There’s much more to the ongoing digital and cloud transitions in the Media & Entertainment Industry than simply technology. 

The adoption of workflows built around commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware running a wide variety of applications on-prem that touch nearly every aspect of their businesses as well as those leveraging the cloud and cloud-native hardware equivalents are yielding many new benefits for media companies.

TVTech Contributing Editor Phil Kurz interviews TMT Insights CEO Andy Shenkler to learn how his company is advising top management players in the M&E Industry on how best to realize the efficiencies and cost savings these transitions are creating.

In this Q&A, Shenkler discusses this fast-paced technological evolution, how it is changing the dynamic within media organizations when it comes to setting strategic direction with regards to technology and workflow and what to expect as these ongoing transitions accelerate.

TMT Insights

TMT Insights is a professional services and software development company delivering leading capabilities in the digital supply chain, including media content management, cloud technology, and SaaS/D2C experiences to global media companies. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills within the media & entertainment, digital & cloud technology space, our team offers industry leading services such as strategy and CXO advisory, product ideation & innovation, cloud transformation, process re-engineering and development to our partners. As early adopters of new technologies, we embrace the power of collaboration and work with our partners to combine our guidance with action to further drive efficiency, value, and scale to their communities. www.tmtinsights.com

Stand A113, Broadcast India 2019, Mumbai: Cinegy, the global leader for broadcast playout software in the cloud, has announced that it will showcase its full range of recording, capture, archive, and encoding capabilities during Broadcast India, taking place at the Bombay Exhibition Centre, Mumbai, from 17-19 October.

Participating on its regional partner Setron India’s stand, Cinegy will feature its ability to maximise the multiple advantages of Secure Reliable Transport (SRT).

Cinegy Business Development Manager Andrew Ward said, “SRT enables users to locate content, tools, and services wherever their business needs them to be, whether that’s in the cloud, on rented virtual machines, on-prem, or at remote data centres."

Ward continued, “SRT is baked in to Cinegy software, including the license, which removes any concerns about whether users have the legal right, proper subscription, or adequate bandwidth to deploy the software.”

Cinegy will demonstrate the use of its SRT-enabled software to perform live, intercontinental playout from the company’s server in Nuremberg, Germany, to the trade show in Mumbai. Also on show is Cinegy software and SRT jointly used as a sophisticated tool for live news gathering.

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About Cinegy
Cinegy develops software solutions for collaborative workflow encompassing IP, capture, editing and playout services tools, integrated into an active archive for full digital asset management. Either SaaS, virtualizable stacks, cloud or on-premises, Cinegy is COTS using standard IT hardware, and non-proprietary storage technology. Cinegy products are reliable, affordable, scalable, easily deployable and intuitive. Cinegy is truly Software Defined Television. Visit www.cinegy.com for more details.

Cinegy PR Contact:
Jennie Marwick-Evans
Manor Marketing
jennie@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7748 636171

For a long time, professional-grade, real-time media transport, processing and monitoring functionality was provided by dedicated hardware. If additional functionality was required in the network, a “box” would be purchased that specifically performed that task.

This dedicated hardware approach made technical sense because of the amount of processing required, as well as the need for low latency, high reliability and minimum power consumption. However, this was inflexible and not always cost effective.

The trend for high-tech equipment in many industries has been a progressive move from dedicated hardware to specialized platforms running software, and then onto COTS (Commercial Off-The-Shelf) IT hardware, such as servers based on X86 CPU architecture, running software applications. For real-time transport, processing and monitoring of media signals, the concept of software-defined platforms is now becoming established. The question is though: how suitable is COTS for live broadcast production?

Intuitively, a COTS approach makes sense, as IT equipment is ubiquitous, open and proven in many environments. Despite some initial hesitancy in the industry, we are beginning to see media processing products appearing that are based on COTS.

OVERCOMING THE CHALLENGES

Currently, COTS products for live media transport, processing and monitoring still only provide limited functionality compared to leading software defined platforms. Before it is possible for COTS hardware to be used for all aspects of live production there are several technical challenges that the industry must firstly work to overcome.

But what exactly are these challenges and what could overcoming them mean for the role of COTS hardware in live production in the future?

Performance

At this stage, the main obstacle to using COTS hardware is its real-time processing performance. While it can handle applications—such as audio processing—that involve flows under 10Mbs reasonably well, it can be less efficient with higher rate flows, such as those required for real-time video encoding.

However, developments are taking place that will help running video processing applications on COTS platforms. Firstly, we are beginning to see newer generations of standards, such as JPEG XS encoding, that have been designed from the ground-up for software processing. Secondly, and more fundamentally, chip vendors, such as Intel and Xilinx, are launching or already offer new “generic” FPGA acceleration boards.

The NICs (Network Interface Cards) used for stream acquisition can also be a processing bottleneck. To get the performance needed to handle very high volumes of data in real-time, it helps if the NICs can communicate directly with the FPGA, rather than via the CPU and memory. Vendors such as Mellanox have developed NICs designed to optimize the throughput to the processing functions.

It is worth noting though that a contributing factor to some of the perceived inferior performance on COTS is poor programming; for example, it is too easy to add buffering to solve problems rather than address them in a way that keeps latency down. Lean and efficient code is key to powerful and scalable media functions implementation.

Packet Pacing

Traditionally, professional media transport has been linear in nature, meaning that the output of equipment utilizes a constant, defined bit rate. In IP terms, this means that packets are transmitted at a constant and steady pace.

COTS equipment is inherently nonlinear, which is a challenge to broadcast orthodoxy. Typically, the software and hardware—due to the resource scheduler—will natively try and push out as much data onto the network as quickly as possible, without any consideration for pacing.

The problem with nonlinear transmission is that bandwidth usage becomes very unpredictable and timing consistency cannot be maintained. And in real-time applications, where packet delays are unacceptable, there should always be enough bandwidth to accommodate all possible flows and keep an accurate packet pace.

The nonlinearity of COTS devices creates the need for substantial additional bandwidth, which is largely unused most of the time and is not desirable economically.

Consequently, the prevailing view in the industry is that COTS-based media applications should be developed in a way that paces packets more carefully.

Power Consumption

CPU-based COTS devices have noticeably higher power consumption than bespoke hardware or software-defined platforms based on FPGAs. In some production environments, such as OB vans or remote sites, this can prove to be a challenge.

Over time, COTS power consumption is likely to be reduced, as generic systems introduce FPGA acceleration.

It is also likely (though not necessarily desirable) that broadcast environments will become more accommodating of the extra power needed for COTS.

DOES THE FUTURE LIE IN COTS?

There is no doubt that, for most real-time broadcast media transport, processing and monitoring, the best approach currently is to use software-defined platforms, built on hardware optimized for performance.

While truly generic COTS IT hardware running software is not yet a viable option for many applications—especially video processing that requires very high bandwidth—it is already being used successfully for some applications. Therefore, as technology continues to evolve and is capable of overcoming the challenges and limitations outlined above, it is likely that COTS will be suitable for use in all aspects of real-time broadcast production.

Olivier Suard is vice president of marketing for Nevion.

LOS ANGELES—One oft-touted advantage of transitioning from SDI baseband video to an IP equivalent is the ability to use common off-the-shelf (COTS) computer hardware to replace specialty video equipment.

The idea is that the economies of scale the computer industry brings to the table are so far superior to anything the M&E industry can muster, which should make it easier for broadcasters and others to adopt IP-based workflows.

However, a presentation at the SMPTE 2018 Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition by Jean Lapierre, senior director of software engineering at Matrox Graphics, sheds a somewhat different light on the issue. While his “Bridging The Gap Between Software and SMPTE ST 2110” presentation did not address the cost issue, it did throw into question the notion of “common” in “common off-the-shelf” computer hardware for M&E applications.

“We think that ST 2110 with full implementation of [ST] 2059 is very difficult using a generic network card and some software,” he said. “It’s much easier if we are leveraging some hardware acceleration on the network card. And we think that the way to do that is to use an FPGA-based network card that actually understands the full ST 2110 implementation.”

PACKET SPACING

Lapierre offered several examples of situations in which a conventional network interface card (NIC) and use of a computer’s CPU would not be up to task.

For instance, traffic shaping is “actually quite tricky to do in software,” he said. Lapierre explained that simply using software to packetize a frame of video and send it as fast as possible on the network is not a realistic solution.

He pointed to an example of 1080p 60 video at a little bit less than 3Gb/s being sent over a 10Gig network.

Sending a frame from a hypothetical source A as fast as possible will take about a third of the memory in a receiver’s buffer. However, if two more sources are added and all three burst their packets onto the network, the network switch will not be able to send all of the packets at the same time. This will require buffering, said Lapierre.

With just three sources, this approach is acceptable. “Where we get into trouble is when you try to move that to scale,” he said.

A far bigger buffer will be needed on the switch; however, it still may be inadequate and have to drop packets, which is undesirable, he explained.

SMPTE ST 2110 addresses this situation through packet spacing, which is “a nice way of spreading packets over time,” which creates holes for other packets to fill as they traverse a network, he said.

In the same example, the same amount of data is sent on the network, but spread out over time, allowing the receiver to build up the frame. With packet spacing, if two more sources are introduced, the switch only has to buffer a smaller part of the second and third source, he said.

However, doing so in software is tricky, said Lapierre. One strategy is to build time loops to build in the needed delay, but that wastes CPU cycles that could be used on an important task.

Additionally, the computer’s operating system may have an essential task to perform, putting the time loop to sleep momentarily to accomplish the task, thereby unexpectedly extending the duration of the loop.

“We think it is better to leave that job to a network card that can do the packet spacing for you.”

PTP-AWARE NETWORK CARD

Precision Time Protocol (PTP), which keeps audio and video packet flows from multiple streams in step in time, is also a challenge in a software implementation.

In this example, PTP would require a network stack, consisting of a grand master clock, a conventional NIC, an operating system and the software implementation, he said.

“Well, my piece of software uses that stack to talk to the grand master to find out what time it is, and by time the message comes back I have to try to figure out how long it took for this message to get there and how long it took to get back,” he explained.

The problem is it can take a variable amount of time to go through the stack, he added.

“We can improve our situation by using a network card that understands our situation,” said Lapierre. However, the precision of PTP that is possible in software is inadequate and “can wreak havoc,” he said.

“What we think is better is if the network card, which is PTP-aware, is the one responsible for doing the time stamping—and why not [also] doing the packet spacing,” he said.

By adding a network interface card to a system with on-board ST 2110 and ST 2059 support, vendors can spend their development time improving their own Software solutions, not dealing with these network interfacing issues, he explained.

“Also, if we look at all the CPU processing we are talking about we will be wasting CPU cycles doing timing loops and things of that nature. To me, if we do that, it sounds like we are doing less with more and not more with less,” he concluded.

RASTATT, GERMANY—The buzz surrounding the use of COTS equipment for real-time video production has been growing in intensity for years with very few actual products to show for it. Although there have been a number of experiments and proof-of-concept systems, most real deployments include very little IP technology—and the ones that do are not taking full advantage of the capabilities of SDN (Software Defined Networking) and virtualization technology. Instead, most of them resemble legacy baseband solutions where the connection is IP instead of HD-SDI. But all of that is about to change with the introduction of the V_matrix series from Lawo.

Traditional broadcast systems are built with intricate connections of single-purpose devices linked together with a myriad of content-specific cabling to form an unbroken production “chain” from source to destination. While this legacy approach is well understood, it severely limits broadcasters in terms of the specific architecture of the system, which is then defined by the particular components and how they are connected together. Reconfiguring these purpose-built and static installations is difficult and time consuming, as the process requires careful planning and often involves manual patching of signal paths. Broadcasters therefore tend not to make changes for anything but long-term productions.

A production facility that could be reconfigured seamlessly via software with a few simple mouse clicks would allow broadcasters the flexibility to produce more content with much less time spent in advance planning and preparation, and with little or no additional capital expenditure.

SOFTWARE DEFINES THE FUNCTIONALITY

The Lawo V_matrix product line, where the V stands for “video,” the newest advance following on legacy single-purpose broadcast hardware, takes advantage of the latest high-performance processors coupled with intelligent and versatile software modules. With Lawo V_matrix products, the software defines the functionality and the hardware simply provides the processing power required to execute those functions. A multitude of software modules including streaming, embedding, video and audio processing, and monitoring can be activated on demand and combined as needed to build each signal path.

With high-speed, 40-gigabit Ethernet connections, the core processing blades can be located anywhere in the facility or, using high-speed WAN/LAN networks, they can just as easily be located in a data center outside of town. Each core processing blade is capable of handling dozens of uncompressed HD signals and thousands of audio channels on a single fiber pair. With the addition of optional mezzanine VC-2 compression, this density quadruples with no loss of video quality and only a few milliseconds of latency, making it possible to build systems that scale to tens of thousands of I/O on a single switch.

When coupled with an Arista high-capacity switch and Lawo SDN functionality as outlined here From SDI Baseband to IP Routing the V_matrix system provides the performance expected for a broadcast live production, including the timely and vertically accurate switching of video with the performance and reliability that broadcasters have come to expect from their legacy systems.

The Lawo V_matrix series uses same as the V_link4 and remote4 IEEE 1588 PTP to distribute accurate timing through the IP layer rather than relying on external cabling, thereby further simplifying facility wiring. With the Lawo PTP Reference functionality, existing facilities can sync all IP devices to their house clock so that both new and old equipment will operate in the same timing domain.

To service a wide range of applications with different requirements, Lawo V_matrix solutions come in a variety of different form factors. The V_line products described in Video line provide compact, powerful systems that can be configured to perform an assortment of typical signal transformation tasks, including routing, embedding/de-embedding, signal processing, synchronization, and monitoring in a small form factor.

The V_matrix software-defined IP core routing and processing platform described in V_matrix brochure offers all the common video and audio processing functionality required in a broadcast facility as versatile software modules running on generic core processing blades. It also offers a wide range of legacy video and audio signal conversion interfaces to connect to legacy signals.

The V_matrix platform uses high-speed 10GE and 40GE IP links to connect to COTS switches for routing, while Lawo SDN provides the performance and functionality required for live production environments.

Broadcasters and media professionals of all types who choose Lawo’s reconfigurable and fully virtualized IP technology in place of dedicated, function-specific hardware will be ideally positioned to cope with the unknown future of modern content production—and they will be able to build a truly future-proof solution that promises to change and adapt along with their business.