Guest Blog by: Roger Sherwood, Cisco Manager of Sales Business Development for Service Provider
The idea was born in Paris late 2015. 42 Mediatvcom and the R&D Department of public broadcaster France Televisions wanted to build a proof‐of-concept demonstration for broadcasters interested in interconnecting their television studios over IP.
The design parameters: it had to be end-to-end, interoperate across multiple vendors and showcase how studios can migrate to IP using open source components.
Next-generation IP Video routing is part of Cisco’s new “Media Blueprint,” to help broadcasters, content providers and media and entertainment companies make the move to all-IP infrastructure. Cisco’s part in the project involved our Nexus series of IP switches, which make it easier to connect and manage disparate data center resources using software-defined networking (SDN). In the demo, our Nexus IP switches were part of the studio migration of production media networks to IP. We collaborated with a great mix of companies in the experiment including:
- EVS
- Embrionix
- Imagine Communications
- GrassValley, a Belden Brand,
- Nevion
- S-A-M
- Tektronix
Studios migrating production-grade content to IP is both a new opportunity and a challenge for broadcasters worldwide — moving live television in real-time over IP requires best-in-class reliability and stability, particularly for high-profile, must-see events.
The Paris demonstration included the engineering departments of all major French TV channels and broadcasters, which delivered spectacular, real-time, uncompressed video inside a full IP production environment — cameras, switchers, multi-viewers, SMPTE 2022-6-based gateways, slow motion servers and clock generators, in addition to our carrier-class Nexus switching platform.
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Brilliant! I expect a reduction in costs over traditional methods, however one must worry about securing the link as to avoid the tampering of the data packages by third parties and how will this affect the speed of the entire process.
Excellent topic, and good to see so much traction on the subject all IP based live media production!
There is no doubt that in order to make this transition a success for the industry it requires a very high quality, non-blocking, network with no loss, no jitter and deterministic latency!
To get ahead of the cost curve we have to leverage the capabilities of off-the-shelf switches and off-the-shelf compute, so I’m very happy to see Cisco matches such expectations and prove the ability to combine live and non-live traffic within the same IP devices!