EVS’ chief technology officer Alex Redfern has been discussing some of the trends the company expects to see within the broadcast industry in 2023.

Redfern was speaking as part of a media briefing where the company’s leadership looked back over what it had achieved during 2022 and its goals for this year.

Asked what he sees as some of the key trends for 2023, Redfern addressed a number of topics, including IP, Balanced Computing, UHD and cybersecurity.

Transition to IP
Redfern began by discussing IP, stating that while it’s not necessarily the newest topic in the broadcast industry, the current trend is about the pace of transition and how quickly it is accelerating. “We’ve certainly installed a lot more IP-based systems, be they in fixed installations or now increasingly in trucks and mobile solutions,” he said.

He added that the need for multi-vendor support is a key topic for EVS and will continue to be. “When you’re in multi-vendor environments, it’s all about observing standards, it’s about understanding how to be interoperable with each other, and also not just observing the standards but each vendor’s interpretation of the standards,” Redfern added.

Last year EVS joined the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM), taking part in the organization’s interoperability which, Redfern says, enables the company to “know that we play well with everyone else”.

“It’s really important for us to know where we sit amongst our peers and how we can build solutions and integrate the solutions,” he added.

“It sort of plays into UHD to a certain extent in that UHD doesn’t necessarily make things more complex,” continued Redfern. “It can make things bigger, obviously there’s much more data but it doesn’t necessarily make things more complex. We see the drive to UHD. Big tech players now are starting to want UHD. For a while in the industry, we saw an interim of 1080P, perhaps 1080P HDR was good enough, it can be up-converted. Now the big tech players are coming in saying it must be native. So that’s a real drive on the UHD side.”

In terms of balanced computing, EVS is seeing a trend towards the cloud and being able to support cloud solutions. said Redfern, However, in certain instances, he sees that balance shifting depending on the area. “XtraMotion Edge is a great example where when we announced the SaaS offering, it was the business model that was interesting to people,” he added. “We deployed it as a SaaS offering in the cloud. And when people start to dig into the needs, what the customer actually needs, speed was the most important thing. In that instance, the cloud didn’t offer the speed that was needed. So it was better to go to the edge than to have it in the cloud.”

Flexible Control Rooms
Flexible control rooms are also an area where EVS is seeing growing interest. In 2022, the company announced a collaboration with Belgian broadcaster RTBF on a new flexible control room solution designed to increase operational flexibility, creativity and productivity across its TV, radio, and digital platforms. “It’s a trend that we see evolving through the broadcast industry, the need for a much more flexible production space,” said Redfern.

“It’s really about decoupling the user experience of pressing buttons and interacting with hardware. The idea is that it can start with a single user doing a single-person show and expand perhaps to add on the graphics operator or audio operator and keep expanding dynamically as the show expands.”

Redfern adds that this is something EVS is working on currently, with proof-of-concept testing ongoing. “It’s very much driven by Cerebrum [EVS’s broadcast control and monitoring system] and it’s totally in line with our blueprint, the idea of picking up on things that perhaps we don’t have yet but we want to build. It’s a really fascinating project to see how that’s going to evolve over the next couple of years.”

The final topic Redfern discussed was cybersecurity, which he believes is something that the broadcast industry is becoming increasingly aware of following attacks on a number of broadcasters in recent years. 

“A couple of years ago we took a stance and said, what can we do about this? The first thing we did was actually look for the people we could onboard and acquire some knowledge and start offering services around audit, detect, protect and learn,” he added. “It was a kind of learning process of how we can investigate what our customers and our clients do and offer them services. That turned into a product, EV Shield, which was a TVBEurope Best of Show winner at IBC. It’s something that I think in 2023 will be a real trend.

“With cybersecurity it feels like it’s not a matter of if but when and not just for broadcasters but for all of us, including EVS,” he concluded.

THATCHAM, U.K.—Phabrix recently announced that a pair of its products, the Qx rasterizer and the handheld Sx TAG, have passed a pair of JT-NM self-tests, meeting the criteria for SMPTE ST 2110 and AWMA NMOS TR-1001-1.

Designed by the Joint Task Force on Networked Media, the tests provide insight into how vendor equipment aligns with IP-based standards. 

The Qx ST 2110 core IP feature that was tested provides ST 2110 confidence status monitoring and was designed for HD IP ST 2110/2022-7 AMWA NMOS and ST 2022-6 environments. The core ST 2110 toolset supports simultaneous decapsulation of one video, two audio and one ANC data flow. It is able to support SMPTE’s ST 2059 (PTP), ST 2110-20 (uncompressed video). -30 (PCM digital audio), -31 (AES transparent transports) and -40 (ANC data) protocols. ST 2022-7 seamless protection (SIPS) is provided for all four flows over two media network interfaces using industry standard 10Gbps SFPs.

The Sx TAG, meanwhile, tested the encapsulation and decapsulation of ST 2110-20/30/31/40 with IP to SDI gateway, ST 2059 PTP, AMWA NMOS and ST 2022-6. The system has hybrid operation that is supported with a built-in synchronizer that allows asynchronous SDI sources to be locked to PTP for ST 2110 encapsulation.

“We’re delighted with the recent JT-NM self-tested results,” said Phillip Adams, CEO of Phabrix. “Phabrix is committed to complying with the growing list of standards our industry is facing, with the JT-NM program offering a trusted reference source for our customers.”

These tests of Phabrix products took place during the JT-NM Spring 2020 self-test and are published in the JT-NM Spring 2020 Self-Test Catalogs.

For more information, visit www.phabrix.com. 

The Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) said it will enhance its JT-NM tested program, a standards testing effort that when validated will authorize vendors to display badges at their 2020 NAB Show booths attesting to their implementations of parts of SMPTE ST 2110, AMWA NMOS specifications and the JT-NM TR-1001-1.

The Joint Task Force will publish testing criteria. Vendors will perform testing at their own facilities. Standards validation of vendor test results will be confirmed at a testing event scheduled for the week of March 16, the task force said.

Overall testing results will be published in a catalog. Past catalogs are available online.

This round will include testing of broadcast controllers and registries. All vendors producing equipment using relevant portions of the standards to be tested are welcome to participate in the tested program, the task force said.

Participation in past events is not a prerequisite for participation in the program for the 2020 NAB Show.

The Joint Task Force is a consortium of industry organizations, including the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Video Services Forum (VSF).

More information about the testing and standards validation program is available by emailing Bob Ruhl. 

Given the effect and pervasiveness of IT in our personal and professional lives, it is encouraging to see that the media and entertainment industry’s transition to All-IP has steadily gathered pace. IP is an enabling technology and our industry’s adapting its use to our needs, responding to a number of challenges across contribution, live production and playout that we see today.

Consider the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of pieces of equipment that are used by broadcasters worldwide. Then, offset that against other operators who are developing the use of IT protocols, interfaces and infrastructure—and therefore utilizing the maturity of perhaps a trillion pieces of equipment—and you can see there are better economies of scale that exist elsewhere. By moving away from broadcast-industry-specific architectures towards IP-based infrastructure and solutions, the media and entertainment industry can become more agile in their operations.

In other words, the reasons to migrate are compelling and have gone beyond applications such as OTT or real-time internet video delivery, and are now permeating across mission-critical use cases at fledgling start-ups and major international broadcasters.

For many, the catalyst has been the demand from consumers for content everywhere, which has ramped up increasingly in the last 10 years as we move towards a mobile-first environment. Bringing new OTT services to market has been a natural fit for IP transformation. Launching a new service on a software- and IP-centric infrastructure, supported by the cloud and microservices, now means a lead time measured in weeks and months and not years, as would be the case in the legacy world.

FLEXIBILITY AND ELASTICITY

In the application-specific integrated circuit history of broadcast technologies, when capacity is reached, it requires a major CAPEX expenditure and significant hardware upgrade. In a software and IP-centric world, capacity, performance and connectivity can all scale quickly, based on demand and then contract if required. This flexibility and elasticity matches the current commercial imperatives that broadcasters face when expanding their content reach, while at the same time, helps to build new revenue models that take advantage of IP-compatible concepts such as targeted and dynamic advertising and OTT-based subscription models.

At the closest edge of the wave, real innovators are adopting fully software-defined media workflows. This starts at the production level from studio cameras, to editing suites and progresses through content processing and distribution. The rationale is simple. Creating, managing and distributing content across a real-time, IP-based workflow with software as the controlling entity is much easier than the myriad transitional steps that are limited by custom-built hardware solutions. Today’s broadcasters can handle more content across a wider range of distribution paths with fewer staff than ever before.

Capacity and resiliency is assured through the ability to spin up more virtualized capacity—not just across media processing but for critical connectivity requirements through network function virtualizations. The transition to All-IP has also gone beyond arcane technical requirements. According to the highly regarded Devoncroft 2019 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), IP networking and content delivery is the top-ranked trend this year—overtaking multiplatform content, which has ranked as “the most commercially important trend to the global broadcast and media industry” for the last decade.

EMERGING STANDARDS

Although closely linked, the move to All-IP has been accelerated by the emergence of several industry standards that have concentrated the minds of key broadcasters and provided a viable route for adoption that overcomes the inherent risk aversion of the industry. The arrival of Society of Motion Picture Television Engineers (SMPTE) ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards and SMPTE ST 2059 Broadcast Profile for IEEE Precision Time Protocol standards specify the carriage, synchronization and description of the spate of real-time delivery of elementary essence streams over IP. This is for the purpose of live production and encompasses video, audio, timecode, sync and ancillary data. Media and entertainment’s future lies in technology stacks, where the enormous amounts of data can be stored in the cloud. Through standards such as SMPTE ST 2110 and ST 2059, broadcasters now have not only a standardized route towards replacing serial digital interface (SDI) with IP, but also the opportunity to usher in a new wave of applications based on, and leveraged off, IT protocols and infrastructure.

For broadcasters, a key advantage is no longer requiring two separate operations (staffing and infrastructure) for managing intra-facility traffic—SDI switches for professional media and IP/Ethernet switches for general data. Instead, facilities can rely on one common data center infrastructure. Alongside SMPTE standards, AMWA Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) define IP-based media network control and management, such as Discovery & Registration, Device Connection Management, Network Control and Interoperable Security. The transition to All-IP for the media and entertainment industry was envisioned and championed by the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM), which is comprised of four major industry organizations: Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), European Broadcasting Union (EBU), SMPTE and Video Services Forum (VSF).

As more vendors support these and other standards and specifications, the rate of customer adoption grows in tandem, leading to a virtuous circle which will help to alleviate one of the major obstacles in the way of All-IP transition—skills shortage. This is not insurmountable, and the broadcast industry has a good track record of attracting the best and the brightest—and the move to All-IP will hopefully mirror earlier technology shifts such as the move from analog to SDI in the late 1980’s.

SUMMARY

An All-IP broadcaster is no longer prefixed by the word “future”—it is a reality for the here and now. As legacy hardware reaches end-of-life, and as on-premises data centers run out of capacity, the logical upgrade path will be a move toward All-IP infrastructure and protocols, software defined media processing, virtualization and cloud-native solutions. The transition happening in the broadcast space in many ways mirrors the shift that telecoms providers and financial services organizations have embraced over the last decade, while the combination of commercial drivers and standards-based technologies is making the transition a far more orderly progression for the media and entertainment industry.

For those broadcasters just starting out on the journey, the ability to move through a hybrid adoption process—shifting discreet processes over to All-IP in a staged fashion—is also a compelling option, as is the use of Software-as-a-Service to limit the technical transition to more of a commercial decision. Over the next decade, the notion of a non-IP workflow will stand out as the exception and not the rule. By enabling production and content delivery providers to reduce time-to-market and benefit from more agile development environments, the realization of All-IP will provide the foundation for the media industry’s long-term future.

Matthew Goldman is the senior vice president of technology for MediaKind.

HEBDEN BRIDGE, U.K.—The Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) has given Calrec passing marks on its IP interoperability testing and is including the company in its JT-NM Tested Catalog, published last month at IBC 2019 in Amsterdam.

“What the JT-NM is doing—backed by VSF, SMPTE, AMWA and the EBU—is tremendously important in terms of continuing the push to true IP interoperability,” says Pete Walker, senior product manager at Calrec.

“It includes NMOS, which we believe is vital as a standardized mechanism for not only discovery/advertisement of IP technologies connected to a network alongside IP streams, but also connection management from a centralized point.”

The JT-NM’s interoperability testing exams how technologies work together and adhere to SMPTE standards.

Calrec participated in JT-NM testing in August. The company’s products were tested for SMPTE ST2110 and ST2022-7 interoperability.

More information is available on the Calrec website. 

MONTREAL, Quebec — September 13, 2019 —Matrox® Video is pleased to announce that the Matrox X.mio5 Q25, Matrox X.mio3 IP, and Matrox DSX LE5 D25 SMPTE ST 2110 network interface controller (NIC) cards have all successfully passed the most recent Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) Tested program for both the SMPTE ST 2110 standard and the NMOS/JT-NM TR-1001 specification. Matrox’s participation and technical contributions to the testing initiative represents a renewed commitment in maintaining the highest standard for multi-vendor interoperability in SMPTE ST 2110, IP-based deployments.

Returning to the IBC 2019 IP Showcase, the JT-NM Tested program offers prospective purchasers of IP-based equipment with greater, more documented insight into how vendor equipment aligns with open industry standards. The Matrox X.mio5 Q25, Matrox X.mio3 IP, and Matrox DSX LE5 D25 cards underwent the rigorous JT-NM testing program, with each of them seamlessly serving as reference sources for the SMPTE ST 2110 trial. For the NMOS/JT-NM TR-1001 trial, the same Matrox NICs demonstrated their built-in NMOS support with predictable, system-level connectivity for the TR-1001-1 technical recommendation. With built-in support for the NMOS IS-04 Device Discovery and Registration, NMOS IS-05 Device Connection Management, NMOS IS-09 System, LLDP, DHCP, and DNS-SD specifications, Matrox NICs completely abstract all low-level design work enabling OEMs to readily integrate their solutions into the ST 2110 network environment. 

Featured Matrox ST 2110 cards in the JT-NM Tested program: 

• Matrox X.mio5 Q25 ST 2110 quad 25 GbE NIC card for IP workflows from HD to 4K
• Matrox X.mio3 IP ST 2110 NIC card with multi-channel video I/O over 10 GbE plus onboard video processing
• Matrox DSX LE5 D25 ST 2110 dual 25 GbE NIC card for IP workflows from HD to 4K

“Matrox has been a long-time supporter of the SMPTE ST 2110 standard, and we are thrilled to continue this commitment through JT-NM’s IBC 2019 Tested program,” says Alberto Cieri, senior director of sales and marketing, Matrox Video. “Backed by our unique combination of IP know-how and broadcast expertise, Matrox NICs are built to offer the simplest path from SDI to ST 2110, while guaranteeing complete network interoperability and 24/7 reliability for next-generation ST 2110 workflows.”  

See Matrox SMPTE ST 2110 NIC cards in action at IBC 2019 on Matrox stand B15, hall 7 and in the IP Showcase Future Zone in rooms E106-107. 

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About Matrox Video

Matrox Video is a technology and market leader in the field of 4K, HD, and SD digital video hardware and software for accelerated H.264 encoding, realtime editing, audio/video input/output, streaming, A/V signal conversion, capture/playout servers, channel-in-a-box systems, and CGs. Matrox's Emmy award-winning technology powers a full range of multi-screen content creation and delivery platforms used by broadcasters, telcos, cable operators, post-production facilities, live event producers, videographers, and A/V professionals worldwide. Founded in 1976, Matrox is a privately held company headquartered in Montreal, Canada. For more information, visit www.matrox.com/video. 

Matrox Media Contact: 

Email: pr@matrox.com

Tel: +1 (514) 822-6000

Website: www.matrox.com

THATCHAM, England—At the recent JT-NM Testing Interop in Wuppertal, Germany, Phabrix’s Qx rasterizer and Sx TAG products were successfully tested and met the criteria for the AMWA NMOS TR-1001-1 and SMPTE ST 2110 standards for IP-based equipment.

The Qx ST 2110 core IP featured was proved to provide ST 2110 confidence status monitoring, while the Sx TAG was verified to offer support for modern IP broadcast systems with JT-NM encapsulation and decapsulation of ST 2110-20/30/40 with IP to SDI gateway, ST 2059 PTP and ST 2022-6.

“Phabrix is committed to complying with the growing list of standards our industry is facing, with the JT-NM program offering a trusted reference source for our customers,” said Phillip Adams, Phabrix CEO.

Phabrix will display both the Qx rasterizer and Sx Tag system at IBC 2019.

WUPPERTAL, Germany—In August, another round of JT-NM interop tests took place in Germany to test a slew of company products and if they met the qualifications for JT-NM’s standards, including the newly announced JT-NM TR-1001-1. Three companies—Grass Valley, Lawo and Nevion—have announced that their tested products passed the tests for both TR-1001-1 and the previously developed SMPTE ST 2110 standards.

GV’s XIP-3901-UDC-IP agile processor, IPVU monitoring gateway, K-Frame X video production center and Kaleido IP multiviewer systems all passed the tests. Nevion’s software-defined media node Virtuoso also passed. Lawo did not specifically announced which of its products passed the test, but noted that all did.

With the passing grades, all of these products have shown that they are capable of working in a multi-vendor environment in an IP media network.

The official results of the test program will be published in a JT-NM Tested catalog and made available during the IP Showcase at IBC 2019, Sept. 13-17.

LIEGE, Belgium—EVS’ latest version of the XT live production servers are now IP certified after passing the Joint Task Force on Networked Media’s JT-NM SMPTE ST 2110 testing. This makes the XT servers a fully-approved product to produced and shipped with full IP interoperability, consistent with the AIMS Alliance roadmap and industry-agreed open standards.

The SMPTE ST 2110 IP network standards specifies the carriage, synchronization and description of separate elementary essence streams over professional IP networks in real-time for live production, playout and other professional media applications.

Key to the newest XT servers is the Multicam 16.2 software engine, which will be publicly released in June. The software supports more of the JT-NM stack of technologies, as well as NMOS IS-04 and NMOS IS-05 updates. Now all EVS servers with the upgraded software engine—which includes the XT, XS-VIA and previous generation XT4K and XS4K—now natively support IP and meet the compliance standards to transition to IP workflows.

EVS claims that the XT servers are the first live production servers to feature IP interoperability.

WOODLANDS, TEXAS—The Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM), which presented the results of its JT-NM Tested Program at the IP Showcase during the 2019 NAB Show in April, relied on test and measurement equipment and software, reference senders and receivers and network switches from a variety of sources for its March 18 tests held at an event hosted by Fox Networks in Woodlands, Texas.

The aim of the program, organized by both JT-NM and the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS), is to give broadcasters, post-production firms and other M&E industry entities thinking about adopting SMPTE ST 2110 and SMPTE ST 2059 standards better perspective on how the equipment of vendors align with the standard, JT-NM said.

“This program is not a certification program; rather it is a snapshot in time of how vendor equipment conforms to key parts of SMPTE standards, providing prospective purchasers and users with a reference as they begin their equipment evaluation and qualification process,” says the JT-NM website.

Among the companies and organizations providing test and measurement hardware and software for the Woodlands test, were BridgeTech, the EBU, Meinberg, Packetstorm, SDPoker, Tektronix and Wireshark. The EBU and IRT administered use of the equipment.

In addition to supplying equipment for the tests, Tektronix helped in their development and dispatched experts to the Woodlands site to assist.

“Every architecture, implementation or customer application is different,” said Mike Overton, principal engineer at Tektronix. “By establishing trust in which devices meet the test criteria, we’re helping strengthen confidence in the standards and, ultimately, advancing their effectiveness.”

Tektronix provided it SPG8000A as the PTP grandmaster clock for the media IP network, its Prism IP/SDI hybrid monitoring and analysis platform and its WFM8300 waveform monitor to monitor video and audio signals to ensure correct decoding of streams.

Other T&M equipment and software used included: BridgeTech’s VB440 IP probe; EBU’s Live IP software toolkit; Meinberg’s PTP Track Hound network traffic capture tool and analyzer; Packetstorm’s CRS capture and replay system, network emulator and VIP media over IP analyzer; SDPoker’s CLI tool and library for ST 2110 SDP files; and Wireshark’s network protocol analyzer.

The results of the JT-NM Tested Programs were presented in a report that is available as a PDF download.