Skype TX: Could Skype's New Offering Create a 新闻 Revolution?
With the Super Bowl behind them and wall-to-wall presidential election coverage still to come, broadcast professionals gathered in Las Vegas, 就像他们每年四月做的那样, for a meet-and-greet-and-try-out-new-gear event: National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.
今年, 和过去两年一样, attendees were faced with a broad range of miniaturized production gear, 有些更小, 更轻的, 而且比以往任何时候都快, thanks in no small part to the surge of online live linear streaming and product demands that go along with it.
From the set-top box (in its cable provider and over-the-top varieties) to the growth of online channels to the long-awaited tipping point of TV Everywhere, the NAB show presented evolutionary gear and modified workflows.
Some parts of the production process found a foothold for what could be a dramatic revolution. One such example is the release of new products such as the 脱口秀节目vs - 100 来自NewTek，基于 Skype TX. If the company name sounds familiar, it’s the same one that brought the world the Video Toaster, 的TriCaster, and the more recent 3Play instant replay system.
While other gear in the NewTek arsenal, including the recently released TriCaster Mini, builds on the premise of better switching and playback, TalkShow is a different breed of cat (or cattle, since NewTek hails from San Antonio).
TalkShow是基于Skype TX, which itself is based very loosely on the Skype personal videoconferencing or instant messaging chat tool acquired by Microsoft in 2011. After being acquired by eBay and then freed from the company several years earlier, Skype continued to innovate—so much so that Microsoft’s acquisition placed the collaborative two-way video communication tool squarely into its key business process service offerings.
2011年早些时候, Skype自己也收购了Qik, which had a focus on mobile devices and allowed Skype to leverage Qik technologies to offer Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, and other mobile operating system applications.
After buying Skype, Microsoft also acquired a small British firm called Cat and Mouse. This company focused on multifeed and call quality optimizations, and its rudimentary Skype-like interface, 喝倒采, 作为Skype TX的基础.
What we saw of Skype TX at the 2014 NAB show was, 坦率地说, 还没准备好, and even the release to manufacturing (RTM) had significant shortcomings. Many of those have improved over the course of a year, and the resulting products that Microsoft’s three initial Skype TX hardware partners released at or just prior to the 2015 NAB show display the benefits of the continued investment in Skype TX.
安全仍然是一个持续存在的问题, as there’s not necessarily anything that keeps someone with Skype from calling into a known Skype TX-based hardware box, but perhaps the first few months of “security through obscurity” will give way to actual security once the first on-air incident occurs.
Yet for all of Skype TX’s growing pains, the advent of products such as the NewTek 脱口秀节目vs - 100 heralds a new way to combine easy-to-use hardware with enhanced content quality. 很快, 我预测, even the experts will be hard-pressed to know whether an expert appearing on-screen with the in-studio anchor is beaming in by satellite or merely sitting down at their desktop or laptop and participating in a Skype call. That blurring of the lines will invariably reshape broadcasting as we know it, 无论是通过广播还是网络.
This article appears in the May/June 2015 issue of 流媒体 as "Skype TX: Spurring a 新闻 Revolution?"
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