TV Industry Braces For The Impact Of IP

The television business stands at the cusp of another historic transition, but this time the disruption it causes will be focused inward at broadcast operations rather than outward at confused viewers trying to figure out why their favorite station seemingly has disappeared.

Fueled by IP video transport and routing, generic IT technology, software as a solution and dynamic user interfaces that can be customized for the task at hand, this new transition will likely be the ultimate undoing and remaking of how TV is produced, encoded and played out today.

Broadcasters, vendors and standards bodies are already laying the foundation for this transition to IP-based workflows in anticipation of a time in the not-too-distant future when the role of technological mainstays at stations, such as the serial digital interface (SDI), video routers and purpose-built devices, begin to fade.

Vendors have branded their particular approach to fueling this transition with different names. Avid rolled out Avid Everywhere at the NAB Show; Grass Valley calls its version Stratus; Harmonic dubs its approach VOS, or Virtualized Video Solution; Imagine Communications (formerly Harris Broadcast) calls its vision MultiService SDN, or Software-Defined Networking, and Snell refers to its approach as the XS platform.

But whatever the name, the underlying technology making these and other new systems possible has as much, if not more, to do with advancements in the general computing and networking worlds as it does with developments in broadcast technology.

Those origins in IT — where data moves as IP packets and computers can run one application at one moment and another piece of software at another — are the root of the big changes to come.

“We are definitely looking at the possibility of a video infrastructure replacement with IP,” said Michael Koetter, senior vice president, media technology and development for Turner Broadcasting System, regarding CNN. “What I mean by that is replacing SDI.”

While outright replacement, such as the one Koetter is contemplating, is unlikely for most broadcasters as a first step, the benefits IP workflows offer are so appealing many broadcasters will deploy bits and pieces as parts of their baseband video infrastructure age and need to be replaced.

“Slowly there will be small islands of IP that will make their way into people’s infrastructure,” said Steve Copeland, director of networking product line management at Imagine Communications. “Those islands will continue to grow and take up more and more space within the facility. And the baseband, or SDI, portion will correspondingly shrink.”

One day, further off, these hybrid IP-SDI infrastructures will begin giving way to something that more closely resembles a data center than today’s television technology. “No longer will broadcasters be tied to proprietary hardware, or hardware where the functionality or ability to control that hardware is built into the hardware itself,” said Copeland.

IP WORKFLOW ADVANTAGES

To understand the benefits of IP workflows in broadcast, Eric DuFosse, segment marketing live production, Grass Valley, said it’s useful to distinguish between three different levels of workflow at stations: technical, operational and business.

Setting aside business — which include sales, customer relationship management and traffic — DuFosse said it’s the technical and operational layers where the IP workflows will make their mark by abstracting the technology underpinnings of the workflow from how operators access, configure and use those resources.

“This is what I describe as the operational workflows managing the infrastructure,” he said. “I don’t need to know where my video server is to do an ingest or record or play. I just don’t care.”

There will no longer be a need to request an engineer to reconfigure a patch bay or router for a specific task. What’s more, by abstracting the operational control of the technical layer, an administrator can configure Stratus with only the controls needed to do a certain task for one operator and reconfigure it with other tools needed by another operator for a different task, DuFosse added.

In essence, control interfaces will transform from the means to control single-purpose pieces of production hardware to an operational interface that controls various software tasks running on blade servers. They’ll be able to run encoding software for one task, then a graphics package for another, then an editing application and so on and so forth. And that will virtualize today’s ingest, production, encoding and playout workflows in an IT environment.

Ian Trow, senior director of emerging technology and strategy at Harmonic, said it may take some getting used to for some broadcasters to fully embrace this virtualized approach. “It’s not clear at what rate conservative broadcasters, who quite rightly have certain expectations in terms of robustness and resilience, are prepared to adopt this new technology and operational practice,” he said.

However, the broadcast industry as a whole has “come of age” when it comes to IT and networking, said Trow.

HARMONIC AND AVID UNVEILINGS

At the 2014 NAB Show, Harmonic fully embraced virtualized broadcast workflows with the introduction of its VOS Virtualized Video Solution and its first application, which encompasses encoding. Using blade servers rather than introducing a new piece of custom hardware, VOS represents “the dawning of a new era in video” where central processing units and graphics processing units absorb high-bandwidth, processor-intensive video applications, Trow said.

Virtualizing workflows and abstracting operational control over the technical layer does not need to be confined to the brick and mortar of an individual station or television network headquarters, however. IP networking opens the doors to creative collaboration without geographical limitations. At NAB this year, Avid unveiled its vision for the future called Avid Everywhere.

Based on the company’s Media Central Platform, Avid’s goal is to expand its workflows to enable creative collaboration on production of content and technology worldwide. For TV broadcasters, the first manifestation of this vision is the relaunch of Media Composer Cloud, said David Colantuoni, senior director product management at Avid.

“The engine that sits in the Media Central Platform is the key driver of Media Composer Cloud. It basically allows you to take your Media Composer out of a newsroom environment, walk outside and have the same access that you have inside of the building to all your content and the same holistics of editorial that you had to create your story,” he said.

While no content actually leaves the building, Media Composer Cloud gives editors the same experience they would have if they were working at the station. With this new approach, video streams to the remote editing station; edits are done, and metadata is sent back to the station via an IP network connection to execute the edits of the content. “This is the first take on where we see the Media Central Platform evolving with remote collaboration,” said Colantuoni.

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

If IP networking and generic IT computing create a tsunami-sized workflow transformation in the future, the industry today is in the earliest stages of the SDI bay being sucked out to a sea of change. Dipping its toe into the water at the 2014 NAB Show, Imagine Communications unveiled its conceptual approach to how IP workflows will integrate into today’s SDI world. 

The company’s MultiService SDN uses IP networking technology to make it possible for islands of IP workflows to exist within an SDI environment, said Copeland.

“The real key to the software-defined network is being able to manage how the video gets from one device to another,” he added.

“In a software-defined network, things will be connected via IP. It’s at that software layer that the network says the input that is coming in is from a particular IRD (integrated receiver/decoder) receiving a signal from a satellite,” he explained. “It doesn’t need to know specifically which IRD is connected to which device downstream, which is connected to the next one and so-forth.”

Two pieces of Imagine Communications technology enable IP islands to exist in an SDI facility, he said. The SDI Orchestrator allows the software-defined network to communicate with and control SDI and IP routers. The other piece is a module that coverts uncompressed SDI to IP and vice versa to provide IP on and off ramps to and from the islands.

Robert Rowe, managing director of live television for Quantel and Snell, said that while the future is IP, Snell is providing IP interfaces for its existing gear to help its customers during the transition.

“However, we will see all-IP studios and all-IP stations,” said Rowe. “There will be new greenfield ones.”

At IBC 2014 in September, Snell will introduce its XS platform, which enables software processing in a workflow enabled with real-time IP steaming, said Rowe. “There aren’t that many people using streams at the moment, but it is part of a bigger jigsaw puzzle of IP routing and IP production,” he explained.

Snell has partnered with Cisco on its IP efforts, particularly with the use of Cisco’s off-the-shelf, carrier grade routers in support of IP transport and routing around a studio. The partnership will be important to customers because it allows Snell to leverage the economies of scale of the $13 billion IP carrier-grade router market, rather than those of the $300 million SDI router market, he said.

THE M&A FACTOR

It may be coincidental that the level of mergers and acquisitions among television technology vendors has increased as preparations for an IP workflow-based future unfolds. But an important consequence of many of these deals is that the resulting companies are better positioned to develop and deliver technology in support of IP workflows.

Belden’s acquisition of Grass Valley and merger with Miranda; Imagine Communication’s acquisition of Digital Rapids; the acquisition of Snell by Quantel, and even the Harmonic buyout of Omneon appear to have placed the combined companies in a stronger position to take on the transition to IP workflows.

For example, part of the Digital Rapids acquisition was the Kayak dynamic workflow engine. Copeland said that technology is a key part of Imagine Communication’s effort to make this software-defined networking — and ultimately a software-defined workflow — a reality.

Similarly, the Grass Valley-Miranda merger (under the Belden acquisition) brought along technology to enhance the Stratus ingest and content preparation platform. In preparation for NAB in April, Miranda was readying a playout platform, said DuFosse.

Weeks before the show, Belden finalized the purchase of Grass Valley and merged it with Miranda. “We were able to demonstrate at NAB the integration of a playout solution into Stratus — Miranda’s planned playout system — that we call Stratus Playout,” he said. The playout addition “demonstrates how quickly Stratus can be integrated with other machines and infrastructures.”

Even though Harmonic announced its acquisition of Omneon in the spring of 2010, the buyout gave Harmonic access to technology that mirrored what was going on with datacenters and helped to position it for a virtualized future, said Trow.

“When Harmonic acquired Omneon, a lot of the RAID-based array structures and storage structures that Omneon supported were very, very similar to data-center type applications,” he said.

“Harmonic intuitively felt that IP was the right thing a long time ago, and it felt to maintain and grow our position in the marketplace you have to absorb complementary technology like Omneon’s.”

Quantel’s acquisition of Snell combined the IP expertise of both companies resulting in a sum greater than the separate parts, said Rowe.

“Snell had quite a dynamic IP strategy anyway; however, with the joining of Quantel and Snell together it meant we have a lot more resources that have experience in stream-based processing and codecs,” he said.

FADE TO BLACK

Many factors are contributing to the IP workflow transition at this nascent stage of existence.

Affordable processing on blade servers; development of standards to transport high bandwidth video via IP; a desire to be more agile in the provisioning of technology resources; the lower cost of IP when compared to SDI routing, and the need to be more flexible in how TV is produced, encoded and delivered are all factors likely to drive the transition to IP workflows.

In most cases, IP islands are likely to pop up in today’s SDI-dominated environment as broadcasters seek to reap some of the benefits without incurring the expense of a forklift replacement of their entire existing infrastructure.

However, it is likely that as broadcast managers, engineers and designers contemplate greenfield facilities, IP networks and virtualized workflows will increasingly be seen by many as the right approach to take. “As we look at some of our new facility builds and our replacement and renewal schedule for our existing big core routers,” Turner’s Koetter said, “I definitely see us taking advantage of IP technology.”

This story originally appeared in TVNewsCheck’s Executive Outlook, a quarterly print publication devoted to the future of broadcasting. Subscribe here.