Everyone understands that the broadcast industry is going through a major structural change at the moment, with the likes of Amazon and Netflix commissioning content. But even by those standards the UK's major telco, BT, announcing that its new premium sports channels will be free to customers when it launches in August is a jaw-dropper

The influential Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has been talking about the future directions that HEVC might take now that its effectively out in the wild. And it's interesting stuff

And no, nothing to do with triple-gatefold sleeves. Panasonic's AV-HS410 Live Switcher apparently played an instrumental part in Marillion's successful attempt last month on the Guinness World Record for producing the World’s Fastest DVD Release.

By the late 1990s, digital VFX had very much come into their own, promising increasingly spectacular visuals in increasingly spectacular films. Andy Stout takes us up to the present day via Pandora, Middle Earth, the middle of the Atlantic and other locations.

Recently at Red Shark Towers a friend sent us a link to an HD scan of the title sequence from the iconic UK children's TV series, Thunderbirds. Proving that smooth CGI and eye-popping VFX isn't always necessary, this show has obsessed generations in the UK, despite the fact that it was essentially a puppet show with a few explosions in.

It's not completely over yet, but during the past few months it seems that industry attitudes towards 3D have hardened and the smart money is now backing 4k. With even cinema audiences now in decline for the format, Andy Stout offers his opinions on what went wrong for 3D

HEVC is real! The first live Ultra HD transmissions involving the HEVC codec have taken place with SES, Harmonic and Broadcom combining to squeeze the signal down into 20Mbit/s.

Even if you don’t, it seems a lot of fairly influential people do. Directors UK, the 4500-strong professional association of directors working with the moving image in the UK, has sent a letter signed by 32 of Britain’s most renowned exponents of the art to the BBC’s Creative Director, Alan Yentob, calling for a review of the BBC’s Technical Guidelines on film delivery for HD

Getting live HD back to base usually involves some serious kit such as uplink trucks, satellites and microwave relays. New kit such as the TVU Backpack, however, does the job using 3G and 4G networks and, as the name suggests, does all this from a backpack that can be worn by the camera operator.

A new patent filed by Nikon in Japan looks like the company is planning a password protection system to make certain lens/camera body combinations work

Intel's unveiling of some early silicon and at least some cursory details of its next generation Thunderbolt controller, codenamed Falcon Ridge, has some highly significant implications for the rollout of 4K.

While the Blackmagic camera news understandably cast a very long shadow over everything else at NAB, the BBC quietly unveiled what looks to be a rather significant world’s first – an IP-based production system called Stagebox.