6
NEWS & VIEWS
December 2018
IP and its impact on broadcast
– now and the future
BY MIKE CRONK
For the past years, Internet Protocol
(IP) for broadcast has been highlighted
as a key technology in many industry
surveys. It promises to transform how
broadcasters and other media compa-
nies use and access live video, audio
and data within production, playout
and delivery workflows. As we close
2018, where are we? I submit we can
definitively say that IP is beginning
to have the positive transformational
impact we have envisioned.
The broadcast industry has come
together to support a common set of
standards for IP transport, the SMPTE
ST 2110 standards suite. Many broad-
casters, including CCTV in China, KBS
in South Korea, CNN, Fox Networks
and others in the US, NEP in Australia
and multiple facilities in Europe have
implemented SMPTE ST 2110-based
systems.
The technology has been used on
such high-profile events as the soccer
World Cup earlier this year in Russia,
the UK Royal Wedding and Wimbledon
tennis, and adoption continues to
grow. At IBC2018 in September, the IP
Showcase featured 58 vendors
with a total of 168 products, not
just interoperating, but demon-
strating the clear benefits of
IP-based systems.
It is precisely these benefits
that are transformational, and
which deliver on the promise
of IP. As part of our prepara-
tion for the IP Showcase events
which we sponsor, AIMS reaches out
to broadcasters who have deployed IP
systems to get a sense of the benefits
these systems bring.
The most often cited benefit is
that IP allows broadcasters to build a
plant infrastructure which is capable of
handling any format. Given the prolif-
eration of formats such as the various
flavours of high dynamic range (HDR),
1080p, UHD-1 and UHD-2, no one has
the perfect crystal ball to predict which
of these must be handled within their
facility.
In this environment, IP is the perfect
choice for a new infrastructure build.
Today, IP switches with 100G ports are
commonplace and announcements
of 400G switches have recently been
made. With port speeds like these and
a SMPTE ST 2110 standard that can
handle the transport of any of these
formats, a broadcaster can build an
infrastructure that can accommodate
any of the above formats, and that
infrastructure can be easily expanded.
Those of us who remember the
transition from SD to HD know that
an SDI router upgrade of that mag-
nitude is a big change. With today’s
proliferation of formats and rapidly
❝Now, with the
foundational protocols
of the SMPTE ST 2110
suite well established,
we look to the future.
IP can be used today
very successfully as the
multitude of successful
installations attest
to. With additional
specifications, IP can
also provide even greater
benefits to our industry.❞
changing environment, a technology
like IP allows one to make an invest-
ment that is flexible enough to last far
into the future.
Another often cited advantage of
IP from those broadcasters who are
on air with SMPTE ST 2110 is scale.
Technologically speaking, based on the
design of modern SDI crosspoint chips,
a 1152 x 1152 HD/3G router is the limit
for a practical router design, and that
router would take up about one full
rack. If one were to try to build a 4K/
Ultra HD (UHD) router with the same
technology, a router that supported
1152 x 1152 signals would take four
racks!
So how then does one build a
network facility with signal routing re-
quirements larger than this? How does
one build a 4K/UHD outside broadcast
(OB) truck that does not sacrifice on
the number of cameras or vision mixer
ports it can support? How does one
provide sufficient multiviewing capabil-
ity for medium to large-scale systems?
The answer is IP.
A great example is Arena TV. The
UK-based OB production company
now has four IP-based OB trucks in
operation involved in the broadcast of
such iconic UK sporting events such as
Premier League football.
As it sets out to build its first 4K/
UHD truck, OB-X, the company wanted
to be able to support 32 4K/UHD cam-
eras and has the largest 4K/UHD vision
mixer the market offered. When Arena
TV looked at building this with SDI,
there was not a 12G-SDI router on the
market large enough (and there still is
not), and if it used 3G routing technol-
ogy (to transport 4K/UHD as four 2SI
streams), the SDI routing system would
take up four full racks.
By contrast, the IP switch which sup-
ports OB-X is a mere 10 rack units, and
it has bandwidth to spare! Literally, the
signal scale that can be achieved with
IP routing cannot be matched with SDI.
The third most often cited benefit
of IP is the ability to share resources.
As IP signals can be transmitted over
long distances, either in a facility or
over continents via a wide area network
(WAN), equipment does not have to
be co-located. This in turn enables the
ability to share resources that are not
co-located. An example of this is what
NEP has done in Australia.
NEP has connected 29 venues to
two central production hubs, one in
Sydney and the other in Melbourne.
This allows NEP to connect cameras
at the venues to the network while
sharing key production equipment
centrally. Production crews in Sydney
and Melbourne can produce the events
and often the same crew can produce
more than one event in the same day
because they need not travel from
venue to venue.
Other broadcasters are taking ad-
vantage of IP’s long-distance transmis-
sion capabilities to locate the bulk of
their broadcast equipment in an area
with cheaper real estate, leaving only
their studios and talent in a higher rent
city area. These are variations on a com-
mon theme: with IP, one has more free-
dom to locate equipment and people
where it makes the best business sense.
As the above examples show, the
promise of IP for broadcasters is now
becoming quite tangible. Now, with the
foundational protocols of the SMPTE
ST 2110 suite well established, we look
to the future. IP can be used today
very successfully as the multitude of
successful installations attest to. With
additional specifications, IP can also
provide even greater benefits to our
industry.
As I write this, key industry organi-
sations involved in the development of
standards and open specifications are
seeking to build on the strong foun-
dation of SMPTE ST 2110. With future
specifications and common approaches
to compressed video transport, discov-
ery, registration, channel grouping, tally
and reliable transport over the Internet,
our industry will be able to build more
agile, more flexible and more power-
ful systems, and do so faster than ever
before. For this reason, the positive
impact of IP on our industry is only just
beginning.
Mike Cronk is Chairman of the Board,
Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS).
He is also an APB Panellist.
APB PANELLISTS
Graham Stephens
CTO
Media City
Development, Malaysia
Goh Kim Soon
Senior Vice-President
Broadcast Engineering
Mediacorp
Shad Hashmi
Vice-President,
Digital Development,
Global Markets & Operations,
BBC Worldwide Asia