The media industry is firmly set on a path to an IP-connected future. Major live events are now routinely covered through remote production, with sources and data delivered over open circuits to the broadcast center rather than being managed on site. This trend will certainly continue, so it’s therefore critical that live production workflows are designed with security and resilience in mind.

IP Adoption
As with any new technology, adoption grows in phases. At first, it’s experimental, with every set-up carefully crafted. Then it moves to a proof-of-concept phase: standards emerge that help make the infrastructure more routine. Finally, it becomes routine, and engineers pull the standardized modules, both hardware and software, that they need for the job in hand, and economies of scale give it a commercial imperative.

This path can be plotted as two lines on a graph. First is the amount of technical effort needed to establish, maintain, and operate the network. This should fall as experience and technology grow, making for simple, standardized implementations.

The second may be a little less obvious. This time it is a line that rises over time. As more productions opt for IP-connected remote working, the demand for facilities and bandwidth grows. More ambitious production standards, more cameras on site, and more return feeds, make the demand for bandwidth grow even faster.

Estimates vary, but it is certain that more than 80% of internet bandwidth is taken up by video. Of course, much of this is content delivery, from TikTok to Netflix. However, what we might call professional video transfer, such as live production, is taking an increasing share.

Managing Cyber Threats
As well as leading to congestion, the growth in the use of the internet for the transport of video also attracts the attention of those with malicious intentions. Whether for political reasons or simply for financial gain, there are many people who seek to profit or make a name for themselves through cyber-crime. And while interrupting a feed from a streaming service might upset customers, if a live production feed is interrupted, this can have much bigger ramifications.

Imagine sitting in master control in the seconds before the Olympic 100 meters final, and suddenly every monitor shows a demand for large numbers of Bitcoin. Not a good situation!

The World Economic Forum now publishes an annual Global Cybersecurity Outlook. Its 2024 report found that among its surveyed organizations, minimum viable cyber resilience was down 30%. In 2025, 35% of small organizations believe that their cyber resilience is inadequate. Media enterprises, many of which are classed as SMEs, must act.

Building Secure and Scalable Live Production Workflows
Not all transport protocols meet the demands of the live production environment equally, which is why RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) that aligns with emerging industry needs, is gaining traction. It’s flexible, readily established, and supports the key professional technical standards like SMPTE ST2110, as well as JPEG-XS, AV1, H.264, and many more.

Security is baked in, with streams protected with AES encryption and advanced authentication options like DTLS. The protection is so good, it’s tempting to take the view “it’s RIST so we don’t need to worry”, however, it’s important not to be complacent because this inevitably leads to security holes.

Every time a network is created, engineers need to consider security at every single point. Just because a stream leaves the source encrypted and arrives at the destination encrypted, that does not mean there is no risk on the way. It’s important to consider whether there are any points in the network where the signal needs to be decrypted?

Why? Is it for routing or distribution? How are those nodes protected? Are those devices completely secure or do they have back doors? Do they need to phone home for licenses and how do they store passwords and routing data?

RIST has a very useful routine called rist2rist, which is great for building distribution services. It takes in a stream and sends it to multiple qualified destinations. Most important, rist2rist does not need to decrypt the stream to achieve this, so you can host the node anywhere you like, including in the cloud, with a high degree of confidence.

As the pressure grows for more and more services, the need for staff also grows, as does the pressure on those operators. Human factors are well known to have huge potential to bring down even the best systems. In the old days, a broadcaster’s infrastructure was contained in a machine room, in the center of the building, protected by multiple layers of access control. You must think the same way about virtual infrastructures. Single sign-on systems must be applied rigorously, allowing access only to the parts of the system required and the times when it is needed. Giving too much freedom simply increases the chances of operator error causing disaster.

Importance of Securing Every Element of IP Production
So far, I have talked about video as the essence of IP infrastructures. It is so obviously important that it is tempting to neglect everything else that production requires. But you can’t make a live production without intercom, text and document transfers. It is important to recognize that they should be protected in the same way as video and audio.

It's easy to imagine, in the set-up phase of a production, an engineer at a remote site asking for an IP address. If the central engineer sends this in the clear, then anyone with minimal hacking skills could read it, and a bad actor could very quickly take down your whole network. It is vitally important to wrap text and intercom into the same high-resilience, end-to-end encryption.

The future for IP production is extremely positive, delivering high performance at low cost and with agile set-ups. But as it grows, we must build new working practices that adopt zero-trust architectures and tight access control. RIST is ideally placed to be the cornerstone, but for an IP future where live video is consistently delivered reliably and securely, an all-embracing approach to security is critical.

OSLO—Sony’s Nevion virtualized media production division announced today that its flagship media orchestration platform VideoIPath now supports federation, or the ability for multiple autonomous instances of VideoIPath to collaborate within and across locations. This unique development is a major breakthrough in distributed multi-site media production, as it allows production resources to be shared and used seamlessly, regardless of where they are located, and without compromising on orchestration performance, reliability and security, the company said.

With broadcasters, media and production companies increasingly seeking to increase the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of their live productions by moving to remote and distributed production, the need to share, control and connect studios, control rooms, people, on-premise and Cloud processing across multiple sites via LANs, WANs, 5G and GCCG (Ground-to-Cloud-Cloud-to-Ground) presents one of the biggest challenges in enabling this type of production.

Nevion VideoIPath is a powerful, scalable, secure and easy-to-use orchestration systems and now with federation support, individual VideoIPath systems—for example at each site—can now collaborate with other VideoIPath systems to share, control and connect resources across locations securely.

As each system is autonomous and in charge of its own resources, it continues to function and collaborate, even if problems occur in other parts of the federation. The federation capability also enables VideoIPath to reach new heights in scalability, to handle all the production resources and all the media streams involved.

While remote and distributed production are obvious applications for VideoIPath’s federation functionality, the capability can also be used to compartmentalize networks within facilities, for example between ingest, production and playout.

VideoIPath’s federation capabilities are also a great opportunity for telecom service providers. Federation allows them to provide a WAN orchestration that can operate seamlessly with broadcasters’ orchestration, to bring together the customers’ facilities.

Arne-Johan Martinsen, VideoIPath Product Manager at Nevion said: “Nevion and parent company Sony are committed to enabling content producers to share production resources wherever they are located. This new VideoIPath federation functionality is a key part of achieving this. By hiding the complexity of the underlying infrastructure from users, and providing scalability, reliability and security, VideoIPath allows content producers to focus on creativity, while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.”

Nevion will discuss these new developments at the Sony Stand (13.A10) at IBC 2022, Sept. 9-13 at the RAI Amsterdam.

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—The old saw is that if you build a better mousetrap, buyers will beat a path to your door. The question of the day is whether IP infrastructure is a better mousetrap for video production when compared to a traditional SDI infrastructure.

The answer seems to be that IP is better for video infrastructure, with the catch being that not everything plays well together—yet. Although there is a SMPTE standard for the transport of IP video (ST 2110) and this is excellent for interoperability, there is a bit of a learning curve and an adjustment period to get all the gear humming the way it should.

That said, there are many benefits to going the IP route for your in-house infrastructure and distribution. A big advantage is flexibility—SDI is a point-to-point one-way system, and IP is bidirectional and can carry multiple uncompressed signals at the same time. A notable future advantage may be lower installation costs, but that’s not necessarily the case today.

“I would say that at current time, an IP-based system is more expensive than an SDI system,” said Svein Henning Skaga, project manager for TV 2 Norway, the country’s largest commercial broadcaster. “We need to do a lot of training since this is new technology, and we need a lot of services from our vendors. But in the long run, we expect it to have lower costs as changes and expansion are less complex.”

Skaga said that the production staff does not see much difference in how operations are conducted, as their systems are much the same as before.

However, for operations and support there is a big change, he said. “They now need to relate to computer network equipment and new [IP] technology.”

The TV2 Norway system relies significantly on Lawo production gear, and the bottom line for Skaga is how well the system runs.

“For a traditional broadcast guy like myself, I was concerned about the stability,” he said. “The IP system has been very stable, and we have full control over all our audio-and video streams.”

When building an IP-based system, Skaga recommends putting a lot of effort into designing the network infrastructure. Getting this right from the start will save you from a lot of trouble, he said, but don’t be surprised if you still have work to do.

“Physical installation was rather quick,” he said, “but configuration took a long time.”

NEW STUDIO USING IP

Celebro Media, a Washington-based studio facility that caters to international broadcasters, recently built a new studio facility using IP technology. At the heart of it is a NewTek production switcher connected throughout the facility using NewTek’s Network Device Interface technology, an IP-based solution that NewTek has shared with many other companies.

“We identified very early on that we needed to go down the IP route,” said Stephen Gaisford, director of US operations for Celebro Media. “We have a studio on the 10th floor and live positions overlooking the White House. Traditionally, broadcasters would be running SDI cables from source to destination all over the building, and we knew that wasn’t practical. We considered New-Tek’s NDI solution as a way to make every source a destination with its two-way connectivity. Everything connected in the in/out module in our rack room is a source that is available to us on our TriCaster switcher in the main studio control room.”

Gaisford pointed out that the NewTek production switcher has only four SDI inputs, and he has four studio cameras plus a host of other inputs—including international remote feeds.

“The flexibility that NDI gives us means that we can have a limitless amount of sources at our disposal,” he said. “We’re future-proofed by going down the Ethernet RJ45 route.”

Celebro’s system was not quite plug-and-play, and Gaisford echoed a thought that many television engineers share.

“Something that broadcasters have to bear in mind going forward is that your engineers are not just going to be television broadcast engineers—they need to have knowledge of computer networks,” he said. “The single biggest issue that we faced getting the bits of kit to talk to each other was making sure that firewalls weren’t stopping one item from talking to another. That’s something that we’ve only resolved quite recently.”

MERCEDES-BENZ STADIUM

The engineering staff at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, recently installed an IP-based video system from Ross Video that is used on game day to source and distribute signals used for broadcasts and in-park video.

One of the decisions was what speed to make the IP network.

“With a 10GbE network, you can send more signals—up to three 3G signals down on path,” said Ben Dolinky, a video engineer for AMB Sports + Entertainment, which operates the video systems at the stadium. “We couldn’t do that with an uncompressed HD-SDI signal.”

Dolinky had one operational note regarding an IP video system, as compared to a traditional SDI-based system: “It goes without saying, but in an IP facility it is very important to keep your server room as clean and dust-free as possible,” he said. “With an IP facility, there is more fiber cleaning and maintenance compared to an SDI facility.”

DAILY BLAST LIVE

To promote the second season of its syndicated daytime programming, Daily Blast Live (DBL), broadcast station group TEGNA conducted a live, point-to-point “media tour” from its KUSA Denver studio to 32 stations across the country. For six straight hours on one day, Daily Blast Live sent 32 different live shots about every 10 minutes featuring DBL talent to TEGNA morning and noon shows.

The number of shots, the total length of time, and the varying time zones that had to be accommodated made purchasing satellite time too cost-prohibitive, so TEGNA turned to TVU Grid, an IP-based switching, routing and distribution system from TVU Networks, to receive DBL media tour audio and video.

Each local TEGNA station receiving DBL media tour audio and media routed the signals through their own control rooms to air. Sharon Levy, DBL technical operations manager, received programming from each station via TVU Grid, using it as a confidence monitor and a source to record all DBL live shots that day. DBL anchors used IFB audio through the TVU Grid to have conversations with each of the stations.

“Distributing our feeds with TVU Grid required no additional fees,” Levy said. “We had the TVU infrastructure in place already, and the technology is nearly as clean [as satellite] now. None of the stations had any issue finding us. All our stations received our output on TVU Grid. I recorded each shot live and archived them all. It went very smoothly.”

HD OR 4K?

Where does 4K fit into the IP video production picture? Gaisford said that all productions so far at Celebro’s Washington studios have been in HD, although the facility can handle 4K origination. It looks like the inherent flexibility of IP makes it a logical choice for systems that have varying needs up to and including 4K.

“One of the big advantages of IP is being able to maximize resources,” said Robert Erickson, advanced technology director for Grass Valley. “Software-defined applications running on IP infrastructures can be quickly spun up and taken down rapidly, allowing more efficient resource management. With IP, projects can be allocated resources as needed and re-allocated somewhere else during downtime. Additionally, IP is completely format-agnostic, enabling broadcasters to quickly respond to new business opportunities.”

A variety of companies now manufacture a wide range of SMPTE ST2110-standard products for IP video production. In addition to those already mentioned, Sony, JVC, Panasonic, EVS and Blackmagic Design all have an array of products that fit into IP production workflows. One example is the Sony XVS-9000 live production switcher, which can be used for 4K and HD productions, and features high dynamic range (HDR) capability.

It is possible today to shoot live broadcast-quality programming using IP-connected equipment. Costs are competitive today with providing similar function using SDI architecture, with the added benefit that IP systems are both bidirectional and more flexible than SDI cabling.