Moving OTT and IPTV operations onto IP-centric solutions and platforms is both complex and fraught with the chance of error. Survival requires that facility managers and engineers at broadcasters learn to swim in the IP pool. Don’t be afraid to seek help.
In the previous articles, we investigated IP from a broadcast engineers point of view as it helps us understand IP. In this article, we start to look at audio integration, and how we make IP work with audio signals, and the challenges we need to overcome.
Point to point connections with well-designed standards have given broadcaster engineers piece of mind for many years, knowing when they connect one AES-3 audio output to an AES-3 audio input, the two will connect seamlessly and audio will pass without incident. The same can be said of MADI and analogue twisted pair. Signal routing is easy to follow using numbered cabling and system diagrams.
As broadcasting moves to highly efficient production lines of the future, understanding business needs is key for engineers, and recognizing the commercial motivations of CEOs and business owners is crucial to building a successful media platform.
With recent events in mind, IP-Security has jumped to the top of the queue once again. The world’s biggest cyber-terror attack wiped out hundreds of thousands of computers and many more critical files, causing chaos in train terminals, the health service and institutions alike.
Broadcast engineers have a whole plethora of tools available in their kit-bag to integrate systems. The common denominators are SDI, AES and MADI for media exchange, serial and ethernet protocols for control, and the trusted GPI should everything else fail.