The perennial challenge facing broadcasters is to do more with less. With further market fragmentation, they must be able to architect media facilities to support many more emerging production needs that are yet to be defined. These needs can widely vary from small-scale single-commentator/operator productions to full blown large-scale multi-operator galleries. All the while, these broadcasters also need to keep day-to-day operations running smoothly. Today, these demands call for greater customization, more room for experimentation, and the ability to spin up and down various capabilities.

All these requirements mirror the capabilities of cloud technology, or the use of software-driven technology on IT equipment, whether located on-premises, hosted by a provider, or some combination of the two. With the shift from conventional hardware systems to software and IT-centric solutions, broadcasters not only gain greater agility and scalability, but also unlock and benefit from the rapid pace of innovation across IT technology. Because investment in R&D for IT technology is orders of magnitude larger than that dedicated to broadcast, its promise is tremendous if broadcasters can leverage IT technology to address their own needs and fuel further innovation.

Broadcast Heritage And Evolution

While the swift advance of IT innovation can serve as a catalyst for the broadcasting industry, the essence of broadcasting — high availability, quality, and low latency— must remain intact. Within the industry, technology providers, systems integrators, and broadcasters have established a heritage characterized by high availability, high quality, frame-accurate control, low latency, and responsiveness, with systems built on best-of-breed equipment. Today, technologies such as SDI and ST 2110 can be deployed at scale while respecting the fundamental requirements long essential to broadcast operations.

The broadcast industry built its own technology stacks to make all this possible. But now the traditional broadcast model, heavily reliant on specialized hardware, needs to give way to a more flexible approach in which IT equipment, whether on-premises or hosted, serves as the backbone. This transition to a software-centric ecosystem should unlock new possibilities, allowing broadcasters to adapt and scale their operations on demand in response to changes in market demands.

Applying IT Tech To Broadcast Workflows

Despite broadcasters’ embrace of and transition to IT technology, the industry has not yet achieved the degree of agility that other markets have by truly embracing IT. A common, but misguided, question that broadcasters and others within the industry ask is this: Do we forgo our heritage and take a “good enough” approach to software-only solutions? This perspective implicitly dictates that the industry reaps only marginal benefits of IT, remaining stuck in its ways and becoming less relevant as the market evolves.

The broadcast industry’s move to leverage IT technology needn’t mean abandoning its heritage. Rather than focus narrowly on IT tools and concepts, or take a lift-and-shift approach to spinning up/down monolithic applications interconnected with clocked synchronous interfaces, the industry must explore how broadcast can truly benefit from IT capabilities. It must start with the very basic principles regarding the handling of live media. IT infrastructure processes and transports data in an event-driven asynchronous fashion, whereas broadcast concepts are all centered around clocked real-time streams. Streams of video not only transport data, they also implicitly handle core operational requirements within traditional broadcast concepts.

Innovative solutions in broadcasting are focused on mapping broadcast requirements, rather than traditional broadcast concepts, onto modern IT capabilities. This involves a paradigm shift in how media is handled — from processing streams to managing individual grains of data or fields/frames. In order for this new approach to work, these grains require frame-accurate and responsive control and to be routable in a multi-vendor environment. This new paradigm must also provide resilience and must process these grains in low latency and with the highest quality across any of the hardware compute that is available. True to how IT infrastructure works, broadcast operations in this model run as fast as the underlying hardware permits and are not subject to clocking delays — unless mandatory (like real-time IO interfaces). Lastly, this approach must also ensure that the timing model is repeatable and deterministic.

Such an approach allows for enduring IT innovation in live broadcast, where operations run on generic IT infrastructure — with no bespoke broadcast hardware needed. With this shift, large-scale operations can be deployed with diverse systems and vendors, maintaining the integrity of timing, control, and routing so critical to live broadcasts.

The Promise Of IT-Enabled Broadcast Technologies

By bridging best-of-breed applications to work in unison in a software defined broadcast infrastructure, the industry can benefit from IT innovations across many live broadcast operations. Blending new capabilities with trusted standards, the industry can ensure that broadcasting maintains reliability and quality while increasing its agility and scalability.

Once such IT-enabled technologies are fully implemented, the implications for the broadcasting industry are profound and multifaceted. Broadcast infrastructure can be defined in software terms, allowing for operational flexibility that supports scaling up or down as required. This level of scalability and flexibility ensures that broadcasters can adapt to emerging demands without requiring extensive physical infrastructure modifications.

Rather than use a single application that resides on one system to perform one job, broadcasters can distribute a multitude of media services, coordinated with frame-accurate control, to perform work on many distributed systems. No longer determined by the capability of any single PC, scale is determined by how the system architect distributes the processing on available resources. The scope of an application can grow and shrink in runtime to meet dynamic operational needs; consequently, the underlying hardware (and cost) match workload demands.

Moreover, systems can be quickly activated with built-in redundancy and non-blocking grain level routing, which streamlines operations and often surpasses the capabilities of traditional technology stacks. With the freedom to customize user interfaces and integrate various media services through open APIs, broadcasters will be able to select the best tools and cater them to their own needs without being restricted by vendor lock-in, fostering a more open and interoperable ecosystem.

Turning Promise Into Reality

With this new flexibility, broadcasters will face new challenges and opportunities. Namely, as they continue to realize the benefits of IT technology, developers, systems integrators, and broadcast engineers will have new problems to solve, such as developing specialized media processing, tailoring automation/control, building UIs, optimizing DevOps, etc., that cater to their own customized needs.

As the broadcast industry continues to evolve, its embrace of IT technology opens the way for immense gains. A software framework that enables best-of-breed software applications to work in unison on standard IT infrastructure without compromising fundamental requirements will not just enhance the agility, flexibility, scalability, elasticity and operational capabilities of broadcasters, but will also pave the way for exciting innovation in broadcast technology—the likes of which we have yet to see.