Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 NAB Show Edition | Page 99

The New World of Teleprompting Over IP: Building in Redundancy for Global Broadcast Workflows By Aaron Brady, technical sales manager, prompting, Autoscript Along with some fairly daunting challenges, the IP revolution is offering highly compelling opportu- nities for media operations of all sizes and levels of complexity. Spurred by the recent publication of the new SMPTE ST-2110 suite of standards for professional media over managed IP networks, the broadcast industry’s reliance on proprietary techniques and systems is beginning to fade. As the prospect of migrating from SDI-based to all- IP signal distribution moves from a question of “if” to “when and how,” media companies are re- thinking their approach to virtually every aspect of production – including teleprompting systems. on proven technology, used for many years by computers in the home, the office, and around the world to connect over the internet via their Ethernet ports. Because IP is so widespread, it’s supported by commodity, low-cost hardware that’s easy to acquire and set up – the main rea- son that an IP network topology offers virtually unlimited scalability for global workflows. Core redundancy for failsafe prompting IP-enabled prompting creates endless oppor- tunities for broadcast operations to collaborate across geographies and allocate resources cost- effectively. One operator can control the script, speed, and other prompting attributes in multiple locations and instantly switch control to another operator anywhere in the world when necessary. For instance, an operator in New York can control a prompter in Dallas and then, from the same workstation, begin operating a prompter in Los Angeles. By the same token, IP is a protocol that’s made to be interrupted, meaning it offers outstanding reliability and built-in opportunities for redundan- cy in large, geographically dispersed broadcast operations. This is a tremendous breakthrough for prompting systems, which until now have relied on USB and serial protocols such as RS 232 and RS 422 to connect the controller to the prompt- ing engine and deliver prompting output to the monitor. USB, while also designed to be interrupt- ed, is a point-to-point protocol and therefore less than redundant, since a node failure requires a complete re-initialization sequence to re-establish the connection. One of the biggest drivers for IP is that it’s based When each component of the prompting sys- Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 99