For 20 years broadcasters have dreamed of a true media factory, where assets arrive and an automated plant configures and delivers the correct form of media to the proper location. The demands of new content players, smart TVs, tablets, phones and PCs, make that dream even more important. In fact, that can happen.
A good test and measurement solution combines both smart test equipment and a trained operator.
Increased global connectivity is enabling broadcasters operating across geographically dispersed locations to reevaluate the way they do business. In this article we take a look at examples of distributed media workflows, where advanced integration connects separate broadcast sites to form a mesh network of operational locations.
The BBC is arguably a pioneer and trendsetter of advanced broadcast technology, and for our first example we travel to the BBC’s operation in the Channel Islands (a collection of UK Crown Dependencies) where BBC Jersey and BBC Guernsey are sharing and exchanging media assets seamlessly using a Sienna Distributed Media Cloud across the two island sites some 40km apart.
In the second example we travel to Mexico City and Televisa - the world’s largest Spanish language broadcaster - where we investigate the latest chapter in the biggest Sienna system in the world, and see how no-compromise fault tolerance and mirroring is achieved with a completely replicated infrastructure pair - and no single point of failure.
When it comes to sports broadcasting, IP technology is changing the game with winning results. The use of IP has the potential to simplify sporting applications making them more cost effective and operationally efficient. From major global sporting events, to the coverage of smaller, niche sports, broadcasters can overcome a number of challenges, including issues surrounding scalability, and tackling the high level of cost and complexity associated with remote production, through the introduction of IP.
Beginning with IBC 2015, the broadcast and production industries have seen an increasingly large investment in IP-centric solutions being offered by vendors. While that is encouraging, customers need to be sure that the performance of a centralized solution is not compromised by a low-bandwidth network.
SMPTE defines a set of stringent requirements for return loss, which have been challenging for many hardware designers even at today’s speed of 2.97 Gbps. As the industry upgrades to 5.94 Gbps and 11.88 Gbps to support ultra-HD video resolutions, meeting return loss will become even more challenging.
As the volume of file-based media grows, the requirement for metadata advances significantly. Simultaneously, the number of sources of metadata available expands as each node in the programme chain adds information to the file. And here lies the problem, the amount of information a producer has to search through is increasing exponentially, and no one person will be able to access all of the available data in a coherent way.
A few years ago at a technical conference, the CTO of a major sports entity was challenging the storage vendors on how much storage capacity and throughput architecture would be needed to meet his needs. What they neglected to tell him was the cost, technology and resources required to monitor, maintain and manage it.
