Are you an IT engineer having trouble figuring out why the phones, computers and printer systems work but the networked video doesn’t? Or maybe you have 10-15 years of experience with video production equipment but really don’t understand why the rack room is filled with things called “switches.” Help for both levels of expertise is just ahead.
As broadcasters migrate to IP, the spotlight is focusing more and more on IT infrastructure. Quietly in the background, IT has been making unprecedented progress in infrastructure design to deliver low latency high-speed networks, and new highly adaptable business models, to make real-time video and audio work in IT infrastructures.
Amidst the chaos of these times, it’s nice to see some things getting simpler. The use of cloud technology has now become mainstream within media companies, and with that the highly customized and complex systems deployed by early adopters are increasingly being retired in favor of off-the-shelf, multi-tenant SaaS, Software as a System solution.
Network Interface Cards (NIC’s) are often seen as the bottleneck of data processing for ST2110 and ST2022-6. IT manufacturers have witnessed similar challenges with high speed trading and 5G networks but have been able to provide real-time solutions to overcome latency and blocking. In this article, we investigate IT’s achievements and how they are applicable to broadcast television.
Riding on the back of IT innovation allows broadcasters to benefit from virtualization. In this article, we investigate those benefits and learn how they apply to television. Especially as we learn of the new trailblazers waiting in the wings.
If you can see how a magic act is performed, POOF! the magic disappears. Live TV is a magic act because so much of the on-screen magic happens behind the curtain. When a random device malfunctions or fails during a live show, if the talent doesn’t blab the secret on-air, viewers probably won’t notice. As many great engineers and directors have said in so many ways, “They won’t know unless you tell ‘em.”
Networked modular audio stageboxes have been around for a while and were hailed as a convenient alternative to clunky snakes and the huge patch bays that came with them. Unlike analog stage- and wallboxes, which usually only transmit signals to fixed locations or else require intricate and time-consuming cabling, they simplify connections and provide flexibility with respect to the I/O types.
Delivering live, high quality broadcast video over the internet has always been an interesting challenge. Broadcast engineers are expected to understand and manage complex video, networking, scale, reliance, and playback to deliver reliable programming to multi-platform viewing devices. In this series of articles, we delve deeper into live-OTT broadcasting, identify some of these challenges, and present strategies for achieving reliable live-OTT distribution.
