ABU members have described how they are meeting a range of challenges brought by rapid technological advances and the effects of the pandemic.

They were speaking today during a session of the ABU Digital Broadcasting Symposium 2022 on Advances in Production Technologies and Applications. Masashi Kamei of NHK-Japan moderated the session.

Dennis Breckenridge of Elevate Broadcast described how a four-hour live international awards show had to be changed from physical to virtual because of the pandemic.

Using cloud technology, his company had created a virtual theatre and a virtual red carpet, with control rooms in Singapore and Sydney, and live feeds coming in from six other Asia-Pacific locations.

Yuichiro Asami of NHK spoke about how camera viewfinders were failing to keep up with the quality of ultra-high-definition television. TV screens were getting bigger and better compared to the tiny viewfinders, which did not offer enough resolution.

He described how NHK was using new technologies to design a more effective, person-oriented focus control system for UHD TV.

Hazizul Jaya Ab Rahim of RTM-Malaysia described how RTM was introducing AR, VR and MR into its programmes and some of the challenges this presented.

Mohammad Reza Hasanabadi of IRIB-Iran gave a presentation on AI-based audio codecs and the machine learning methods involved.

A fifth speaker, Michael Lok of Arista Networks, described some of the ways broadcasters could use AI to help prevent malicious attacks.