IP, Virtualization To Drive Workflows At NAB

One year ago, it looked as if the TV industry’s effort to find an IP replacement for SDI signal transport and production might spin out of control. Competing, non-interoperable standards and protocols were emerging to create an all-too-familiar, unwelcome situation reminiscent of the bad old days of incompatible videotape formats.

But a funny thing has happened. Vendors, technologists and broadcasters have come together over the intervening months to find common ground and avert the IP equivalent of format wars.

At the 2017 NAB Show (April 22-27 in Las Vegas), the fruit of that effort, the SMPTE ST 2110 draft standard, will be on full display in vendor booths and at a special interoperability exhibit where multiple vendors will demonstrate the ability to pass IP streams of video, audio, control and metadata among their equipment.

“I think the biggest development over the past year is the entire market seems to have agreed upon a single standard [SMPTE ST 2110],” says Deon LeCointe, Sony’s senior manager, IP production technology and sports solutions.

By doing so, the television industry has opened itself up to taking “advantage of optimal processing” and an “able-bodied network architecture,” says Alan Hoff, VP, market solutions, at Avid.

The new standard, which has at its foundation work done by the Video Services Forum on technical recommendation 03, or TR-03, not only will support separate IP streams for signal essences, but also provide for the IP equivalent of an embedded SDI signal that is compatible with the SMPTE 2022-6 standard, he says.

“It’s going to be a big Lingua Franca for the industry,” Hoff says.

The importance of IP for media transport and production may best be understood as being the essential ingredient for leveraging the power and affordability offered by common, off-the-shelf technology from the IT industry, says Ciaran Doran, EVP for international sales and marketing at Pixel Power.

“Within the past six to 12 months, broadcasters have begun to realize that IP is an enabler,” he says. “The true goal [of the transition from SDI to IP] is finding solutions that are truly software-only and as a result of that can be virtualized.”

Twenty years ago, the computing power available in the general market was insufficient to handle the requirements of playout, graphics rendering, routing, transcoding and other core broadcast functions. “Now that compute power is ubiquitous with COTS,” he says.

Virtualization will be a big part of the IP story at the NAB Show, says Mo Goyal, director of product marketing at Evertz.

“I think you are going to see a lot of different flavors of cloud services and virtualization. Some are going to be FPGA-based, which offers the ability to spin up and down services in a real-time environment with ultra-low latency,” he says.

Other examples will highlight the use of the public cloud for playout and even production services, Goyal adds.

Deciding to run broadcast and production services in a virtualized environment, whether in an on-premise datacenter or in the cloud, grows out of a willingness on the part of broadcasters to rely on COTS hardware, says Mark Hilton, VP of networking at Grass Valley.

“We are seeing a lot more acceptance of COTS-based solutions,” he says.

However, Hilton cautions that while some off-the-shelf IT technology is up to the demands of broadcasting, it’s important to be choosy. “Just throwing a random set of switches together and hoping it works is not a good strategy,” he says.

He points to the Cisco 9000 series and the Arista 7500 as examples of high-performance COTS switches that can handle broadcast applications.

A key benefit of IP and virtualization over SDI transport is how they impact broadcast and production workflows.

Together, the technologies will play a major role in the workflows broadcaster need to deploy to reap the benefits of a future ATSC 3.0 deployment, says Steve Reynolds, CTO of Imagine Communications.

Over-the-air, 3.0 single frequency networks (SFNs) leveraging a special aspect of the next-gen TV standard will be able to transmit different ads to hyperlocal audiences within a DMA — much like cable TV today delivers zoned ads, he says.

That creates the opportunity to insert specific commercials for each zone and in the process, generate more station revenue.

The technology needed to do so will be microservices running in the cloud, which Imagine Communications will be showing at the show.

“Using our Regional Ad Distribution System, a station can do replacement of advertising in a cloud-based origination stream [which would feed individual SFN transmitter sites] to enable advertising on a hyperlocal level,” Reynolds says.

The impact of IP and virtualization on broadcast workflow will also one day touch large station groups looking for new capital and personnel efficiencies, and it’s likely the technologies needed will begin appearing at the NAB Show, says Avid’s Hoff.

Rather than having each station in a group “uploading and downloading the same content,” those functions could be centralized in a datacenter, which is “a real compelling use case for IP over SDI,” he says.

In sports, IP and virtualization have already begun to impact production, says James Stellpflug, VP of marketing at EVS.

“IP is enabling new workflows by allowing people to work in other places and participate in a production,” he says. “It is allowing them to contribute files to broadcast centers efficiently without having to jump through too many hoops.”

(Note: Click here to access TVNewsCheck’s NAB 2017 Resource Guide listing of IP vendors and products.)

Joop Janssen, CEO of Aperi, echoes that sentiment. “IP and virtualization enable you to have a lot of the [production] equipment located away from the trucks and the stadium and centralized in a remote control room,” he says. “Ultimately, all this processing will go into the cloud even for live sports.”

While enabling new, more efficient workflows and enhanced flexibility and agility are big reasons for broadcasters to adopt IP, the desire to be UHD-ready is equally important, says Phil Myers, IP production manager for Snell Advanced Media (SAM).

“Here in Europe we are seeing an increased demand for UHD live production,” he says. “That benefits greatly in terms of the signal handling of IP.”

A future ATSC 3.0 deployment — with the next-gen TV standard’s support for 4K — may similarly encourage U.S. broadcasters producing and distributing UHD to look seriously at IP transport and switching, whether via 25 Gigabit, 40G or 100G Ethernet, he says.

Broadcasters’ interest in live IP production also will be motivated by “something that no one really saw coming” a year or two ago, says Andrew Cross, president-CTO of NewTek.

“That’s Facebook Live. It has captured some astronomical share of the live video market in under two years,” he says.

As of August 2016, Mediakix reported that 100 million hours of Facebook videos are watched daily and that Facebook Live videos are viewed three times longer than non-live video, illustrating the level of engagement viewers have with the content.

“The reality is a big part of the traditional media world is working out how to adopt this new reality,” he says.

Many will come to the NAB Show looking for online video technology that makes production affordable for multiple platforms, says Cross. “Facebook Live is the catalyst that’s making this [uptake of online video gear] go from zero to 100 mph.

As new demands like Facebook Live and the need to produce UHD mount on broadcast and production workflows, and agreement emerges on a standard to carry the industry forward, broadcasters will have a high degree of motivation to learn more about IP at the NAB Show.

“Over the last 12 months, we have seen an execution of the vision we all had for the past few years that IP is ready for real-time video production applications,” says Aperi’s Janssen.

Stellpflug from EVS agrees, and sees this year’s gathering in Las Vegas as a chance to take a deeper dive into these developments. “NAB will provide a great opportunity to educate yourself and to see the way in which facilities will be able to be designed and to make sure you are understanding the transformation IP can bring.”

Click here to access TVNewsCheck’s NAB 2017 Resource Guide listing of IP vendors and products or click here to download it as a PDF.

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