High standards: live production and the move to IP

Asked to identify one key trend in live production technology over the last few years, a casual observer would surely identify the shift of the industry from legacy technology to IP and the cloud.

That drive to adopt remote cloud production, IP and virtualisation of production for live events is being driven by a familiar set of industry trends – demand for more personalised content, greater choice about what sports to watch and how to watch them, and an expansion of the range of events and sports covered.

Some of these trends, and the move to accommodate them, were accelerated by the Covid pandemic, which saw an expansion in streaming and coverage of events to cater to people confined to their homes by lockdowns, according to Mo Goyal, Senior Director of International Business Development for Live Media, and production technology giant Evertz.

“I think we found as an industry that cloud production was viable, and really solved a need,” he says. Following the pandemic, there was a certain ‘return to normal’ to make the most of existing investment in hardware. However, some workflows moved to the cloud, creating a different mix than had existed previously.

Now, according to Goyal, there is a growing demand for solutions that match the needs of second and third-tier sports leagues, for example, who see an opportunity to take advantage of innovation in this area to make their content visible to a broader audience.

“Using an OB truck can be cost-prohibitive, and they may not know how big the audience will be,” he says. “So this next year you will see sports leagues adopting cloud production because there are savings to be had – there’s cost benefit to do it this way to get your content out, generate an audience and maybe look at building and improving your production as you go along.”

Key to enabling this shift is adequate network connectivity and a willingness to support a shift to a cloud-based model.

Network connectivity and data centres that can support a cloud-based model are not universally available, but even where they are, says Goyal, “there’s a definite challenge for vendors that are traditionally hardware-based companies to realise revenue in the software and cloud space”.

The economics of running on-premises may also still be compelling for operators with many permanent channels.

There are also other factors fuelling the move from hardware-based on-premises technology to virtualisation and the cloud.

“A lot of things are still CapEx-based, and people are sweating their assets,” says Ronny van Geel, Director of Product Marketing at Grass Valley. “On top of that, you need a more elastic layer that is OpEx-based to be able to say, well, I have this opportunity to test something, and the cloud works great for that,”

Van Geel says that “the first logical step” for companies migrating to a cloud-based infrastructure is “translating hardware things into software” and then making sure the technology performs at the same level of quality and reliability.

“That sounds simple but it’s a huge step. If you look for instance at AMPP [Grass Valley’s flagship Agile Media Processing Platform], we started developing that four years ago,” he says. The company used this year’s IBC to debut Sports Producer X, a new AMPP application aimed at smaller and mid-tier sports producers that combines some previous products into a single solution.

IP-based infrastructure

A pre-condition for the move to the cloud is the migration of the production workflow to IP.

“The adoption of IP-based infrastructure and production technology is pretty much de facto at this point. The industry has kind of coalesced around SMPTE 2110,” says Steve Reynolds, CEO of Imagine Communications, who says that “most of the projects” Imagine is engaged with involve that suite of standards for moving professional media over managed IP networks.

He says that Imagine is also heavily involved in retrofitting existing serial digital interface (SDI) infrastructure – the industry workhorse standard for moving digital video and audio over coax or fibre cabling.

“Part of the reason for that is that people realise that SMPTE2110 and IP production in general is the on-ramp to the cloud. You can’t get to the cloud, and you can’t get to virtualisation until you’re on IP. You can’t virtualise an SDI cable,” he adds.

Reynolds says he has noticed a significant shift towards sports production moving to IP, with much of it being cloud-based, remote and virtualised, over the last year.

Reynolds believes the shift is being accelerated by wider market trends, with broadcasters focusing on higher-value content such as live sports to differentiate their offerings from the output of streamers.

“Live sports is the big breadwinner for a lot of these broadcasters, and so they have had to figure out ways to reduce costs on the production side, and IP is also a great catalyst for cost reduction, and virtualisation is another great way to do that,” he says.

“But they also wanted to broaden out their sports offerings. They wanted to be able to add tier two and tier three sports, and they wanted to be able to add international sports. And again, if you’re going to be producing a lot more sports, what you don’t want to have to do is build control room after control room after control room.”

The ability to spin up virtual control rooms has seen broadcasters reaching for the cloud for high-profile events such as the Olympics.

SMPTE ST 2110 and compressed video

SMPTE ST 2110 was originally designed as a standard way to move uncompressed video over IP networks. More recently, the introduction of SMPTE ST 2110-22 has paved the way for the use of compressed video and led to increased adoption of the JPEG-XS compression format, providing additional flexibility in bandwidth-constrained environments. This has opened the way for a much wider application of cloud contribution and remote production that can deliver high-quality video at low latency.

Imagine’s gateway platform, the Selenio Network Processor, is a hardware platform that sits at the edge of the network. The company, says Reynolds, built a JPEG-XS contribution module that is compliant with the Video Services Forum’s TR-07 specification for streaming JPEG XS video and interoperable transport of JPEG-XS compressed video along with associated audio and ancillary data in an MPEG-2 Transport Stream.

“This enables us to perform cloud contribution using lightweight, low latency compression [using JPEG-XS] to get high-quality material from the ground to the cloud,” says Reynolds, citing the company’s work during the Olympics using this workflow for cloud-based production.

Goyal says Evertz is also “a big fan” of SMPTE ST 2110-22. “JPEG-XS is something that we’ve been behind for the last four or five years and a lot of our technologies are based on it because we see the value proposition of a codec that’s lightweight and low-latency,” he says. “The fact that I can take this codec and move it into many parts of the puzzle – we can build it into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), but also into software – opens up working in a hybrid environment.”

Grass Valley’s Van Geel says that the rise of IP means that “the importance of standards again is increasing”. He says that IP and standards such as JPEG-XS have also enabled the industry to “completely break free” from constraints such as the Pixel Clock Rate – the speed at which pixels are transmitted that determines whether or not a certain resolution or video rate can be transmitted over a video cable, where transmission to a new hardware device means that the clock has to be re-synchronised, leading each time to the loss of a single frame.

Standards, says Van Geel, enable interoperability and allow multiple vendors to coexist within the same workflow. “AMPP is not intended to be a closed system – it’s not an ASIC-like device. It’s open. Ideally, we would like to earn the trust of people and have as many components as possible from our own library, but it’s not necessary,” he says.

Reducing cost

Other technologies enabling innovation in remote production include Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST), which is designed to enable transmission over loss-prone networks including the internet with low latency and high quality, and the more widely used companion Secure Reliable Transport Protocol (SRT), which includes additional protection against packet loss to ensure quality of live video but lacks RIST’s multicast capability. The Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) meanwhile enable interoperability between devices within an IP infrastructure.

“You can now have more of a production hub bringing in content remotely, reducing the cost of having people and equipment on site while still being able to deliver high quality,” says Goyal. “Remote feeds can be over JPEG-XS. The introduction of RIST and SRT has also created opportunities to use the public cloud.”

Goyal says that hybrid ways of working are becoming more common, with some elements being done on premises and others in the cloud. A move to IP-based production universally makes this easier because the cost of converting between environments, which may be high, is eliminated in an all-IP environment.

Nevertheless, he says, movement from SDI to all-IP is still an ongoing process. “I think the industry has done an admirable job with SMTPTE ST 2110 and NMOS, but a lot of companies are still apprehensive about going IP because they’re just not well-versed in the technology.”

Grass Valley’s Van Geel agrees that hybrid ways of working are likely here to stay. “If you really started over, that would be a big shift that would slow you down,” he says. “SDI is just one of many ingredients. In the old days, the step from analogue to SDI was a huge one and then from 1.5G to 3G was huge. When 3G came then 3G SDI was the only reliable solution that could work at that bandwidth all the time. One of the main hurdles when IP all of a sudden provided that level of reliability, bandwidth and security was cultural.”

Those reservations aside, the direction of travel is clear – and it’s being driven by an ever-growing demand for high-quality, low-latency video from an ever-growing number of sports leagues and live events.

“I think it comes down to the level of UHD you now have within production. What we saw with the Olympics was a great deal of UHD and HDR, and a lot more feeds. That kind of demand would make JPEG-XS a logical choice as you try to move not just a handful of cameras but hundreds of cameras across the network, produce within all the venues and deliver to broadcast partners,” says Goyal.