Designing IP Broadcast Systems: Part 2 - IT Philosophies, Cloud Infrastructure, & Addressing

Welcome to the second part of ‘Designing IP Broadcast Systems’ - a major 18 article exploration of the technology needed to create practical IP based broadcast production systems. Part 2 discusses the different philosophies of IT & Broadcast, the advantages and challenges of integrating cloud infrastructure, hybrid systems, and the role of layer 2 & layer 3 packet addressing.

About 'Designing IP Broadcast Systems'

This series builds on the foundations of the huge body of work already published by The Broadcast Bridge on IP. The 18 article collection delves deeper into various aspects of how IP based systems work, with detailed technical explorations of key themes including; design philosophies, discoverability, hybrid systems, remote production, cloud infrastructure and software control layers.

IP for broadcasting is no longer a theoretical concept. It is proving its worth in television stations throughout the world. But transitioning to IP has its challenges, even for those lucky enough to work on greenfield sites. The abstraction of the video and audio essence from the underlying timing plane is presenting many issues whose solutions were often taken for granted in SDI and AES infrastructures, but the learning curve needed to make IP systems work for broadcasting is well worth the investment.

Fundamentally, we’re distributing synchronous video and audio over an asynchronous network, and in doing so, we’re effectively destroying the timing plane. To reconstruct the video and audio signals at the destination we must synthesize a timing system that operates over an asynchronous packet switched network. Switch buffers with indeterminate latencies conspire against this goal so packet jitter and loss become something we have to work with.

To achieve the promise of scalability, flexibility, and resilience, a change in mindset is required as broadcast engineers expect video and audio signals to be delivered with near perfection, but IT engineers and the vendors who manufacture routing and switching equipment assume there will be some packet loss due to the dynamic nature of IP networks. Once this has been accepted, then designing IP broadcast systems becomes more achievable.

Designing IP Broadcast Systems picks up the story where ' Understanding IP Broadcast Production Networks- The Book' left it, and assumes the reader has read this earlier work.  

Designing IP Broadcast systems will publish in four parts. Details of all four parts can be found HERE.


About Part 2. IT Philosophies, Integrating Cloud Infrastructure, Addressing & Packet Delivery

Part 2 is a free PDF download containing 4 articles:

Article 1 : Where Broadcast Meets IT
Broadcast and IT engineers have historically approached their professions from two different places, but as technology is more reliable, they are moving closer.

Article 2 : Integrating Cloud Infrastructure
Connecting on-prem broadcast infrastructures to the public cloud leads to a hybrid system which requires reliable secure high value media exchange and delivery..

Article 3 : With ST2110, You’ve Got The Power
Our partner Lawo discuss how a hybrid infrastructure that combines SDI and server based processing technologies, connected by an ST 2110 IP core offers the best of all worlds.

Article 4 : Addressing & Packet Delivery
Layer-3 and layer-2 addresses work together to deliver data link layer packets and frames across networks to improve efficiency and reduce congestion.

Part of a series supported by

You might also like...

Microphones: Part 11 - The State Of The Art… And The Potential Of MEMS Microphone Arrays

Here we look from the state of the art in microphones, to what the future may bring with the enticing theoretical potential of microphone arrays built using MEMS technology.

IP Monitoring & Diagnostics With Command Line Tools: Part 2 - Testing Remote Connections

In the previous article, we set the scene for working with the Command Line Interface (CLI) on a UNIX system. Now we will explore some techniques for performing basic tests on our network infrastructure to check for potential problems.

Microphones: Part 10 - Mid-Side (M-S) Recording And Processing

M-S techniques provide useful sound-field positioning and a convenient way to check mono compatibility. We explain the hard science behind this often misunderstood technique.

Microphones: Part 9 - The Science Of Stereo Capture & Reproduction

Here we look at the science of using a matched pair of microphones positioned as a coincident pair to capture stereo sound images.

Microphones: Part 8 - Audio Vectorscopes

The audio vectorscope is an excellent tool for assuring quality in stereo sound production, because it makes the virtual sound image visible in the same way that a television vectorscope allows the color signals to be seen.