monitoring detects problems before they affect the audience
Bridge Technologies has been pushing for IP since before most of the industry had heard the term, and has been a fundamental feature of practically every live global sports production of the last decade. This started in the field of contribution and distribution, where our compressed probes – including our flagship VB330 – ensure uninterrupted delivery. As the Bridge monitoring ecosystem has evolved, features crucial to live sports broadcast have been added each year. Take for instance SCTE-35 ad insertion monitoring: something that is fundamental to live sports, where the ability to validate and prove compliance to advertisers is central.
But Bridge’s role in the recent rise of IP production has been even more transformative. With the development of our VB440, we have replaced the need for multiple rack units of dedicated hardware, providing dozens of best-in-class tools for production specialists in all fields, be they camera shaders, audio engineers or network specialists. Up to eight simultaneous users can access these tools and create a custom assembly of readouts on their Canvas workspace, accessible from any HTML5 browser, from anywhere in the world. That means a colourist in London, an audio engineer in Sydney, and a network technician in Oslo can all work at the same live production simultaneously, using just an iPad if they so wish. The operational implications for truck roll costs, energy consumption, and crew movement are substantial.
This year, the introduction of software-defined deployment – particularly through integration into NEP Platform – adds further flexibility. The VB440 can now be instantiated on shared COTS compute, scaled up or down as production demands, and terminated when the event ends. With NEP also lynchpins in the delivery of global sports broadcast, the alliance yet further cements Bridge’s centrality for the upcoming summer of sports.
And that’s particularly true given the new features integrated this year. Our AV sync feature – which uses physically embedded markers as a ‘first line’ of validation – ensures commentary and environmental audio matches action every time (and with audio monitoring of up to 64 channels, engineers can ensure the right language is reaching the right market across dozens of commentaries). And that has now been even further extended to include multichannel AV sync, so that productions avoid single points of failure by using multiple redundant input sources can ensure that if and when they need to switch, there is no lag, no glitch, no risk of viewers missing a decisive goal.
Because ultimately, that’s what Bridge products are about: delivering a seamless viewer experience, even in the challenging world of live and remote production.
