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Â鶹ԼÅÄ Research & Development's IP Studio team is addressing the building blocks that will help make our vision of the future a reality. These include the networking and compute technologies that are used in broadcast facilities, the mechanisms to connect, control and these, and how we can benefit from cloud computing.

This blog post covers developments since our previous summary in May.

IP Production Facilities

is now widely supported in the industry, with several broadcasters now planning, building and commissioning new facilities. This has been helped by the JT-NM Tested programme of interoperability workshops and a catalogue of 2110-capable devices. The programme now also checks support for discovery and connection using . This uses a developed by Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D and others, and our Andrew Bonney managed these . This was a significant step forward for NMOS, making it easier for broadcasters to see who/what supports it and to require these technologies in the future.

In July, AMWA Networked Media Incubator held a workshop at the Montréal location — where — and allowed us to successfully test NMOS on a network that was representative of what is being installed. The workshop enabled to progress our work on , and carrying real-time data/event information ().

The team were busy at IBC 2019, demonstrating and presenting on our NMOS and JT-NM Tested work in the , and on the .

• Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - Securing the Future of Broadcast with Public Key Infrastructure
• IP Showcase - AMWA NMOS IS-04 & IS-05: Things You Might Not Know

Cloud-Fit Production

We’ve already written about our storage and hybrid storage approach to an architecture that can be parallelised, and deployed onto different platforms. Now we are looking at building these into useful workflows, that support support traditional production operations, but will also be useful for new types of content.

So we now have a Stream Packaging component, which pulls media from a Media Object Store and streams it in a chosen format. We’ve started by using FFMPEG to create an H.264 playout instance, and plan to support ST 2110 and other formats in the future. See Simon Rankine’s recent post for more about this.

The Media Object Store doesn’t have to be accessed as a stream of course, and the team is now developing components to provide more conventional file-based access on-the-fly, for instance to support edit-during-capture workflows.

We are also investigating how our highly-parallelised approach to storage can help with parallel processing at scale for our wider media operations, such as video analysis and machine learning.

Computing and Networks at Scale

Following on from our initial pilot in Salford, we are now building a larger on-premise cloud in London, again using the  framework and  storage. This will provide a facility for much of our project work, and also help inform Â鶹ԼÅÄ’s wider cloud strategy.

As SMPTE ST 2110 becomes more common, there is increasing interest in how it can be used alongside virtualised infrastructure, as in an on-premise cloud. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, such as the need to support PTP (Precision Time Protocol) and multicast streams. We’ve presented at the EBU’s  and at IBC on this subject, and the team is now actively investigating technical approaches.

Automation

A common objective across our projects is how automation can provide Â鶹ԼÅÄ with the flexibility and scale it will need. This includes not just automation of how we deploy devices and services (including our NMOS work), but also .  We make extensive use of open-source tools such as and for provisioning and configuring the on-premise cloud infrastructure, and tools such as and to automate our software development and testing.

This is an area that will be important to all broadcasters, and we are setting up to help us work alongside our colleagues in other EBU members to share experiences in this new area, where many of the tools and approaches have come from outside our traditional industry.

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Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - IP Production Facilities

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - Cloud-Fit Production Architecture

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - Computing and Networks at Scale

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - IP Studio

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - Beyond Streams and Files - Storing Frames in the Cloud

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - High Speed Networking: Open Sourcing our Kernel Bypass Work

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - IP Studio: Lightweight Live

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - IP Studio: 2017 in Review - 2016 in Review

Â鶹ԼÅÄ R&D - IP Studio Update: Partners and Video Production in the Cloud