16
December 2018
NFV and SDN
at the core of
IP transition
Ooyala joins
SRT Alliance
More affordable way
to create high-quality
EAS alert crawls
Digital Alert Systems/Monroe
Electronics, global providers of
emergency communications
solutions for video service providers,
has partnered with DigIT Signage
Technologies to interface the ChyTV.
ChyTV is a version of the ChyTV video
graphics system for TV, information
displays and digital signage, with the
DASDEC series of Emergency Alert
System/Common Alerting Protocol
(EAS/CAP) flexible emergency
communications devices. The
integration, said the companies, brings
to the marketplace a better, lower-cost
solution for creating selective, high-
quality crawls for EAS alerts on SD and
HD channels.
PANELLISTS
Chong Siew Loong
CTO
StarHub
The road to IP involves much
more than just replacing SDI.
What exactly lies at the heart
of this transition?
T
he move to IP has been one of the most
keenly discussed topics in the broadcast
and media industry in recent years.
However, while broadcasters and
media owners continue to plan their own
paths to IP, it would be too simplistic to
see the conversion to IP as just replacing
SDI. Instead, there is a “bigger transition”
at play, emphasised Michel Proulx, media
industry advisor and former CTO of
Miranda Technologies.
Speaking as the keynote presenter dur-
ing the APB IP Master Class held in June
this year in Singapore, Proulx referred
the “bigger transition” to the move from
hardware-based, fixed-function solutions
towards software-based solutions. He
explained: “The software-defined world
needs IP because the real deal of flexibility
comes from software, which will allow
fixed tools to be more agile. Moreover, the
benefits of moving to software is greater,
as it will eventually lead to virtualisation
and the cloud.”
This is an assessment that found reso-
nance with John Mailhot, CTO, network-
Oolaya is the newest member to the SRT
Alliance, a collaboration to continuously
develop the Secure Reliable Transport
(SRT) protocol and technology stack for
low-latency video streaming across any
network. Belasar Lepe, founder and CTO
of Ooyala, said: “Ooyala fully supports
the SRT Alliance’s goals; we are all about
driving innovation and collaboration to
overcome the challenges to achieving
consistently low-latency video
streaming. Providing the best digital
video experience is a major part of our
mission, and we’re fully committed to
delivering just that — reliable video
quality unfettered by latency issues,
stuttering and dropouts. This industry-
wide collaboration is a key step in giving
viewers TV-grade performance, with the
added benefits unique to online.”
While broadly described as the transition to IP, network function virtualisaton (NFV) and
software-defined networking (SDN) are perhaps the most important underlying elements
broadcasters and media companies need to embrace.
ing, Imagine Communications, who
told APB: “Network function virtu-
alisaton (NFV) and software-defined
networking (SDN) go hand-in-hand
with IP.”
He describes NFV as the network-
ing part of the move from dedicated/
purpose-built broadcast equipment
to software/virtualised functions that
can run on commercial-off-the-shelf
(COTS) hardware. SDN, meanwhile,
can be seen as the control and man-
agement methodology that applies
equally to NFV and to the physical
Dell EMC’s software
infrastructure helps
broadcasters to manage
their platforms like a
cloud, and to leverage an
intelligent mix of public
and private cloud services
to get the most efficient,
secure and cost-effective
operation.
❝ So the transition of NFV
Michael Cronk
Chairman,
Alliance for IP Media
Solutions (AIMS)
Peter Bithos
CEO, HOOQ
that the telecom industry
went through over the
past two decades is now a
reality for broadcast and
media companies. We call
it ‘MFV’ — Media Function
Virtualisation. ❞
— Charles Sevior,
CTO, Dell EMC
underlying networks, depending on
the implementation scale and band-
width requirements.
“In the future, we foresee a flexible
combination of physical and virtual,
depending on the specifics of the im-
plementation,” Mailhot continues.
“Management of networked, virtual-
ised functionality includes the tools
needed to define and orchestrate the
virtual functions, and to orchestrate
the underlying connectivity — the
network between them, including
managing load balancing, bandwidth
and scaling — that is, starting new
services when needed or requested.”
When it comes to the transition to
IP, nobody in the broadcast industry
will be getting an award from their
CEOs for replacing all the SDI cables
and routers with an IP network de-
ploying SMPTE ST-2110 technology,
suggests Charles Sevior, CTO of Dell
EMC. The actual business benefits, he
highlights, is not from the IP technol-
ogy itself, but from moving to a more
agile, flexible infrastructure that can
support new content types, without
having to go through a major rip and
having to go through expensive up-
grades every few years.
Sevior elaborates: “If you compare
the past transitions of analogue to
digital, or SD to HD, the latest technol-
ogy transition is essentially to abstract
the media services and functions them-
selves away from the specific hardware.
“So the transition of NFV that the