PARIS—The video compression, delivery, and streaming solutions provider Ateme has announced that it was selected to manage live video feeds for a new major French sporting event for Mediawan, one of Europe’s leading studio groups.

For this event, Ateme’s TITAN Edge decoders were deployed in a 1+1 redundancy setup to receive over ten live stadium feeds, encoded onsite and delivered up to 1080p50. The solution provides reliable production access for journalists, replay teams, and editors during live broadcasts.

“We are delighted to support Mediawan in bringing a brand-new sporting experience to audiences in France,” said Benjamin Etienne, Sales Director, France at Ateme. “Our TITAN Edge solutions combine low-latency, reliability, and scalability, empowering Mediawan to deliver premium quality while staying future-ready.”

Ateme announced that it was selected because the 1+1 redundant TITAN Edge deployment guarantees robust operations for live production, minimizing downtime risk in high-stakes environments and it has a long track record in delivering reliable, high-quality live video solutions In addition, Ateme’s software-driven technology delivers minimal latency, accelerating editing, replays, and highlights production.

Its TITAN Edge’s software-based architecture also meant that workflows can scale and adapt quickly to future requirements to support new capabilities such as HDR LUT conversion or future 2110-based workflows.

More information is available at www.ateme.com.

IBC 2019, 13-17 September, Stand 6.C11- BirdDog, a leading manufacturer of NDI tools will launch BirdDog Cloud, enabling NDI delivery over the public internet securely with AES 128/256 Encryption. Utilising SRT protocol, BirdDog Cloud ensures high quality delivery despite poor quality network connections with extremely low latency. BirdDog Cloud will be available to purchase immediately via its global network of resellers.

BirdDog Cloud is a modular and scalable delivery platform, allowing customers the option to pay only for the features that are required. Full remote production, studio and control is possible via the public internet from any global location. Support features include; PTZ Camera Control, Tally, and Audio Intercom via the BirdDog Comms application.

BirdDog Co-Founder and CEO Dan Miall said, “We are extremely proud of BirdDog Cloud. We’ve been creating NDI workflows since its inception and BirdDog Cloud can make the dream of working on a tropical beach with a laptop and an internet connection come true. We live in a time of exciting technological advancements and are excited to see the workflows our customers can create with BirdDog Cloud.”

“SRT (Secure Reliable Transport) protocol is the fastest growing industry standard for online content sharing between sites and was an obvious choice for us when building BirdDog Cloud,” said Jan Grimestad, Product Manager and Lead Designer for BirdDog Cloud. “SRT creates a reliable, stable connection complete with AES encryption. Our customers can send video over the internet with low latency and have total peace of mind that their content is secure. We’re really excited to be part of the SRT Alliance.”

Users simply need an Endpoint Core at each end and have the flexibility to add features as required. The complete list of modules includes:

Endpoint Core:
Everything you need to get started for a single point to point connection, including Tally, Comms, Video, Audio, and PTZ Control all over a secure and encrypted connection.

Endpoint Multi
A multiple stream licence limited only by the number of streams your computer can process. The faster the machine the more streams. It enables multiple, single point to point connections.

Multistream:
Enables multiple streams over a single SRT connection. Use an End Point at each end and stream from Oslo to New York, Paris, and Melbourne simultaneously. All NDI feeds sent from Endpoint to Endpoint will maintain individual sync.

Multiview:
A scalable and powerful NDI Multiviewer that automatically creates the least number of video windows needed whilst still maintaining a 16×9 aspect ratio. Each receiving End Point can configure it’s own custom Multiviewer. The NDI for the Multivewer is sent at lower bandwidth to allow more video windows than full bandwidth NDI capabilities. Variable settings include 720p or 1080p resolutions or full NDI.

Alpha:
Additional support for sending remote graphics or other sources with alpha over the SRT link.

WebRTC:
Convert NDI to WebRTC with very low latency as Program out back channel to ENG or other remote productions.

Learn more about BirdDog Cloud by viewing: https://youtu.be/gwENJ9-CELU

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About BirdDog
BirdDog is the manufacturer of the world’s best NDI tools and is dedicated to simplifying your transition from baseband video to IP workflows. Based out of Melbourne, Australia and with a team of innovative and slightly quirky engineers, our goal is simple - make great products at great prices. BirdDog is an Australian company based out of Melbourne. To learn more about BirdDog, please visit http://www.bird-dog.tv/.

Media Contact:
Eamon Drew
eamon@bird-dog.tv

PR Contact:
Laura Westrope
Manor Marketing
laura@manormaketing.tv
+44 (0) 7436 874 000

OSLO, NORWAY—Nevion, a provider of virtualized media production technology, says it has added a new JPEG XS encoding and decoding media function to its Virtuoso software-defined media node. The new functionality is already being rolled-out by “a leading global broadcast network” to get video in and out of content hubs, as part of a centralized live production infrastructure solution—the world’s first official deployment of the technology, according to Nevion.

JPEG XS (ISO/IEC 21122) is a new encoding standard for video that achieves pristine visually lossless output (both for one-time and multiple concatenated compression), at sub-millisecond latency, i.e. a fraction of a video frame. High quality compression is achievable with ratios up to 10:1 and beyond, depending on the application.

Read More:JPEG XS Reduces Cabling Bandwidth Needs

This makes JPEG XS extremely attractive for low latency real-time transport of HD and 4K/UHD video over wide-area networks (WANs). It also makes it suitable for bandwidth-constrained campus and facility local area networks (LANs) when uncompressed transport is not a viable option.

The Nevion Virtuoso JPEG XS media function is powered by TICO-XS from intoPIX and offers both encoding and decoding capabilities, and multi-channel support. It takes uncompressed video in either SDI and IP (SMPTE ST 2110-20) formats, and outputs JPEG XS encoded video for transport over IP (SMPTE ST 2110-22). The solution also provides transport protection using SMPTE 2022-7 based SIPS (Seamless IP Protection Switching).

The JPEG XS media function can also be combined with the Virtuoso’s extensive audio capabilities, for example to enable encoded video and audio to be transported as separate SMPTE ST 2110 flows, and be synchronized at the receiving end.

“We are very excited to have added JPEG XS to the many media functions that can be configured dynamically on Nevion Virtuoso,” says Johnny Dolvik, Chief Product and Development Officer at Nevion. “We are also very proud of the fact that it is already being deployed. We have no doubt this is the first of many deployments, as JPEG XS provides an exceptional balance between compression ratio and latency.”

As well as JPEG XS, Nevion Virtuoso already offers JPEG 2000, TICO, and H.264 encoding capabilities.

Nevion Virtuoso and the new JPEG XS media function will be on show on Nevion’s booth (1.B79) at IBC 2019.

PHOENIX—“Video is everywhere. More content than ever is being produced due to the lower cost of entry in acquisition.”

This, according to Tom Lattie, vice president of market development at Harmonic, helps explain the explosion and future potential of video on our news, sports and entertainment media landscape. Furthermore, he says, there are no longer prohibitive entry costs in producing large quantities of high-quality media, and there are more and more outlets demanding it in a variety of formats to feed everything from handheld devices to home theaters.

One of the reasons for this rapid change is the evolution of video compression technology. From capturing content in the camera to transporting it for edit and distribution, there are codecs that supply light to heavy compression in order to move and store content efficiently. As camera resolutions increase, this coding and decoding process is key to enabling camera manufacturers to capture content that can then be edited and transported through distribution to the end user. This production chain starts with small cameras with limited power options and ends with huge server systems that can churn out content in multiple formats, and faster than real time.

Panasonic uses a single LSI chip, known as DYNA, to power its AVC-Ultra format.NO ONE SIZE FITS ALL
To accomplish this task, several technologies are leveraged throughout the process. Cameras require small, low-power encoders, whereas transcode farms leverage vast numbers of power hungry CPUs in data centers to do their heavy lifting.

“There is no one size fits all solution,” said Stephen Mahrer, technology alliance manager for Panasonic. Chuck Meyer, chief technology officer of Grass Valley, agreed and said, “There is no free lunch and there are always tradeoffs between the technologies.”

Though many broadcast and media technology vendors agree on certain benefits of codec hardware, there are vastly different implementations available to customers today. Some are very company specific or proprietary, where others are open source. It is important to understand the technologies and benefits of the three most prevalent processing chips in use today.

THE HARDWARE BATTLE
There are three types of processing chips that handle video compression. The most simplistic is the ASIC or “application-specific integrated circuit,” which, as its name implies, is a chip designed for a singular function. Then comes the more flexible FPGA, “field programmable gate array,” which combines some of the processing benefits of the ASIC with the flexibility of changing its coding via software at any time. Finally there is the GPCPU, or “general purpose central processing unit,” which is the Intel chip found in most every computer. This is the powerful processor that runs software-based solutions, but has a little hardware processing hidden under the hood as well.

ASICs are very popular in cameras due to their small form factor and minimal power requirements.

“We primarily use ASICs as we focus on the needs of production and field gathering devices,” Panasonic’s Mahrer said. Panasonic uses a singular stackable ASIC called the Dyna chip across the company’s entire camera line to provide HD to UHD encoding. These chips only draw 1.2W per unit. “You can’t do this kind of processing in software and still fit it into a camera,” he said.

Others recognize this benefit but point out the limitations of the ASIC.

“The ASIC can be custom-tuned to deliver a specific result at a cost of inflexibility,” said Brick Eksten, vice president of product strategy for networking & distribution at Imagine Communications in Dallas.

He is an advocate for the FPGA-based solutions that his company offers. “FPGAs are about flexibility,” he said. Within the FPGA, he said he could write code to build I/O, memory buses, filtering, up/down and cross converting. Though the chips may cost more than an ASIC they offer the flexibility to swap codec sets when needed.

Hugo Gaggioni, chief technology officer of the Broadcast and Production Systems division at Sony

“FPGAs are great, but they can also be quite power hungry,” Panasonic’s Mahrer said. He acknowledged their great flexibility in configuration, but does not see them as efficient as the ASIC solution.

Hugo Gaggioni, chief technology officer of the Broadcast and Production Systems division at Sony sees ASICs, which Sony also uses in its cameras, as an ideal application for the XAVC codec, where FPGAs will be more likely found in terminal gear.

“FPGAs are very large in size and consume a lot of power, making FPGAs better suited to larger dedicated devices,” he said. “For day-to-day operation of inexpensive commodity devices, one needs a dedicated LSI, which is why Sony rarely uses FPGAs for professional equipment.”

Harmonic’s Lattie said that they have been leveraging the power of both ASICs and FPGAs in their systems for years, but in the last year have gravitated toward GPCPU-based solutions.

“Even though we call them GPCPUs, we leverage hardware components in those chipsets to improve video compression,” he said

Lattie said that the new XEON processors in their systems have built in AVX instruction sets which allow them to do hard-coded accelerated math functions within the chip, speeding up the encode/decode process.

Grass Valley’s Meyers conceded that CPUs can do anything as their processing is software-based, but that comes at a cost of requiring more power and being more expensive.

“They are infinitely flexible,” he said. He added that Grass Valley also makes use of FPGA technology with the TICO codec as “it allows us to manage what has to be a real time process.” Like Panasonic and Sony, they have found that specific chip configurations solve problems like latency and power budget limitations.

Paul Turner, vice president of enterprise product management with Telestream in Nevada City, Calif., and a self-described “ex-hardware engineer,” agrees.

“Telestream is a software company,” he said. “Our belief has always been that the software approach is more flexible and adaptable.”

A hardware-based approach to encoding is advantageous when looking for a fast and cheap solution to a specific task. But, like Meyer, Turner cautions that there’s a trade-off.

“Chipsets go obsolete so you’ve constantly got to worry about what happens if you can’t get them anymore,” he said. “But just as importantly, is how flexible you can make the product. Our argument is always—with a software architecture—you can more or less do anything you want to modify the product. It’s more agile and flexible to use software.”

Chuck Meyer, Grass Valley chief technology officerWHICH CHIP WILL WIN?
Each chip-based solution seems to offer benefits that the others cannot provide. All camera manufacturers noted in this article offer camera-to-editor solutions, and a software version of their codecs as well.

From connectors to the number of devices to spanning long distances, changing a physical plant is both challenging and expensive. Choosing a single codec solution can be of concern.

“It does give one pause to ask, what should my next investment be?” Meyers said. He sees continued growth in the GPCPU-based systems and feels software will provide more flexibility in the future. “The broadcaster is no longer in control of the format at home,” he added, pointing to the need for maximum flexibility in the complete broadcast chain.

Imagine’s Eksten sees a definite leaning on the enterprise level.

“Look at the velocity of the market, we are seeing the biggest players asking for software-only solutions,” he said. He also explained that large content distributors are more concerned with their operational fabric rather than the cost. “Their scale precludes having lots of dedicated boxes; they want to manage their systems on an IT level.”

For companies like Imagine, Grass Valley, Harmonic and Telestream, this means that their software-based solutions will continue to grow the use of GPCUs. The need for ASIC and FPGA solutions will continue to evolve, as where Moore’s Law will continue to increase the processing power of CPUs, it may never bring down their size and power draw. Thus cameras, terminal gear and other links in the facilities’ production chain will remain reliant on ASIC and FPGA technology.