Let us start with the content and where it comes from. These will be high-quality contribution links, encoded at high bit rate, using 4:2:2/10-bit, and often with surround sound. They will come to a central ingest and uplink facility, typically using dedicated data circuits. The ingest and uplink facility is responsible for transmitting the content to the ships.

Live content is transmitted to the cruise ships using bidirectional satellite links, which have the following requirements:

1. Available bit rate is limited, but acceptable video quality needs to be maintained.
2. The quality of satellite delivery can change over time (occasional dropped data), so the equipment must be resilient to that.
3. Content must be protected from unauthorized reception.

Requirement #1 is achieved by decoding the content using a high-end professional decoder, such as the Cobalt PACIFIC 9992‑DEC, and then re-encoding it in HEVC 4:2:0/8-bit, using a high-end professional encoder, such as the Cobalt PACIFIC 9992‑ENC. The PACIFIC 9992-DEC has support for MPEG-2, H.264 (AVC), and H.265 (HEVC) decoding at 4:2:2/10-bit, as well as full support for several types of ancillary data, including Closed-Captioning. The PACIFIC 9992-ENC can take the content, optionally downscale it for transmission (e.g., go from 1080p to 720p), and produce an excellent stream at under 2 Mb/s.

The connection between the PACIFIC 9992-DEC and the PACIFIC 9992-ENC is through a standard SDI signal. For maximum flexibility, the SDI signals go through a router. This allows for choosing content dynamically for each channel, especially for special events. The PACIFIC 9992‑DEC has a built-in genlock function that allows signals from multiple devices to be aligned to the house sync, and the PACIFIC 9992‑ENC has a built-in framesync that ensures a glitch-free switch in the outgoing stream. This is all tied together by the Cobalt WAVE series of SDI routers, which supports RP-168 switching of genlocked signals. The Cobalt WAVE router is compatible with all the major control systems and provides a modern web interface. Another control option is the Cobalt WAVE series of control panels, which include the CP-84L panel with back-lit LCD buttons, and the cost-effective CP-78 panel.

Requirement #2 is achieved by using the Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) protocol over the satellite link for delivery to the cruise ship. Using retransmissions, RIST can recover from lost and corrupted packets. The protocol can handle packet losses on the order of 30% and offers retransmission throttling to avoid overloading the link. RIST is built into the PACIFIC 9992‑ENC, avoiding the need for a separate gateway. Additionally, RIST can provide NULL Packet Deletion, which further optimizes the bandwidth without compromising stream compliance.

Requirement #3 is also achieved by using RIST, in Main Profile mode. RIST supports multiple encryption and authentication suites, up to AES 256 with ECDSA authentication. This ensures that content is protected in flight and is only accessible at the destination. It should be noted that encryption and authentication are different functions: encryption protects the content in flight, and authentication ensures that endpoints are who you think they are. The RIST encryption and authentication are also built into the PACIFIC 9992‑ENC, making it a one-stop solution for the transmission side.

The full ingest and uplink diagram is displayed in Figure 1.

Now let’s look at the ship. The staterooms have set-top boxes driving the TVs. In modern ships, these set-top boxes are connected over IP using an internal ship network. Live content is made available using IP multicast. Often, for cost reasons, these set-top boxes only support H.264 (AVC). Therefore, the incoming H.265 (HEVC) RIST stream may need to be converted to a UDP multicast in AVC format, to be compatible with the stateroom set-top boxes.

The PACIFIC 9992‑DEC is the ideal choice to receive the content in the ship:

1. It has built-in RIST support, including packet recovery, encryption and authentication.
2. It can decode and output the content over SDI, including re-insertion of all the ancillary data.
3. It can output a clean copy of the stream in UDP/multicast if desired.

If the stateroom set-top boxes support HEVC and can directly decode the satellite feed, the PACIFIC 9992‑DEC can put a standard clean UDP multicast stream directly into the ship network, with configurable address/port.

If the stateroom set-top boxes only support AVC, the SDI output of the PACIFIC 9992‑DEC can be re-encoded and transmitted as a multicast. The ideal device to do this is Cobalt’s low cost 9990‑ENC2‑H264‑IP, which is an encoder optimized for transmission to consumer-grade IP set‑top boxes. In this case, the ship can also benefit from having a Cobalt WAVE SDI router and a Cobalt WAVE control panel for maximum flexibility.

The shipboard diagram is displayed in Figure 2.

All of this gets good-quality video from the ground contribution links to the ship. But what if you want to roll out HDR, and you need to do that in stages and not all at once? There is a solution for that as well.

Let’s go back to your 4:2:2/10-bit contribution links. Some of these may have HDR content in PQ‑10 or HLG formats. Whether an incoming signal is HDR normally does not matter to a decoder; all that is required is for the decoder to mark the VPID in the SDI signal with the correct format. The PACIFIC 9992‑DEC will automatically do that if the relevant metadata exists in the incoming signal, or it can be manually configured if not. Now you have properly marked HDR signals on SDI. The question then becomes how to support a mixture of HDR and SDR set-top boxes and TVs in the ship staterooms.

The best solution is to use SL-HDR1 standard, which takes in the HDR signal, and generates an SDR signal with additional metadata to reconstruct the original HDR content. The standard includes both SDI and compressed stream representations of the metadata. If the receiving device does not understand SL-HDR1, it plays the SDR version; if it does, it plays the HDR version. The Cobalt 9904‑UDX‑4K card can take in an HDR signal over SDI and generate the SDR version with the metadata. This device can be placed between the PACIFIC 9992‑DEC receiving the contribution link, and the PACIFIC 9992‑ENC used for transmission to the ship. If there is a router in the uplink facility, the 9904‑UDX‑4K can be connected as a separate resource that can be assigned to any channel. The Cobalt WAVE routers support “salvos”, which can be used to automate this process.

The PACIFIC 9992‑ENC supports 10‑bit encoding, as well as conversion of the SL‑HDR1 metadata from SDI to the compressed stream. One change that will need to be made in this case is to transmit in 4:2:0/10‑bit mode (instead of 8‑bit); this requires about 20% more bandwidth. The SL‑HDR1 metadata bitrate requirements are negligible.

The ship is now receiving an HEVC 4:2:0/10‑bit signal with SL‑HDR1 metadata. What does it do with this signal? We have the following scenarios:

• For ships equipped with legacy AVC SDR set-top boxes, no change is needed (not even a configuration change). The PACIFIC 9992‑DEC receiving the bitstream will generate an SDI signal with the SL‑HDR1 metadata re-inserted; the 9990‑ENC2‑H264‑IP units used to create the signal for the set‑top boxes will simply ignore this metadata and generate a standard AVC stream as before.
• For ships that have HEVC set-top boxes with SL-HDR1 support, the PACIFIC 9992‑DEC will simply relay the original stream clean stream (corrected and decrypted by RIST). Again, no changes are needed in this case, not even configuration changes – the HDR support will just “flow through”.
• For ships that have other forms of HDR support (e.g., HLG), the Cobalt 9904‑UDX-4K can be used to recover the original HDR signal. It will take the SDI feed from the PACIFIC 9992‑DEC with the SL‑HDR1 metadata and reconstruct the HDR signal. In the HLG case (which is the most common), the 9904‑UDX‑4K can natively output HLG. In this case, the stream to the set-top boxes in the staterooms will be generated by an onboard PACIFIC 9992‑ENC, in 4:2:0/10‑bit mode, with proper HLG marking. As with the uplink facility, having a router on the ship allows for swapping the 9904‑UDX‑4K in and out of specific feeds, by using a salvo.

Finally, it should be noted that all Cobalt processing elements are provided as openGear cards. A 2 RU chassis can hold 10 PACIFIC 9992‑ENC cards (40 encoder channels), or 10 PACIFIC 9992‑DEC cards (20 decoder channels), or 10 9990‑ENC2‑H264‑IP (20 encoder channels), or 10 9904‑UDX‑4K cards. Single-card standalone versions are available using the BBG-1300-FR.