ITN launches low-latency IP control room

ITN’s production control room (PCR) has been designed to deliver reduced latency and greater flexibility to production teams. According to the partners, the system: provides responsive, fully configurable monitoring within ITN’s new production control room (PCR); enables multiviewing for live news bulletins; and mirrors the immediacy of traditional baseband workflows while remaining entirely IP-native.

TAG’s Realtime Media platform is a fully software-based system that unifies probing, monitoring, visualisation, and analysis into one platform. Its adaptive architecture enables efficient load balancing, rapid mosaic generation, and on-the-fly transcoding, all within the IP domain. Moreover, ITN highlighted that it has harnessed its support for SMPTE ST 2110 and JPEG XS in the new PCR to deliver a scalable, future-ready monitoring solution for live news production.

The deployment drives multi-viewer latency down to between 1 and 1.5 frames. This has been achieved through the Matrox ConvertIP ST 2110 – HDMI interfaces, which drive the PCR’s ten 4K multi-viewer displays.

The Matrox ConvertIP decoders make this latency possible by translating IP signals into native HDMI outputs with deterministic timing and no perceptible lag. Their ability to maintain consistent frame-accurate synchronisation across all ten 4K displays ensures the “live feel” that operators rely on when cutting between sources.

Going beyond low-latency, TAG’s Operator Console also allows people in the gallery to quickly adapt multi-viewer screens to the current production, putting them in control of what they see.

“With TAG, we’ve been able to realise the agility of an all-IP monitoring workflow while retaining the low latency and reliability that operators are used to in traditional galleries,” said James Wickes, Lead Media Engineer at ITN Productions. “Matrox’s ConvertIP technology delivers that responsiveness on screen, and with Techex helping us bring the two together in a cohesive architecture, we’ve been able to future-proof our gallery and the production workflows that depend on it.”

“ITN’s new gallery is a great example of how IP-native monitoring can reach full broadcast responsiveness,” explains Paul Briscoe, Chief Architect at TAG. “In a newsroom environment, the immediacy of information delivery, while retaining the flexibility of a software-defined system, is hugely validating. It demonstrates that an advanced, all-IP control room can meet the real-time demands that live production requires. Techex’s approach brought together the strengths of TAG and Matrox Video in a way that allowed ITN to focus purely on production rather than infrastructure.”

John Treadwell, Senior Strategic Account Manager of Global Accounts at Techex, commented: “As long-time partners with TAG Video Systems, we were able to bring our experience to bear while designing this system using the TAG–Matrox Video integration. We worked closely with ITN to capture requirements, validate the design, and deliver the project. That collaboration will continue as we support ITN in evolving the system now that it’s live.”

Daniel Maloney, Technical Marketing Manager at Matrox Video, added: “The Matrox ConvertIP family was designed exactly for projects like this. Seeing ITN achieve such low-latency multi-viewer performance across multiple 4K displays is a great demonstration of how tight partnerships can bring immediacy and confidence back into IP-based control rooms.”

Jon Roberts was recently promoted to Chief Technology Officer at ITN. Discover more here.