Live TV is a like a magic act. It works best when the audience can’t see what’s really happening.
Visitors to IBC 2017 this September in Amsterdam might have concluded that a prediction made almost 20 years ago that over the air services such as TV transmission would migrate to the ground while those already on the ground such as voice telephony would take to the air has now completely come true. They would have witnessed the bullishness of Wi-Fi proponents combined with the low visibility of the principle wired alternatives, Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) and Home Plug powerline (PLC) for transmission over power cables.
In today’s highly competitive media environment, companies are always looking for ways to streamline their operations and speed up the processes involved in content creation. One of the most critical is post production workflows and the need to find audio and video material stored on ever-larger repositories.
In an article in the August issue title “Ethernet Basics for Studio Video Over IP,” I gave an overview of studio video over IP (SVIP) in the uncompressed domain using Ethernet. That article covered Ethernet basics such as subnets, multicasting, virtual local area networks, bandwidth considerations, and the Open Systems Interconnection model. Now we’ll look at the essential components of elementary audio, video, and data streams in an Ethernet network, and I’ll present some approaches to network design meant to help you get started building an organized Ethernet architecture.
It seems almost impossible to fathom now, but it was only fairly recently that businesses within the telecoms industry focused on one thing and one thing only: delivering telephone services for voice communication. It was this service that used to account for almost every single penny of revenue they earned (in the residential market at least), and by delivering this service they all felt as if they ‘owned the customer’. This focus on telephony can still be evidenced by simply looking at the names of several companies, including AT&T (American Telephone & Telegraph) in the US, Telefónica in Spain and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation) in Japan.
The business case for migrating to IP is compelling and driven by the needs of business owners. Broadcast engineers must rise to the challenge and if they are to deliver reliable IP infrastructures they must understand not only the technology, but the differences in how IT-Network and Broadcast engineers think.
As well as providing functionality, tangible products present the opportunity of adding worth through their aesthetic appearance, cost of manufacture and development expenditure adds to the perceived barrier to entry for other vendors, and combined with low volumes, the cost to broadcasters has been traditionally very high.
Virtualization and cloud computing is taking us back to the architecture of the mainframe era. A thin client, maybe just a browser, provides the user interface, and the processing takes place at a central location. The co-location of processing and media storage gives the performance needed in a post-production environment. The lightweight, network-connnected client give producers a new flexibility as to where users can access their content. Production is a global business, and producers need the ability to work wherever suits the needs of the production. An associated download from L.A. post house, DigitalFilm Tree, decribes their deployment of Avid Media Composer for global production services.
