TVBEurope presents Europe’s premier conference dedicated to the business of 3DTV. 3DTV is already where HD was five years ago, but it will require additional infrastructure, new investment and extra technology. 3D Masters examines the implications.

At the first conference to knock IT and broadcasting heads together, mutual suspicion seemed to be giving way to sensible dialogue. Richard Dean and David Fox report from TVBEurope’s inaugural IT Broadcast Workflow event.

Opening a packed inaugural conference, chairman Jeremy Bancroft of Media Asset Capital may have surprised some delegates by suggesting that tape isn’t quite the encapsulated ribbon of evil that some would have us believe.

Reducing the costs of delivering to more than 10 VoD platforms with 14 different languages and eight subtitle languages. Presentation by Darren Breeze, Discovery Communications, supported by George Boath, sales director, Telestream.

Digitising and transforming new and archived content – and dramatically reducing ingest time. Presentation by Jake Robbins, TVT, supported by Bruce Devlin, CTO, AmberFin.

The L’Equipe Group is a French sports-based media empire encompassing the L’Équipe TV sports news channel, the www.lequipe.fr website and the RTL-L’Équipe digital radio station. Speakers: Sebastien Valere, L’Equipe 24/24 and Chritine Jecko, vice president Sales, Netia.

The Press Association news agency has about 1,600 staff worldwide, of whom some 160 to 200 work in IT. Workflow presentation by James Elliot, introduced by Raoul Cospen, director of Marketing, Dalet Digital Media Systems.

Providing catch-up TV content on the web, and other platforms, within minutes of its live transmission has been the key driver for Nederlandse Publieke Omroep in adopting its current IT broadcast workflow. NPO speaker was Egon Verharen, and the session was sponsored by Technicolor.

Turner’s Broadcast Inventory Management Project (BIM): centralised ingest and archive in a multichannel environment.

Setting up and launching a 24/7 HD sports service: GOL TV is a 24/7 football channel in Spain that launched in August 2008, and became the country’s first ‘premium TDT’ channel a year later, offering major football coverage via smartcard-enabled terrestrial digital pay-TV.

Challenges of current broadcast workflows: convergence can be a good thing – but how can IT help? Session presented by Declan Wood and Alistair Washbourn, software marketing manager EMEA, Quantum Corp.

From planning to playout – the automatic workflow. Integrating business-critical modules that are fully embedded in the systems environment. Ricki Berg, technical manager, SBS Broadcasting Networks Ltd, with Gerrit Cornelis, development manager and business consultant, MediaGeniX.

In July 2008 Channel 4 announced the outsourcing of its broadcast and production services. Analysis of the migration from Shane Tucker, technical architect Channel 4 and Ian Wimsett, senior technologist, Red Bee Media.