VILVOORDE & ANTWERP, Belgium—After 20-plus years at DPG Media, a leading player in the media and broadcast industry in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, I currently serve as the head of technology for their news and sport operations in Belgium, where DPG Media owns numerous media brands like VTM (television) as well as radio stations (Qmusic, Joe), online services, magazines and a strong digital media presence with newspapers like HLN, AD and the Volkskrant.

News City, where I work, is the headquarters in Antwerp for our news and sport departments and hosts our biggest news brands in Belgium, including VTM Nieuws, HLN and DeMorgen.

It’s an exciting time of growth for our company. A pivotal moment in this expansion was the recent move from our office in Vilvoorde to our new headquarters in Antwerp, marking a significant transformation in our operational setup. All equipment stayed in our datacenter in Vilvoorde whilst Antwerp became a full remote location.

The Path to All-IP
In order to streamline these operations, reduce costs, and enhance overall efficiency, we are transitioning to an all-IP infrastructure. We teamed up with our technical colleagues from RTL-TVI (a leading channel in French-speaking Belgium that is 50% owned by DPG), to identify a robust and proven IP routing solution that would support a decentralized workflow and meet our needs for flexibility and scalability.

Our implementation goals were clear: minimize development, limit risks, and ensure seamless integration. And with elections and major sporting events on the horizon, we needed a functional solution, not just a roadmap. After extensive research and evaluation, we chose EVS’ Strada routing solution to replace our existing systems and SDI infrastructure.

Connecting our master control rooms—the heart of our operations where all signals converge—the EVS Strada solution lets us work efficiently across various outputs and in conjunction with the galleries used for production. Built on the Neuron Network Attached Processor and Cerebrum broadcast control and monitoring system, it meets all the requirements for efficient and flexible broadcast operations: IP processing for audio and video, IP audio shuffling, JPEG-XS/ST2110-22 compression, and HD/UHD up/down/cross conversion. We’ve also added the new low-latency multiviewer, Neuron View, for monitoring multiple feeds in real-time using different layouts.

Thanks to Strada, our MCR team now has a single control platform to independently manage signals for news, entertainment, sports and digital channels across all locations. The solution integrates smoothly with our existing workflows, maintaining compatibility with our current SDI equipment while leveraging an IP backbone. This hybrid approach minimizes operational disruption and offers the benefits of modern IP technology, providing greater flexibility and scalability compared to traditional broadcast infrastructure.

Customized Panels
The new system has significantly boosted our functionality and efficiency, allowing us to create packages and organize sources logically, providing a better network overview and allowing us to save configurations for future use. This is a huge time-saver.

The customizable panels of Cerebrum are a major advantage, allowing our team to switch sources and manage signals independently, enhancing operational efficiency and user autonomy. Customization was a critical factor in our decision, and EVS was incredibly attentive to our needs. Together, we ensured the system was tailored to our workflows and UI requirements.

Although we are still in the early stages, the potential of this transformation is clear. We are fortunate to rely on such a professional team, guiding us through the biggest transformation our organization has undergone in the past 20 years. We eagerly anticipate the positive outcomes and continued growth that this new IP infrastructure will support. l

Sven Van Vlem is the head of technology for News City at DPG Media. He can be reached at info@dpgmedia.be.

For more information, visit https://evs.com/.

TVU Networks has unveiled TVU MediaHub, a cloud-driven router for managing video signals in both IP and SDI environments.

As a cloud-based SaaS, TVU MediaHub’s cloud-centric and hybrid architecture supports limitless inputs and outputs, managing intricate signal matrices in both SDI and IP formats and will help advance media companies’ transition away from hardware-based solutions to cloud-based digital media workflows.

“TVU MediaHub is born from our collaboration with over 4,000 leading media companies globally,” said Paul Shen, CEO of TVU Networks. “As the demand for IP-based input and output sources grows, so does the complexity of managing increasing numbers of decoders and encoders. TVU MediaHub offers an innovative approach to handling, processing, and routing these signals. We’re thrilled to now offer this solution to a wider audience.”

TVU MediaHub accepts various input formats ranging from SDI, NDI, SRT, TVU Grid, to YouTube, and more, and can scale and direct outputs to multiple destinations in formats like RTMP, HLS, TVU Grid, Facebook, etc.

It uses resources on premise in data centers or in the cloud with TVU providing additional resources as needed. Its interface features an object-oriented visual UI, eliminating the need to train users. Monthly subscriptions start at $8.75/core monthly, with on-demand resources charged per minute during signal routing, TVU said.

TVU MediaHub is a key component of TVU Networks’ extensive broadcast ecosystem, integrating AI-powered ingestion, advanced graphics, and streamlined live production and ad management tools. 

“TVU MediaHub is more than a routing tool; it’s a portal to endless broadcasting possibilities,” Shen adds. “We’re eager to see how this platform will enable content creators and broadcasters to innovate and engage their audiences in novel, exciting ways.”

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—In the broadcasting industry, two of the top favorable attributes are affordable cost and total reliability. In most facilities, reliability is king, as a failure can be both embarrassing and costly when commercials are on the line. Still, if something is both reliable and affordable, it’s a winner.

So it has been with routing and signal distribution for video systems. Once the industry transitioned to digital and switchers went from somewhat complex analog video/audio devices to SDI, routing switchers became less complex, more affordable and more reliable. Since SDI was a standard tailor-made for the television industry, it fit the needs of broadcasters perfectly.

So why are we now talking about routing and distributing television signals using IP technology? Didn’t the video industry already have a routing and distribution system designed specifically for it?

The reason we now discuss IP routing and distribution is because IP routing is less expensive than SDI (and analog audio/video) routing—in many instances by a considerable margin. In addition, IP routing is also considerably more flexible in its ability to send signals to/from places that would be difficult to reach with SDI. Finally, IP routing now has established standards for television distribution, which means that all vendors are on the same page when it comes to interoperability.

“Over the last couple of years, there has been a massive take-up in broadcasters moving towards IP-based solutions,” said Lee Buchanan, senior director for networking at Grass Valley. “Although there were challenges to bring the first systems online in 2016, we now have more than enough experience with such systems to ensure that they are designed and delivered in a way that we know will behave as expected.

“Although the suite of standards is continuing to evolve, the SMPTE ST 2110 standard has allowed the industry to standardize on a format for the transmission of video, audio and ancillary data in a very efficient manner,” Buchanan continued. “This standardization has allowed a much smoother deployment of multi-vendor systems.”

SMPTE STANDARD

With the initial parts of the standard completed in 2017, the SMPTE ST 2110 video transport standard specifies how media-related data is described, carried and synchronized as it streams over IP networks in real-time for the purposes of live television production, playout, and other professional media applications. Television distribution has been drifting toward IP networks for years, and the ST 2110 standard makes it likely that the pace of this drift will increase.

Just so we’re all on the same page with the concept of IP routing, let’s take a look at how it differs from SDI routing with which we are all familiar.

“In IP, the ‘router’ is really a distributed concept—each device speaks IP and they are connected by Ethernet cabling to a network [or two for redundancy purposes],” said John Mailhot, CTO for networking and infrastructure for Imagine Communications. (Mailhot is also the drafting group editor for SMPTE’s ST 2110 standard.) “Devices that don’t speak IP need some kind of gateway, but those will become the exception over time. The ‘router’ is really now a control system that makes it all act like your traditional router acted.”

Two factors driving facilities toward IP routing are the proliferation of UHD signals and the sheer number of signals to route.

“IP makes the most sense in systems that need to scale to pretty large [greater than 1,000 HD signals, or greater than 256 UHD signals], and makes more sense the more devices have IP native signals available,” Mailhot said. “For small-to-medium systems composed of SDI equipment, and no need to evolve to UHD, SDI routing remains low-risk and cost-effective. Today is the ‘golden age’ of SDI routing—the products are fully debugged, audio embedding and dis-embedding and frame synchronizers and multiviewers are all built into the SDI routers, and the technology is familiar and therefore low-risk.”

Mailhot thinks that IP routing will eventually become standard for systems large and small, particularly as the need to move UHD signals grows.

NOW PRACTICAL

For a video facility considering replacing an aging SDI plant with IP distribution, all the experts I talked to said this was now practical. However, they are two different beasts, so you need to ask the right questions.

“The most important question is: What devices are going to speak IP natively [and when] and which devices will still be SDI at the time of the upgrade?” Mailhot said. “This is essential for determining how many signals will require gateways, and how many are directly connected to the network.

“A second question is on the system’s overall scale: How big does the system need to grow in the reasonably-near term [12-18 months]?” he continued. “And will there also be changes in format [especially UHD]? This helps to establish the right network architecture to accommodate the near-term scale.”

It’s particularly important to note that audio is treated very differently for IP distribution than it is in an SDI system.

“SMPTE ST 2110 doesn’t just allow audio to be done separate from video, it actually always does it separately,” Mailhot said. “So the customer needs to make some decisions about how to organize the audio. How many channels to group into each stream and why? This is needed to find the right balance between ease-of-use and flexibility.”

In an SDI system, compression and latency are not part of the discussion when it comes to routing and distributing signals around a facility. SDI systems also are designed to send one signal per cable.

“With IP routers, you have to consider compression and network latency, but they provide multiple streams,” said Bob Caniglia, director of North America sales for Blackmagic Design. “With SDI routers, you have longer runs, direct connections and more reliability, but a 1:1 ratio for streams.”

Will IP distribution push SDI gear to the large-and-growing pile of intermediate technology that once was central to operations but has now been replaced by something better?

“Broadcasters need to evaluate IP and SDI routing with regard to their needs and what makes sense for their specific deployment,” Caniglia said. “While at present, the majority of broadcasters still rely on SDI routing for their day-to-day needs, IP is likely already a part of their overall workflow in some regard, [and] it’s definitely a consideration for the future.”

EVER-INCREASING SPEED

Grass Valley’s Buchanan pointed out the ever-increasing speeds of IP networks, and the inherent benefits of IP architecture.

“The rate of development in the IP industry far outstrips anything possible to achieve in broadcast,” he said. “On the back of this, 100GbE network speeds are now considered commonplace, with greater interface speeds just around the corner. As an industry, we are now in a position to leverage this fast pace of development and use it to our advantage in order to achieve significant advantages in terms of space, power, cabling and operational efficiency. With IP solutions, we also have the option to build the level of redundancy needed for any situation.”

Traditional routing switchers—both SDI and analog—have gotten more compact and affordable over the past two decades. As routing technology became mainstream in the past 30 years, reliability and performance have gone way up as well. If traditional routers had remained as large, complex and expensive as they were 30 years ago, there would be no contest—we would all be screaming for the relatively low-cost and flexible distribution provided by IP networks.

However, SDI routers got better in every regard in the past couple of decades, and that keeps them in the game today. Still, the days of traditional routers may be numbered.

“Over time, as more devices natively speak IP, the ability to connect them via IP will push IP technology into smaller systems and smaller deployments,” Mail-hut said. “And moving to UHD makes everything harder by a factor of four with SDI, so UHD also is a big driver of the need for scale and the movement to IP.”

Top photo: Jamie Oakford mans an Arena Television OB truck wired for IP distribution, with technology provided by Grass Valley.

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.