ENEX Technical Committee Meeting at Red Bull Salzburg / Austria

ENEX Technical Committee brought together the technology leaders from global commercial TV stations in Salzburg, Austria on May 4th and 5th, 2023. Over 50 ENEX partners met at the Bulls Corner at the Red Bull Arena, home of FC Red Bull Salzburg coming from Mexico to Kurdistan.

The conference started with the welcome from the organizers from Servus TV and Red Bull Media House, both part of the Red Bull. Servus TV is the leading commercial TV station in Austria with a wide a range of activities in the Austrian broadcast landscape. Red Bull Media House provides world class global video production for the Red Bull brand.

During the event the discussion on the Technology trends panel brought together Hans Martin Paar, News Director Servus TV, Fabian Dorschel, Global Head of Media Techology & IT Red Bull, Frederic Bochart, Director of Technology RTL Belgium, and Martin Boronski, CTO BCE, and raised some question about the future of broadcasting. Technology could help the media industry under cost pressure by simplifying the production chain. Moving to IP and the cloud to use serverless microservices is the way forward. Challenges are the lacking competences needed for this transformation as well as that the cloud technology is dominated by the US providers.

After hosting the Technology trends panel, Sime Jurlina, ENEX Head of Finance and Operations said: “It seems that broadcast and broadband have finally met. There is an evolution happening and we are looking forward to excitement around new and improved ways of reaching our audiences. We would like to thank Servus TV, Red Bull Media House and Red Bull for providing us an opportunity to have this discussion in Salzburg.”

Gerry Collins, Director of Product Management Mobile Networks from Intelsat provided more information on the interesting topic of how 5G, IP and Satellite are converging to give us a seamless network for contribution and distribution of our stories and signals.

Also watch out for SaaS as a service! Is everything in the cloud built for the cloud and providing you optimal usage? CEO of Fonn Group, Haarvard Myklebust gave us some industry insights as the leading software developer for newsroom production systems.

Our partner 1+1 from Ukraine closed the conference with their impressive presentation on how they are using Starlink terminals to cover the frontline, but also all other news in Ukraine. They see it as very resilient and reliable and are sure it will improve with more satellites in orbit. Ukrainian media received the terminals for free and is not paying any service fees.

There were many networking opportunities, from drinks and dinners to teambuilding exercises. The most exciting one was the Red Bull Gravity Challenge! 12 different teams had to land an egg unharmed from the height of 15 meters. It was a real team effort and… something really unbelievable happened. Two teams actually landed the egg uncracked on hard cement path in the FC Red Bull Salzburg stadium. “The Omellets” took the win with a minimum advantage.

To get ready to jump into the rich day full of new information and exchange of views we needed some help. And the perfect recipe was breakfast on the 15th floor of hotel Cool Mama with the most wonderful view of the Alps.