IBC: BHV Featuring Expanded Design & Engineering Services Portfolio, Upgraded Chip Solution

By TVNewsCheck Staff.  This article was originally published 9 August 2023 in TVNews Check - original article here

BHV, provider of turnkey engineering services, will be back at IBC (Sept. 15-18, RAI Amsterdam, Stand 10.A20) with its expanded portfolio of design and manufacturing services for hardware, firmware, desktop, and cloud solutions.

In addition to its range of in-house and outsourced engineering services, the company will be showcasing its “significantly upgraded” TV studio in a chip solution that now includes 4K 60 rendering and image manipulation and will present a range of wireless and control technologies.

BHV will also be highlighting its new alliance with L2Tek, a Silicon supplier recently appointed to represent BHV’s value-added services to the video sector with special emphasis on image rendering and processing. The alliance will offer greater support for clients looking to develop video solutions, buttressed by significant levels of integration with component manufacturers. Executives from both companies will be available to discuss the benefits the relationship brings to customers.

“BHV has now expanded with locations in the US as well as in Europe to provide better support for the key international brands we serve,” said CTO Bill Garrett. “As part of this development strategy, we are delighted to establish this relationship with L2Tek that will offer significant advantages to our clients and play a key role in our continued growth.”

Technology for the Next Generation

by BHV CTO Bill Garrett.  This article was originally published 2 December 2022 in TVB Europe - original article here

I don’t mean to write a ‘dark skies’ story about the future of broadcast equipment, but one must ask the question, ‘as an industry are we delivering the appropriate kit for the workforce of tomorrow?’ Of course, if we adapt, the risks are mitigated, but my time at IBC 2022 says that some manufacturers need to look closely at their product set.

I’ll start by presenting a scenario. A market that many ‘clear thinking’ kit manufacturers have moved into is pro AV. Corporate communications, houses of worship and many other previously ‘non broadcast’ organisations have made steps towards becoming content providers. The sale of PTZ cameras, which had already been enjoying growth, have rocketed along with all the associated peripherals, mini vision mixers and streaming gateways.

However, the scenario in my head involves three smartphones  on lighting sticks, their 8K image sensors enabling virtual pan, tilt and zoom, some clever warping to give the image that ‘mechanical movement’ feel, with their multiple image sensors providing numerous shot options, and sound via bluetooth microphones. The producer, assuming there is one, sits at a tablet screen selecting the appropriate shots; AI is tidying the picture quality by automatically balancing colour and brightness, and is probably sorting audio too. The devices’ 5G connectivity streams all the content to the cloud. The total count of traditional broadcast manufacturers involved: zero!

All of this can be done right now. Sport producers are already using smartphones connected with 5G. What will make this scenario a reality is not cost but usability. All the functions are delivered by apps and a cloud-connected infrastructure, hence there’s no cabling. Production power is not heavy v-lock batteries but three USB power packs picked up at the service station.

If you are unsure that the new workforce of tomorrow really will be different then let me explain a situation facing the automotive industry by posing a question. ‘Would a child born today learn to drive a manual gearbox car? Would a child born today learn to drive at all?’ With the phasing out of hydrocarbon fuels, the first part is easy to answer with a resounding ‘no’! The second part needs a little forethought. There will be social changes that affect the choice to own and drive, there is also the question of autonomous vehicles and how progressed will these be. As it takes about seven years for a car to leave the drawing board and enter the showroom, automotive manufacturers have just over two vehicle design cycles to work out what to do. Worse still, the numbers are already in: the total UK driving tests taken in 2016 was around 500,00; by 2019 the pre-pandemic figure was 400,000. Car makers are currently scrabbling around for ideas. Let’s not find ourselves having lacked forethought.

Deep breath, now back to broadcast. There can be a bright future when we recognise the threats. But, our industry offering needs to change. I will spare the blushes of some manufacturers, but I saw new products on show at IBC that had an interface featuring a two-line text-based LCD display, with a ‘helpful’ rotary encoder! To set up this ‘sophisticated and modern network aware’ piece of equipment is like looking through a letterbox. Ovens and coffee machines have better. It is an interface that has been around for 40 years, it’s clunky, awkward and two generations away from the industry entrants who spent the pandemic glued to an iPad.

There are cheap and easy solutions to improve the interface between equipment and user. Technologies developed for smartwatches now enable cost-effective rich user interfaces without the need of a stack of silicon or the headache of a Linux subsystem. Development tools released in the last 18 months now enable designers to deliver graphical, icon-driven UIs with gesture control.

There is no need for kit designed today to have a text-only interface. This change brings the opportunity of a tutorial-driven ‘at the device’ guidance through an interface capable of providing it. Users will get much more from your product, thus enhancing your reputation for  user experience.

Designers need to think about connectivity too. A good number of engineers have quit the industry when asked to swap the BNC for a CAT5 cable because a trip to the classroom to learn new skills later in life didn’t sound appealing. When connectivity sorts itself out the frustration and fear subsides. There are networking technologies that can resolve the connectivity challenge, 5G being an important stepping stone where devices leave the complex connectivity overhead to a telco.

Every place in the chain where there is overhead and manual activity needs to be under review because the marketplace is doing so from the inside and out. The new workforce of tomorrow will influence what gets used, and within a short time that workforce becomes the decision-maker. If the industry hasn’t adapted, those dark skies will be upon us.

BHV at IBC 2022

BHV’s stand at IBC (Amsterdam 9-12 September 2022) was a great success, attracting attention from a range of leaders in the broadcast industry. On display was our ASIC-based video processor that serves as a single chip, four channel, 4K vision mixer. We also demonstrated our “HMI of Things” development capability - rapid development of rich UI comparable to smartphone interfaces including gesture control.

Chief Technology Officer Bill Garrett said “It was great to be back at IBC this year after a 3 year break. We were able to discuss a number of exciting upcoming projects with potential clients and partners.”

BHV also generated a lot of good press.  Highlights include Bill’s article in TVB Europe discussing how outsourcing can be a solution to engineering staffing shortages; his think piece on SMPTE versus NDI published in TV Technology; and BHV managing director Julian Hiorns’s piece in InBroadcast explaining how ‘design and manufacturing as a service’ can deliver more cost-effective results than traditional product development. Other outlets such as TV NewsCheck  picked up on the BHV story as a ‘must see’ exhibitor at IBC.

Life After Co-Axial: SMPTE or NDI?

by BHV CTO Bill Garrett. This article was originally published 30 August in TV Technology - original article here

Neither NDI or SMPTE IP is “optimum,” and thus the right choice is much harder to select.

Looking to a life after co-ax connected video signals has many wondering which path to take—SMPTE or NDI? How can it be we’re at a fork in the road for IP video production?

The simple fact is this: for decades, the evolution of digital video production was a fairly standard and uncompetitive process. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) took the lead and developed standards which the industry has relied upon for many years. With each evolution new higher resolution formats were supported but continued to use co-axial cable with BNC connectors. If you needed to throw a particularly long distance, then a baseband fibre alternative was also an option. 

So why are we at a juncture where system architects are left making a judgment call when developing new production facilities? The answer is simple: Neither NDI or SMPTE IP is “optimum,” and thus the right choice is much harder to select.

An Evolution
The first important IP format, SMPTE ST 2022, appeared in the last decade and was basically SDI packetized into an IP stream. Though not hugely flexible, it did—and still does, have uses. Then came SMPTE ST 2110; it provided greater capability by separating video, audio and metadata into individual IP streams, allowing designers to create facilities with simplified workflows and significantly less hardware. There are other advantages, too many to mention, but a critical one opened the door to remote production with cameras and production galleries located in different countries with a helpful telco in between; global televised sport never looked back.

The latter part of the last decade saw manufacturers, including ourselves, natively supporting SMPTE ST 2110. The choice was simple, the future was bright… wasn’t it? The reality is that SMPTE ST 2110 demands very high-speed IP infrastructure with cost to match. Away from the highly organized environments of studios and outside broadcast, SMPTE ST 2110’s fibre transport can show its fragility making decision makers nervous. Remember it took years to get location drama to stop using film!

This backdrop has been to the advantage of NDI, emanating from NewTek and now a commercial tech spin-off owned by Vizrt. Its mantra could be summed up as “keeping it copper—IP video should be transported over cheaper Cat5/Cat6 networks.” Here the cables are robust and familiar, and the networking infrastructure doesn’t require $40K of training to manage. 

There is, however, a big “however" the video is compressed. Purists in broadcast engineering dismissed this with a sniff and sharp turn of the head, so NDI sat in the dark longer than it should have. Nearly all routes to the consumer result in video being compressed so why should compression matter further up the workflow? Well, it probably doesn’t, thus we are seeing growing numbers of manufacturers supporting NDI. One of the “cons” of NDI was its limited acceptance but this is becoming historical. 

“Nearly all routes to the consumer result in video being compressed so why should compression matter further up the workflow?"

The compression itself can be confusing as the NDI brand has multiple types. NDI, often referred to as “Full NDI” is based on something known as SpeedHQ supporting variations SHQ2 and SHQ7 (both 4:2:2 video types), resulting in HD bitrates around the 100Mb/s. NDI’s other version HX is H264/H265 depending on whether it is HD or 4K (UHD). NDI-HX is a much lower bit rate and may rule itself out for more “premium” production environments wishing to avoid the cost of SMPTE ST 2110, but the non-HX NDI is pretty damn good, when you consider it wasn’t long ago the audience was “enjoying” interlaced Standard Definition.

More Complex Than It Looks
Those “purists” I mentioned will protest that I’ve oversimplified the issue and have clearly overlooked important factors such as compression latency. They’d be right of course; but the true picture is much more complex. Film, CGI and drama workflows are still going to demand minimal if not zero compression and I strongly suspect that in location production, baseband 12Gb/s SDI will have a long life to come. 

Eventually we will all implement IP and the hardware will only ever be present at the “edge” with all processing, distribution and storage being firmly in the cloud. Which format will win is of course difficult to predict. If the discovery model (how you identify and find multimedia IP devices) for SMPTE ST 2110 and its eventual successor matures, then an uncompressed video, standardized by SMPTE, may take the lead. 

For NDI, taking its place in the competitive market might come down to the commercial approach. Having spent some time talking with senior figures in the NDI team—past and present, I believe it’ll be the fee manufacturers must pay to wear the NDI logo that will dictate the take-up.

We are likely to see a battle over the next five years and the resulting uncertainty will make choices difficult. I won’t make a prediction, but I will say that having previously introduced support for SMPTE ST 2110 in our video technology, we are currently putting the final touches to our NDI support ahead of this year’s IBC.  

BHV Unleashes Outsourced Engineering Paradigm at IBC

BY TVBEUROPE STAFF

This article was originally published in TVB Europe on 26 August 2022: original article here

Re-branded and expanded, BHV is returning to IBC 2022 with a new logo, look and a paradigm to provide vendors with a reliable resource for building ground-breaking product portfolios without breaking the bank.

BHV, known for its multi-award-winning designs dating back to 2002, is leveraging its own skill base to offer turnkey embedded engineering services to large brands seeking agility, or small players needing capability in video, streaming and production sectors.

“We’ve been fulfilling this need for manufacturers, very successfully, for years,” explained Julian Hiorns, managing director of BHV. “The pandemic, however, threw us into high gear with vendors having to deal with lockdowns, supply chain issues and labor shortages. Clients brought us their idea, or even a seed of an idea, and we turned it into a product built on the very latest, proven technologies in the industry. We absorbed the risk and worry, and they reaped the rewards of bringing cutting-edge solutions to market, some of which earned them patents. Now we’re pleased to have IBC as the perfect environment to broaden our reach and offer these services to the variety of attendees and vendors at the show.”

BHV fills the growing need for outsourced innovation and development by bringing high-end electronic design and manufacturing services to a broad cross-section of vendors serving the broadcast/video production, streaming, professional AV and image processing industries. The company offers clients a multi-phased approach to product development that includes market assessment, technology evaluation, an intelligently engineered product design and delivery of a complete turnkey solution.

Leveraging its own unique portfolio of hardware and software technologies, BHV provides embedded engineering solutions available in ASIC, FPGA and software defined delivery for video, wireless and control applications. The Company also maintains a substantial inventory of components enabling completed software and hardware solutions to be integrated quickly, avoiding supply chain delays and missed deadlines. BHV’s outstanding reputation is based on its ability to deliver sophisticated, low risk and reliable designs on-budget, on-time.

At IBC, BHV will conduct demonstrations that illustrate the three major pillars of its product development offerings.

View

The View section will highlight BHV’s video capabilities, feature its own software-defined NDI implementation, and include demonstrations of the company’s ASIC-based video processor silicon, capable of format and frame rate conversion, vision mixing and DVE and many picture manipulation functions all at 4K60P.

Connect

The Connect section will be dedicated to BHV’s wireless technology capabilities and include solutions for network connectivity, telemetry and remote control with support for ISAM, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, and UHF RFID tracking.

Control

The Control section will introduce attendees to the Human Machine Interface of Things, or the “HMI-of-Things” that refers to the creation of rich interface designs comparable to smartphone interfaces.

Stand 10.A20

IBC: BHV To Offer Outsourced Engineering Paradigm To Reduce Risk, Lower Development Costs

This article appeared in TVNews Check 17 August 2022 - original article here.

By TVN Staff | August 17, 2022 | 12:53 p.m. ET.

Re-branded and expanded, BHV is returning to IBC 2022 (RAI, Amsterdam, Sept. 9-12, stand 10.A20) with a new logo, look and a paradigm to provide vendors with a reliable resource for building ground-breaking product portfolios without breaking the bank.

BHV, known for its multi-award-winning designs dating back to 2002, is leveraging its own skill base to offer turnkey embedded engineering services to large brands seeking agility, or small players needing capability in video, streaming and production sectors. The team will be on Stand 10.A20 to discuss projects, explain the process and will also be demonstrating the company’s own new video, wireless and control technologies.

“We’ve been fulfilling this need for manufacturers, very successfully, for years,” explained Julian Hiorns, BHV managing director. “The pandemic, however, threw us into high gear with vendors having to deal with lockdowns, supply chain issues and labor shortages. Clients brought us their idea, or even a seed of an idea, and we turned it into a product built on the very latest, proven technologies in the industry. We absorbed the risk and worry, and they reaped the rewards of bringing cutting-edge solutions to market, some of which earned them patents. Now we’re pleased to have IBC as the perfect environment to broaden our reach and offer these services to the variety of attendees and vendors at the show.”

BHV says it “fills the growing need for outsourced innovation and development by bringing high-end electronic design and manufacturing services to a broad cross-section of vendors serving the broadcast/video production, streaming, professional AV and image processing industries.” The company offers clients a multi-phased approach to product development that includes market assessment, technology evaluation, an intelligently engineered product design and delivery of a complete turnkey solution.

Leveraging its own unique portfolio of hardware and software technologies, BHV provides embedded engineering solutions available in ASIC, FPGA and software defined delivery for video, wireless and control applications. The company also maintains a substantial inventory of components enabling completed software and hardware solutions to be integrated quickly, avoiding supply chain delays and missed deadlines.

At IBC, BHV will conduct demonstrations that illustrate the three major pillars of its product development offerings.

View — The View section will highlight BHV’s video capabilities, feature its own software-defined NDI implementation, and include demonstrations of the Company’s ASIC-based video processor silicon, capable of format and frame rate conversion, vision mixing and DVE and many picture manipulation functions all at 4K60P.

Connect — The Connect section will be dedicated to BHV’s wireless technology capabilities and include solutions for network connectivity, telemetry and remote control with support for ISAM, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G, and UHF RFID tracking.

Control — The Control section will introduce attendees to the Human Machine Interface of Things, or the “HMI-of-Things” that refers to the creation of rich interface designs comparable to smartphone interfaces.