21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

13 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue scte long read doesn’t always tend to follow the same predictable pattern as, say, social behaviour. No, instead I wanted to look at how the history of broadcast and broadband – and of ‘monitoring’ (broadly defined) - has impacted us socially, politically and even perhaps philosophically. How technology has intermeshed with these elements in the past, and therefore how might it continue to shape our futures; not just in the way that we interact with the piece of technology in front of us, but the way that we interact with each other. Bits and bytes, wrongs and rights Now of course, as leaders in the field of network monitoring, if you ask us to write an article about the history of broadcast monitoring, we may geek out on the technical details – the way in which waves, bits, bytes, packets are all ‘monitored’ as they make their journey from one place to another, using whatever infrastructure was in use at the time. But sometimes, it is important for engineers to take a step back. These technological processes – fascinating as they are – are in reality just a means to an end. What is even more inspiring than the technology itself is what it facilitates. Every member of SCTE – regardless of their function – is ultimately united in one aim: human communication. Every day, our efforts all contribute to a singular purpose; disseminating content around the world that informs, entertains, educates, enriches, enlightens, and brings us closer together. This means that the conceptual content we work with is, in reality, as important to consider as the technological container that it comes wrapped in. And it turns out that the process of monitoring one is inherently bound with the other. But before we dig into those juicy discussions of purpose and meaning, I can’t escape the mission I’ve been tasked with completely. If we want to discuss all the exciting conceptual things about how monitoring broadcast content might shape our lives, then first I need to give you a little bit of a chronological rundown of the history of broadcast, if only to show you just how far we’ve come. The (non-existent) history of broadcast monitoring For us at Bridge, our love affair with IP has a very particular broadcast flavour to it. We saw it coming a long time ago, and our commitment has been vindicated, because we are now very much in the era of broadband as broadcast. But of course, once upon a time, broadcast was a very separate concept indeed. It occupied its own space. You could tell a joke about how a broadcast engineer and a broadband engineer walked into a pub and… well actually, you couldn’t, because in the days of Marconi, broadband engineers were mere twinkles in their fathers’ eyes. Broadband simply wasn’t a thing yet. This means we need to give you broadband engineers a quick rundown of basic broadcast history. So how did you go about monitoring a broadcast in the good old days? By good old days I mean the halcyon 1980s of course; life was simpler - and more complicated - for lots of reasons. Well, you didn’t really. Of course there were ways to check if your network was performing, but these were inelegant, ‘brute force’ operations. In