When it comes to sports broadcasting, IP technology is changing the game with winning results. The use of IP has the potential to simplify sporting applications making them more cost effective and operationally efficient. From major global sporting events, to the coverage of smaller, niche sports, broadcasters can overcome a number of challenges, including issues surrounding scalability, and tackling the high level of cost and complexity associated with remote production, through the introduction of IP.
Beginning with IBC 2015, the broadcast and production industries have seen an increasingly large investment in IP-centric solutions being offered by vendors. While that is encouraging, customers need to be sure that the performance of a centralized solution is not compromised by a low-bandwidth network.
SMPTE defines a set of stringent requirements for return loss, which have been challenging for many hardware designers even at today’s speed of 2.97 Gbps. As the industry upgrades to 5.94 Gbps and 11.88 Gbps to support ultra-HD video resolutions, meeting return loss will become even more challenging.
As the volume of file-based media grows, the requirement for metadata advances significantly. Simultaneously, the number of sources of metadata available expands as each node in the programme chain adds information to the file. And here lies the problem, the amount of information a producer has to search through is increasing exponentially, and no one person will be able to access all of the available data in a coherent way.
A few years ago at a technical conference, the CTO of a major sports entity was challenging the storage vendors on how much storage capacity and throughput architecture would be needed to meet his needs. What they neglected to tell him was the cost, technology and resources required to monitor, maintain and manage it.
In the transition to IP, do you know what the product is you might be buying? Is everything as it seems, or will you draw back a curtain to find nothing has changed, realize that the medicine is snake oil or that you have been tricked and locked into an expensive proprietary platform? Even if the product uses media industry standards? What questions should you ask?
The Ultra HD Forum released its first set of guidelines for production workflows at NAB 2016 as promised, clearing the way for early deployments in 2016. But the Forum emphasized that these guidelines were still work in progress and that a future version would target later Ultra HD services in 2017 and beyond.
The Ultra HD Forum released the first phase of industry Guidelines on end-to-end workflows for creating and delivering live and pre-recorded UHD content. The Ultra HD Forum is a global organization defining industry best practices for the introduction of technologies that will facilitate the ultra-high-definition (UHD) viewing experience.
