As broadcasters continue transitioning to IP-based workflows, industry leaders are exploring new approaches that could improve interoperability, collaboration and operational flexibility.
At the heart of these discussions is the Dynamic Media Facility (DMF) and related Media eXchange Layer (MXL), emerging frameworks intended to help broadcasters determine how the next generation of software-defined workflows could work.
The topic was explored during a panel hosted by the North American Broadcasters Association (NABA), in conjunction with the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA), featuring moderator Steve Reynolds, CEO, Imagine Communications, and guest speakers Naveed Aslam, senior vice president of Production Technology and Engineering, CBS/Paramount; John Mailhot, senior vice president of Product Management, Imagine Communications; Willem Vermost, senior IP media technology architect, EBU; and Andy Rayner, CTO, Appear.
“Much of media processing now runs in software, in a combination of on-premises and in the cloud,” Reynolds said. “And so, if everything is now moving to software, we have to ask the question: are we still designing our facilities in the right way?”
Panelists said DMF was created to address this question, driving the industry forward while solving key business challenges such as how to improve efficiency and allow broadcasters and their partners to share “very expensive resources” amongst more productions.
“I think, from our perspective, SMPTE ST 2110 and IP-based workflows have largely been understood and embraced as being the next industry evolutionary step,” Aslam said. “From our perspective, the DMF initiative is truly the key to start unlocking the practical and technological benefits that we can derive from an IP infrastructure, the opportunities that arise from that, and it just truly starts to give us an opportunity to explore what IP workflows can be.”
The panel explained that neither DMF nor MXL are meant to replace SMPTE ST 2110, the technical standards that gives broadcasters a means to transport broadcast-quality signals over IP networks, enabling them to scale workflows and providing a foundation for interoperability.
Rather, all three are designed to work together: DMF provides a framework for the next generation of more dynamic, software-defined facilities, while MXL provides a specific mode for connecting applications and services, effectively enabling interoperability inside of a computing cluster.
“It’s really the goal of the DMF to organize those upper layers so that you can actually have a dynamic facility,” Mailhot said. “I think that 2110 and MXL will work together to achieve that, but there’s a lot of work to do to fill in all those blanks.”
“If we work in an asynchronous way, suddenly more media functions can be run than ever before. Within the same time frame, of a frame, multiple operations can be run,” Vermost said.
“If you look at it from that point of view, it seems like a revolution. But, if you look at it from your broadcast plant and how you operate it, it’s an evolution. We’ll get there step by step.”
Panel discussion is available on demand on NABA's YouTube channel.
