Outside broadcasting

Outside broadcasting (OB) is the electronic field production (EFP) of television or radio programmes (typically to cover television news and sports television events) from a mobile remote broadcast television studio. Professional video camera and microphone signals come into the production truck for processing, recording and possibly transmission. The mobile production control room (PCR) is known as a "production truck", "scanner" (a BBC term), "mobile unit", "remote truck", "live truck", "OB van" or "live eye". In the United States an "OB van" is smaller in size than a production truck and generally requires two or three people in the field to manage.

In the past many outside broadcasting applications have relied on using satellite uplinks in order to broadcast live audio and video back to the studio. While this has its advantages such as the ability to set up virtually anywhere covered by the respective geostationary satellite, satellite uplinking is very expensive and the round trip latency is in the range of 240 to 280 milliseconds. Modern applications such as hardware and software IP codecs have allowed the use of public 3G/4G networks to broadcast video and audio. The latency of 3G is around 100–500 ms, while 4G is less than 100 ms.

A typical OB van is usually divided into five parts.

An ABS-CBN OB van transmitting a satellite feed

FOX 25 trucks in Boston's Harvard Square

A BBC Radio outside broadcasting van at New College, Oxford

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