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-
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