Show or InfoComm.”

AT&T moves further away from the video biz with the divestment of the thriving anime-focused niche SVOD service.

Tokyo-based Sony’s quarterly sales rose 27% from 1.7 trillion yen to 2.2 trillion yen ($20 billion). Sony had reported a January-March profit of 12.6 billion yen last year.

New camera angles and innovative AR graphics will mark Tampa’s Super Bowl LV with a sparser crowd allowing for novel camera positions and experimentation.

ATSC President Madeleine Noland weighs in on the technology’s COVID-hampered rollout, the importance of peripheral receiver devices for viewers’ embrace and prospective nontraditional uses cases for the spectrum as a broadcast revenue driver.

Trends driven by the pandemic are likely to persist into 2021 and beyond, while transitions to IP infrastructures will accelerate and aging on-prem infrastructure will give way to increased reliance on the cloud. NextGen TV will also likely pick up speed after COVID’s cooling effect on its rollout this year.

Sony is close to finalizing a deal to buy US-based anime streaming service Crunchyroll fro AT&T for nearly $1 billion, according to a report from Nikkei Asia. Nikkei says Sony negotiated exclusive rights to bid for the streaming service and its 3 million paying subscribers earlier this year, and the two companies have now “entered into final negotiations.” Although an asking price is unclear, Nikkei notes that Sony could end up spending “more than 100 billion yen” on the company — around $957 million.

Tokyo-based Sony reported a 459.6 billion yen ($4.4 billion) profit in July-September, up from 188 billion yen the previous year. Quarterly sales at the maker of the PlayStation game machines, Bravia TVs and Spider-Man movies inched down slightly to 2.1 trillion yen ($20 billion).

The online event this week underscored 2020’s biggest TV tech trend — moving on-premise broadcast workflows and vendor products to the cloud — while anticipating 5G’s potential use in remote production. Above, a 5G-enabled camera used in a BBC-led trial exploring multi-camera synchronization.

The arrival of summer hasn’t slowed the flow of webinars, briefings, demos and webcasts, most targeting TV’s engineering and IT communities. For the full list of live events this week, including TVNewsCheck’s At Home Production and the Future of News Workflow, please visit TVNewsCheck’s Virtual Events Directory.

Revenues at Sony’s film and TV division climbed to $9.32 billion from $8.87 billion in the previous fiscal year. Overall profit at Sony Corp. fell 36%.

NAB Show Express opens Tuesday and runs through Thursday with virtual panel sessions, keynotes and exhibition. Sony concludes its Technology Tuesday series, while the IEEE continues its Wednesday Webinars and Quantum hosts full day virtual gatherings Wednesday, Thursday and Friday Ross Video Live and Gates Air also have several virtual events this week. TVNewsCheck’s full listing of live and on-demand Virtual Events is here.

Costs are inhibiting a flood of 4K sports production, but 1080p HDR offers numerous practical advantages, among them that the improvement in picture quality is more readily apparent to consumers than the gain from 4K resolution. Above, Sony tested an 8K camera at the Sony Open in Hawaii last year, but doesn’t expect 8K to be used for regular sports production for several years.

The coronavirus pandemic has amped up the transition to cloud-based workflows as broadcasters have employed as many remote operations as possible. The next frontier: an acceleration of live production applications in the cloud. Above, an Amazon Web Services Outpost cloud server.

Sony Corp. said Thursday that it will launch a $100 million fund to support those around the world affected by the new coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The Tokyo-based conglomerate said the initiative would target three areas: supporting frontline medical professionals and first responders to fight the virus; aiding children and educators who must now work remotely, and supporting members of the creative community in the entertainment industry, “which has been greatly impacted by the spread of the virus.”

The massive NBCUniversal Boston Media Center in Needham, Mass., houses the company’s NBC and Telemundo stations plus regional cable news and sports networks in a new $125 million, 160,000-square foot headquarters. “It’s a complete game-changer,” says one GM of the greenfield build.

Tokyo-based Sony, which makes PlayStation video-game consoles, Bravia TVs and Spider-Man films, said the impact of the virus was unclear, but production and sales of its image sensor division were at risk. The company promised to release any new forecasts as soon as possible.

Fox will use more than 100 manned and robotic cameras to cover the game, including 24 “Super-Motion” cameras to support replays; 20 goal-line and end-line pylon cameras; wireless “Line to Gain” cameras that travel up and down the field in alignment with the first-down marker; and two different SkyCam systems which operate at different elevations. It will also use 72 field mics, as well as wireless player mics, to capture game audio. And that’s just scratching the surface.

The annual consumer electronics bazaar offered an important stage for fledgling NextGen TV this week, while also allowing varied glimpses at 5G, anticipatory technology and acres of beautiful new screens including the Samsung Sero that shifts from a horizontal to vertical perspective.

Audio over IP (AoIP) networking technology is experiencing higher adoption among TV broadcasters, prompted in part by a new transport standard ensuring more interoperability. Many of those embracing IP no longer think of audio production as an island, but as connected networks prompting interoperability to become an important factor. Above, SSL’s System T AoIP production system runs on COTS hardware like Cisco switches.