Intelligence for the media & entertainment industry
JUNE 2022
THE SUPERHEROES BEHIND
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CONTENT
The importance of education
O
ver the last few weeks at TVBEurope’s website we’ve been showcasing the different roles within the media technology industry. It’s a subject that’s really important to me. I was recently asked to be part of a podcast, on which our discussion touched on the fact that so many school pupils and higher education students have no idea of the breadth of roles available in our industry. That spurred me on to launch a new feature called Meet The… which aims to showcase that rich variety of disciplines that make up our marketplace. So far it seems to have struck a chord with our audience and I hope that continues. If you’re interested in sharing what your typical day is like, and why you chose to work in the industry, please do get in touch!
Graphic Designer: Marc Miller Managing Design Director: Nicole Cobban nicole.cobban@futurenet.com Group Content Director, B2B: James McKeown james.mckeown@futurenet.com
MANAGEMENT
This is why I believe the work Carrie Wootten and the team at Rise do in terms of going out into schools and engaging with young kids is so important for inspiring the next few generations of our industry. If something like that had happened when I was at school I would have been so excited to get involved and explore the possibilities that were open to me. As part of that focus on education, I spoke to Polly Hickling from Solent University about how she works with the industry to help prepare that next generation of the workforce. It was fantastic to hear how supportive she feels the industry is, not just in helping students understand some of the more technical aspects through guest lectures and workshops, but also how
“It’s not just the students who need educating about the possibilities of working in media tech. We also need to teach the teachers” Education is so important. And it’s not just the students themselves who need educating about the possibilities of working in media tech. We need to teach the teachers as well. As a sixth form student, I told my teachers I wanted to work in the media. I was told I’d probably be a good researcher, because that was the only role my teachers had heard of.
Editor: Jenny Priestley jenny.priestley@futurenet.com
media professionals are willing to teach the teachers so that they can pass that knowledge on. It’s so important that we help to encourage the next generation of talent into our community. I hope that through our platform and our showcasing and support for grass roots initiatives, TVBEurope can help to educate and inform those who might be interested in joining as well as those people and businesses that are looking to employ outreach schemes of their own (we’d love to hear from you!). We all know we have a skills gap and so it’s up to all of us to help bring in that new talent that is going to keep pushing this incredible industry forward. n
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TVBEUROPE JUNE 2022 | 03
IN THIS ISSUE
JUNE 2022
10 NAB kicks off awards season We profile the winners in the TVBEurope categories of Future’s Best of Show and Best in Market awards, showcasing the innovations and solutions that R&D teams have been working on through the pandemic period
14 A standardised approach to AoIP By Pete Walker, senior product manager for Calrec
18 Educating the next generation As the media tech industry continues to struggle with a skills gap, Polly Hickling tells Jenny Priestley how Solent University is helping to educate the workforce of the future
22 Shining a light on software
28
We meet the team behind new media tech company Backlight to discuss its plans to add value and flexibility to content production workflows
25 The sports portal of the future Jenny Priestley meets Unity Technologies’ Peter Moore to discuss how volumetric video could have as big an impact on the way we watch sport as the introduction of colour
28 The superheroes behind The Batman When the pandemic hit one of the most anticipated blockbusters of recent years, Hula Post employed technology from Avid to help keep the film on track
32 How RIST and SRT can address SRT’s limitations By Adi Rozenberg, founder, Alvalinks
36 The rings of power
10 www.tvbeurope.com
36
The team at NHK reveals details of the development of the new gamut ring framework for visualising the range of reproducible colours
TVBEUROPE JUNE 2022 | 05
OPINION AND ANALYSIS
Managing quality and costs in IP networks By Steve Bilow, senior product marketing manager, Telestream
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he media industry has for decades relied on media backbone providers; specialist telco companies that provide back-haul circuits (e.g. from sports stadia to broadcasters) or contribution circuits that carry programme feeds from broadcasters to affiliates, or to cable platform headends, and increasingly to streaming platforms. Major telcos provide services in almost every country (BT in the UK, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and MTI Teleport in Germany, Telstra Australia, Swisscom and more), and there are multinational equivalents such as SES. For many years, the primary method of carrying the media signal was typically an mpeg transport stream, which could be carried over satellite or a dedicated video circuit, either copper or fibre. In recent years, the video signal has become more encapsulated within an IP structure and can be carried by public internet or over private circuits. This has allowed more generic telecom backbone providers to offer video services and increased the level of flexibility available to media companies. IP delivery is format and resolution agnostic, so (provided there is enough bandwidth) it is relatively simple to switch from SD to HD or UHD and back, which is not possible with more traditional technologies. THE MONITORING PROBLEM When the video signal was mostly mpeg-TS via satellite back-haul, monitoring (for quality assurance) mostly consisted of viewing the feed in a NOC or Master Control, and perhaps measuring key technical parameters during the set-up stage of an event. Once a link was established, the NOC or MCR operators were mostly watching for catastrophic failures and were ready to switch to back-up feeds if available. As more signals are now carried over IP, the number and complexity of signals carried has increased. Manual monitoring in a NOC or MCR has become less effective and more expensive, and is often unable to identify many of the potential problems that can develop. IP-based carriage, using ST 2110 or ST 2022-6 is incredibly versatile, and works well the majority of the time. However, it is almost impossible for an operator to quickly spot that video-audio timing has drifted, closed captions are missing, or that the signal is in SD when it should be
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HD; especially if they have to keep watch on dozens or even hundreds of feeds simultaneously. Add in the complexity of distributed production, where the broadcaster may be receiving separate video and audio feeds from multiple locations, and the challenge for manual monitoring becomes evident. MODERN IP MONITORING TECHNIQUES Tools have evolved from the telco and OTT world that now allow ‘monitoring by exception’ of large numbers of video feeds on an IP network. In one common example, one probe device with support for dual gigabit ethernet, could be located at a main switching centre constantly monitoring up to 100 incoming ST 2110 or ST 2022-6 feeds from broadcasters and sports stadia, while other probes are used to monitor signals delivered to a cable TV headend. ‘Monitoring by exception’ at the IP level provides rapid alerts in the event of any problems in the IP layer, PTP timing or signal essence structures. This allows the NOC operators to concentrate on the content rather than having to watch for technical errors. The data logged from the probes allows the operator to verify that they are performing against their service level agreement, and more importantly to pinpoint the source of any error detected. VALUE Many backbone operators traditionally find that their clients are not ready to pay for 100 per cent technical monitoring, but the flexibility of modern probes, coupled with a low cost per channel and extreme flexibility, now makes it an attractive proposition for media network operators large and small. In fact, when amortised over three years, the cost of a modern probe can be as little as £0.50 per channel per day of use. At this price, the service provider should no longer view automated monitoring as a cost item to be loaded onto the customer, but as a cost-saving; reducing their operating costs and saving potential losses. The true value of moving to IP for media contribution demands a highly automated monitoring and quality assurance strategy from service providers, and the technology is now available to ensure quality and compliance. n
OPINION AND ANALYSIS
How can operators win hearts in 2022? by Pierre Donath, 3SS CMO / CPO
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oday the video entertainment landscape is more complex than ever. Subscription fatigue, viewers dazzled by choice – including myriad contract-free alternatives – and achieving ROI are now daily concerns for service providers. All these business risks are heightened by an uncertain economic backdrop of tightening household budgets and global inflation. In such a challenging marketplace, providing a great, and differentiating, user experience (UX) is imperative for business survival. The UX must be as good as it can be, always, wherever and whenever subscribers use the service. That’s UX in its entirety, including the full range of services and apps an operator delivers, the user’s experience as they are presented with the content smorgasbord, navigating the service and discovering content. But UX is still much more. From advertising, promotions offered through operator marketing, to customer support and the operator’s other interactions with subscribers, these are also the fabric of the UX. EMBRACE SUPER-CURATION WITH PERSONALISATION Service providers need to create strong one-to-one relationships with each of their customers. Operators need to step beyond ‘super-aggregation’ and unleash the potential of ‘super-curation’, the first step in delivering the advanced TV experiences that viewers really desire, with the ability to centralise access to all content, including apps and games, relevant to a viewer’s tastes and interests. For super-aggregators especially, a highly capable UX management and optimisation hub enables the curation of a vast array of assets, of diverse content types and sources, and it can all be offered within a personalised, seamless cross-device entertainment experience. Content curators, editorial and marketing teams can rapidly create experiences that are captivating by being individually tailored. Highly personalised super-curation is possible when tech can ‘learn’ about each subscriber. Everyone knows the risks are high. Consumers are generally pretty unforgiving. Once they’ve been disappointed by a TV service or experience, there’s little or no chance that the trust will ever be the same as before. AI, A/B TESTING AND AUTOMATION AI has the power to transform video UX possibilities to the benefit of service providers and their subscribers alike. AI is now widely used to process user data and content metadata to orchestrate and personalise the UI/UX, in real time. If the operator can also perform automated A/B testing, it can experiment with innovations and benefit from actionable user data to adapt and enhance the UI/UX. All the aspects of the UX can be adapted based on real-time feedback.
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The combination of AI-informed personalisation, proven UX optimisation, plus automation, yields an operator-centric set of capabilities and tools that can transform UX and galvanise the operatorsubscriber relationship. To dynamically optimise UX, the operator needs to be nimble. New content offers, features, services and promotional offers must be able to be created rapidly by marketers and editorial teams to ensure the customer is always presented with the right content at the right time. Also, the UX needs to be seamless across devices. Dashboards should be intuitive and highly visual to enable editors to see how new UI/UX pages will appear and function. Enabling a wider range of staff to carry out UX optimisation enhances resource efficiency. The means and tools that facilitate UX optimisation need to be editor-friendly, and easy to use without the need to call on the in-house development team to make UI/UX changes. Marketing people can analyse data, deploy antichurn measures, and improve UX on the fly. WORK WITHIN AN ECOSYSTEM In the pay-TV context, it is generally wiser for an operator considering technology platforms to choose an established ecosystem, with many pre-integrated solution options. In a tech ecosystem, an ‘extended family’ of complementary technologies and vendors reduces risk, increases modularity, eliminates waste and accelerates new products within a collaborative and future-ready environment. The operator benefits from freedom to choose system technology – such as backend, recommendation engine, or player – eliminating the operational and economic disadvantages of vendor lock-in. Earlier rollouts result in earlier revenue generation, and happier subscribers. Recommendation solutions, analytics, QoE optimisation technologies can combine with powerful UX management to enable operators to really understand their customers, to individualise UX and galvanise loyalty. AI and machine learning are fuelling ever-deeper and more granular data understanding, and enabling a new data analysis toolset for operators to build their subscription base, and improve operations. All told, with the right technology ecosystem, the operator can have transformative power over UX. Subscribers can enjoy truly personalised, super-curated entertainment experiences, harmonised across content sources and devices. Meanwhile service providers can be sure they’re delivering a high-quality, data-driven UX that’s closely aligned with users’ tastes, and easy and rapid to develop and enhance. With the right UX optimisation capabilities on hand, the operator has all tools to win the heart of every customer. n
TVBEUROPE JUNE 2022 | 07
OPINION AND ANALYSIS
The importance of being interoperable By Miroslav Jeras, CTO, Pebble
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or broadcasters and media companies the digital revolution has meant facing a variety of compatibility and interconnection challenges in all parts of the business. The migration toward IP workflows is possibly the most pressing example though, with interoperability becoming a key metric as organisations seek to replace proprietary media networking with format-agnostic workflows. Interoperability describes the ability of an application or device to interact meaningfully and exchange information with another separately developed application or device. Interoperable workflows allow broadcasters to take advantage of the best features of each manufacturer’s technologies, in an ideal world combining all into one seamless, highly customisable and adaptable workflow. Interoperability also makes possible the highest levels of flexibility and scalability that organisations require to accommodate future growth. However, one of the issues broadcast engineering teams are facing is that, to paraphrase Orwell, some devices are created more interoperable than others. There are many still on the market from different manufacturers that operate proprietary protocols internally with what is effectively an interoperable layer built on top for external IO. Unfortunately, these implementations can often be less than perfect, with even a small amount of drift leading to additional complexity as workarounds have to be implemented to accommodate any idiosyncrasies. The upshot is that when building a workflow which relies on interoperability between multiple vendors – i.e., most modern workflows – standards and best practices are absolutely key to its smooth functioning. There are two industry standards helping to both accelerate and smooth IP deployments: SMPTE ST 2110 (the set of SMPTE standards for sending digital media over an IP network) and the Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) suite of protocols. NMOS provides an open and simple to use control-plane solution that enables interoperability and management of IP connected audio and video devices. The protocols also govern device connection management on a network, which is an issue that has become dramatically more complex as we have moved away from SDI workflows. As the momentum towards IP continues to gain pace, multiple manufacturers, Pebble included, are working to the SMPTE and NMOS protocols to simplify establishing IP native workflows. This is done
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by ensuring that solutions and applications are developed with these protocols and their future roadmaps very much in mind, thus offering broadcasters standards-based interoperability for their new build or updated facilities. New solutions based on these protocols address the needs for ease of use, interoperability and reliability across the industry, while also allowing for the expansion of IP systems to more complex COTS network architectures. One issue well worth pointing out is that interoperability also requires working with legacy and current systems in the current hybrid environment of transition. This makes any compliance with industry protocols an even more critical factor than ever. The ability, for example, to emulate legacy index-based matrices or routers means any IO can be connected using the SW-P-08 general router protocol. Such protocols can be both lifesavers – and cost savers – when it comes to workflow design. The sound implementation of standards has a pronounced beneficial effect on the new breed of installations looking to implement IP through the cloud too. The acceleration of interest in this area is a consequence of the pandemic, and is being powered by the multiple drivers of companies being unwilling to commit to large on-prem IP infrastructure installations in the current climate, the desire to implement remote operations as and where necessary, and an increasing acknowledgement of the advantages that cloud-based workflows can bestow. The end result is that we have a pronounced split in approaches in the current industry when it comes to any new installations. On the one hand you have wholly IP-based facilities that were typically commissioned pre-pandemic; and, on the other, equally new installations where a more pragmatic approach has informed decisions. Here you are more than likely to see machine rooms filled with routers on one side and racks of SDI equipment on the other. And given current global instabilities external to the broadcast industry, this pragmatic period may well extend for a while yet. It is important to make the transition from one state to the other as seamless as possible. Again this is where a standards-based interoperable approach reaps dividends, providing both backwards and future compatibility regardless of your organisation’s scale and scope, giving you the space to grow and even evolve in different directions if necessary. The future may be uncertain, but ensuring that all your devices are genuinely interoperable is one of the best ways possible to cope with whatever it may bring. n
#ICYMI
FEATURE TVBEurope’s website is a hive of exclusive news, features and information about our industry. Here are some featured articles from the last month…
MEET THE ENTRY-LEVEL SOUND ASSISTANT
‘INNOVATION IS AT THE CORE OF WHAT WE’RE GOING TO DO TOGETHER’ The executive team behind the new BT Sport have promised the broadcaster will continue to innovate following a joint venture being agreed between Warner Bros Discovery and BT. https://bit.ly/3NCkN9e
SHUJA KHAN APPOINTED NEW ARQIVA CEO Arqiva has announced Shuja Khan will take over as CEO of the company from Paul Donovan on 1 June. Khan, who is currently the company’s CCO, joined Arqiva in January 2020. n
https://bit.ly/3sYlhOR
‘I KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE ON THE OTHER SIDE’ Lucy O’Brien discusses her move from the broadcast to supply side of the industry, why training and education is so important to her, and her plans to unify the technology being used by all of EMG Group’s European entities. n https://bit.ly/3NFVi6Z
https://bit.ly/38TRLmu
HOW MEDIA TECH CAN BE A PATH TO GREATER PARTICIPATION AND INCLUSION
dock10’s Madeleine Jones discusses how she got her start in the media industry, why no day is ever quite the same, and finding a passion for sound that she didn’t know she had n
ITV BEGINS MOVING STAFF TO WHITE CITY ITV has moved 800 London-based staff to the new Broadcast Centre at White City. The broadcaster first announced plans to move from its Grays Inn Road base in June 2021, revealing it had signed a 13-year lease. n https://bit.ly/3wNp4jk
Frank Kunkle, SMPTE’s director of marketing, explains how modern media technologies offer capabilities most people
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consider conveniences, but can be life-changing for others. n https://bit.ly/3sXOHwu
TVBEUROPE JUNE 2022 | 09
FEATURE
NAB KICKS OFF AWARDS SEASON
The NAB Show made a triumphant return to the trade show calendar in April, with exhibitors and attendees revelling in the buoyant atmosphere of large-scale, in-person events once again. Future’s Best of Show and Best in Market awards programmes were also in action, showcasing the innovations and solutions that R&D teams have been working on through the pandemic period. Here, we profile the winners in the TVBEurope categories BEST IN MARKET AWARD WINNERS 3 Screen Solutions 3Ready Control Center 3.0
3Ready Control Center 3.0 is the new, next-generation user experience (UX) management and optimisation platform from UX specialist, 3 Screen Solutions (3SS). Operators benefit from real-time management over the presentation of content, features and branding of all service apps from one unified location. It enables super-aggregators to curate content across all sources including third-party providers, such as Netflix. This highly automated solution fulfils an operator’s requirement to enable a wider range of staff to perform editing and UX optimisation, reducing dependence on technical specialists. Judges’ comments: This product offers several features that caught my attention. The first is its claimed ease of operation that allows a wider range of staffers to use it. The second is its ability to display the various elements (“headings, stripes, user buttons, icons, functions”) rather than just a list of element names. Also, there’s its ‘agnosticism’ that allows it to operate with “any backend, recommendation engine, or player. Avid Avid NEXIS | EDGE
Avid NEXIS | EDGE enables editors to work from anywhere with the same media access, workflow, and user experience as if they were editing at the facility. And with the Avid NEXIS | EDGE web client, team members can find, organise, storyboard, edit and review content at the facility, at home, or on location, extending the limits of what’s possible.
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Avid NEXIS | EDGE empowers video editors to work concurrently on the same video content, sharing metadata and media on Avid NEXIS from anywhere. Creative stakeholders, such as producers, can readily browse and review content using the Avid NEXIS | EDGE Web Client, while assistants can accelerate editing workflows. Editors using Adobe Premiere Pro can also access Avid NEXIS | EDGE with the Premiere Pro Editing Connector. Judges’ comments: The collaborative and remote production aspects of this product seem very similar to the attributes inherent in the latest version of Media Composer. Like all things Avid, this is a very well thought out and developed product. Ross Video Ross Production Cloud
Production Cloud is an end-to-end highly flexible production solution that is specifically designed for broadcast quality content live production fully powered by the cloud and optimised for AWS. Supporting perpetual and subscription licensing models and operating natively within a customer supplied cloud ecosystem, the Ross Production Cloud allows production teams to collaborate and produce live shows and events, using the same interfaces that they are already experienced with. It combines production switching, real-time graphics, ingest, playout, newsroom, asset management, and remote contribution capabilities, with innovative groundto-cloud technologies designed by Ross to bring on-premises SDI and NDI live feeds into the cloud ecosystem, and vice versa. Judges’ comments: The pandemic has pushed a lot of operations to remote production with staff in diverse locations. It’s only natural that the cloud has played a big part in making this possible, and I’m glad to see
FEATURE this reflected in this addition to Ross’s line-up of products. The fact that it allows production teams to use the same interfaces they would use if they were all in one location (business as usual) is a big plus.
integrated system. From the Broadway stage to a local performing arts centre to the largest and most complex live events, Arcadia is ideally suited for a wide variety of applications, in part due to its flexible licensing-based model that allows for future expansion. Judges’ comments: Very good backwards and third-party compatibility. Knobs supplementing the touch screen is always a welcome addition. Blackmagic Design Blackmagic Cloud Store
BEST OF SHOW AWARDS WINNERS Cobalt Digital 9904-UDX-4K (+HDR-TCHCLR-4K)
This year Cobalt Digital (pictured above) demonstrated the latest additions to the Technicolor Intelligent Tone Mapping® (ITM) and SL-HDR processing engines offered on its software definable 9904-UDX4K processor. The 9904-UDX-4K leverages some of the latest FPGA technologies to offer enhanced flexibility. With 12G SDI interfaces standard and options for ST 2110 ingress and egress it is the premiere openGear platform of choice for those who want the utmost processing flexibility. The new HDR technology is Reversible Inverse Tone Mapping® (RITM) which adds an additional layer of metadata to the previously award-winning Technicolor ITM technology. A dynamic processing technology created using machine learning and AI for SDR to HDR conversion. When pairing RITM with SL-HDRv1 the SDR video + HDR metadata is an exact copy of the original SDR signal pre conversion and enhancements. Judges’ comments: Really elegant application for simplifying the conundrum of producing content that works in both the HDR and SDR video spaces. Clear-Com Arcadia Central Station
Blackmagic Cloud Store (from $9,595) is a highperformance network storage solution with four 10G ethernet connections and a parallel memory core that can sustain maximum possible transfer speeds on each 10G ethernet port at the same time. Unlike IT industry storage products that are rack-mounted and have loud cooling fans, Blackmagic Cloud Store has a vertical, portable design and is “whisper quiet”. Internally it has an array of flash memory cards working in parallel for speed and data protection. The four 10G ethernet ports operate as a switch, so customers can connect four separate computers, or they work together using “link aggregation” for 40G ethernet speed. There is also an HDMI monitoring output for watching a live graphic view of the storage operating on a TV or monitor. Blackmagic Cloud Store is available in 20 TB, 80 TB and 320 TB models. M.2 flash memory cards are used for extreme reliability, high access speeds and zero seek times. Plus, the M.2 cards are arranged in parallel RAID 5 groups so they can operate much faster than a single card. Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 18
DaVinci Resolve 18 features a whole new way of remote collaboration using cloud-based workflows. Host project libraries using Blackmagic Cloud and collaborate on the same timeline in real time with multiple users all over the world. The new Blackmagic Proxy Generator App automatically creates and manages proxies from camera originals. Create a watch folder and new media is automatically converted into H.264, H.265 or Apple ProRes proxies to accelerate editing workflows. Customers can extract proxies into a separate folder for offline work. DaVinci Resolve 18 adds intelligent media location management, so when collaborating, customers can quickly link media to their unique file
Arcadia Central Station is a next-generation scalable IP platform that integrates all wired and wireless partyline systems, including the FreeSpeak™ family of digital wireless solutions and HelixNet® Digital Partyline, as well as analogue systems and third-party Dante devices. Designed with input from Clear-Com’s extensive global live sound user base, Arcadia represents the next evolution in partyline workflows, combining digital, analog and AoIP intercom technologies into a single
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TVBEUROPE JUNE 2022 | 13
FEATURE paths. They don’t need to manually relink or search for assets when working remotely. The collaboration update also provides major performance enhancements if customers are using a secure private network. BB&S Lighting Compact Fresnel Lights
BB&S new Compact Fresnel lights come in both BiColor, tungsten and Daylight versions. The smallest footprint (5.5-in/14cm) LED Fresnels on the market, they draw just 40W. The BiColor outputs 2,400 lumens at 96 TLCI (tunable from 2,700 to 5,600°K). The Daylight version outputs 3,000 lumens. They offer a genuine curved glass 90mm Fresnel lens that ensures even field distribution in addition to excellent shadow rendering. All while being extremely cost effective and readily available, at under $700 each. The CFL family is completely designed in Denmark right down to proprietary designed LEDs and sophisticated lens technology to provide high TLCI and stable colour temperature to render outstanding skin tones. CFLs output a hard-shadow beam that fades from 100 per cent at centre to 50 per cent at the edges, making it suitable for mixing and overlapping with other lights while eliminating blinding glare. The fitanywhere fixtures weigh 3.5-lb/1.6kg and measure 175mm/6.5” long by 145mm/5.7” diameter, allowing quick repositioning within the same grid brackets or clamps as other CFLs. Judges’ comments: Good, inexpensive product suitable for broadcasters. Heat is good and it is fanless. No flicker at any frame rate is promised along with zero colour drift. Imagine Communications Imagine Aviator™
Aviator is a cloud-native platform that enables media companies to plan, make and monetise premium-quality linear and OTT content on
any screen from a single, unified platform. It’s designed to help media companies optimise ad delivery, significantly improve the revenue of under-monetised OTT content, and generate greater profitability from their media assets. There are three key pillars to the Aviator offering: ‘Plan’ supports all the stages of scheduling, including rights management and content acquisition. ‘Make’ oversees the media supply chain and secure content storage and provides premium content origination and playout in the cloud. ‘Monetise’ supports the commercial aspects of advertising, from sales through ad decisioning and traffic to billing and reconciliation. Judges’ comments: Aviator builds on the company’s deep history in content management technology. Aviator and its competitors (current and soon-to-be) are at the forefront of next-gen ‘all under one roof ’ solutions. MediaKind MediaKind Engage
MediaKind Engage is an end-to-end media technology streaming platform and service designed to meet the needs of all sizes of service providers – from sports entities to broadcasters, and content owners – so that they can create and monetise compelling, high-quality live and on-demand video and data services. MediaKind Engage is based on MediaKind’s experience and expertise in delivering robust and resilient broadcast solutions. The company’s engineering and product teams have leveraged this knowledge to develop a cloud-native technology service that acts as a foundation for modern video workflows and applies directly to today’s market challenges in enabling streaming delivery and monetisation. Judges’ comments: SaaS model helpful for entrants from different kinds of media companies. Sports is a target for uptake in near term but it could be a good end-to-end solution for other broadcast and corporate clients. SDVI Net Zero Supply Chains with SDVI Rally
SDVI this year introduced Net Zero Supply Chains, formally making carbon-neutral usage a standard and permanent element of its cloudbased Rally supply chain optimisation platform. The company launched a sustainability programme by which all usage of the Rally platform, going back to the beginning of 2021, is rendered completely carbon neutral; and through which all SDVI customers benefit from permanent, ongoing carbon offsets for all Rally platform usage, including all third-party media applications used as part of a Rally-managed supply chain.
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FEATURE Measurement and reporting are essential to sustainability. Media organisations are increasingly focused on creating their own green footprints, but they need better insight into their own operations before they can determine what needs to be done and what kind of policies to implement. Rally not only delivers that insight through extensive reporting but also provides a net-zero guarantee of its own. Judges’ comments: Impressive that this offering operates as something of a virtual chief operating officer, using analytics to crunch the numbers on various divisions of a company and ensure efficiency. Teradek Prism Flex
Prism Flex is an Encoder/ Decoder for Low Latency, 4K HDR, point-topoint streaming video. Designed for missioncritical IP video transport workflows, it is used by top brands like NASA, Netflix, NBCUniversal, and BBC, for secure IP video delivery. Like its predecessor, the Cube, Prism Flex packs a ton of functionality into a tiny package – delivering secure, reliable, low latency streaming with a wide variety of transport protocols. With a compact form and low power-draw, Prism Flex streams stunning 4K, 10-bit, 4:2:2 colour-accurate video with 12G-SDI and HDMI 2.0 I/O, so it is easy to integrate into any live production workspace and workflow. With on-board recording and store and forward functionality, it is the perfect complement to remote collaboration workflows. And, Prism Flex gives users secure monitoring options for viewing their streaming content with latency over WAN as low as 300ms on AppleTV, Mac OS, and iOS devices. Judges’ comments: Ingest 4K and HDR with network bonding for $29K. Smaller and less expensive than competitors. Backwards compatible with the entire product line, and used in M&E, corporate/industrial. SmallHD SmallHD 27” 4K OLED Reference Monitor
The SmallHD 27” 4K OLED Reference Monitor is a bigger, brighter OLED solution that generates the true life colour accuracy that OLED is known for. It features a wide viewing angle with up to 550 nits of brightness, a >1,000,000:1 ultra-high contrast ratio with an absolute black point, 110% DCI-P3 / 135% Rec. 709 colour gamut coverage, and 12.3 stops of dynamic range, making it just as capable for on-set HDR preview as it is for in-suite colour grading. Thanks to PageOS, users gain easier access to a diverse and customisable array of curated exposure tools and workflows for enhanced production functionality. With intuitive and simple functionality and speed, PageOS supports a streamlined colour-calibration experience with Monitor Calibration Wizard and Color Pipe, a rendering tool that accurately converts log formats into SDR and HDR. PageOS includes upgraded user page presets, HDR (PQ) waveforms, improved false colour, and Dual and Quad-View.
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Judges’ comments: This is partly a big brother to a 24in version. The brightness is good for OLED. This is the first OLED reference monitor they have made that can do a four-screen multiview. Potential creative benefits to that as well as just not having a second or third monitor. Seems light and good for field use with a nice handle. Viaccess-Orca VO Secure Player with Advanced Features
Viaccess-Orca (VO) is helping operators attract subscribers and increase viewing engagement with the VO Secure Player, which now supports Watch Party, multiview, virtual reality (VR), and smart caching. VO Secure Player is a multi-platform media player for premium live and VoD content, including streamed and downloaded video. The one-stopshop VO Secure Player works across multiple platforms and operating systems, including mobiles, desktops, the web, Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and MacOS. By supporting all of the latest streaming standards, it ensures that streaming service providers can deliver real-time, live OTT experiences; fast zapping time; and responsive scrubbing while deploying ad insertion. Through unique features such as user behaviour monitoring, Targeted TV Advertising, and QoE metrics, VO Secure Player provides viewers with a more compelling video experience. Judges’ comments: The player allows a telco or other operator to offer a streaming Apple/Android app for phones and tablets for real-time live streaming of content. Advanced features include multi-view of all the cameras that lets the end user decide which view to enlarge. Also a virtual reality/360 degree view compatible with VR headsets. n
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FEATURE
UNDERSTANDING A STANDARDISED APPROACH TO AOIP By Pete Walker, senior product manager for Calrec
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here are various standards for transporting audio over IP networks. In broadcast production, we’re dealing with lots of audio signals from different sources, so time alignment between signals is vitally important, as is low latency. AES67 sought to standardise a robust and proven method that achieves these requirements. AES67 AES67 is not really a single standard or a new protocol. It documents the use of multiple pre-existing IP standards that combine to provide low-latency, highcapacity audio streaming. Many manufacturers were already using these standards in similar ways to provide audio network streaming; LiveWire, Dante and Ravenna gained popularity, offering convenience and opening new workflows. AES67 sought out the common elements of these technologies and defined standard ways of using them. This was a defining moment as manufacturers could
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conform to a standard way of doing things, giving users the benefits of audio networking between devices from different vendors. SMPTE 2110 While AES’ focus is on audio, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) covers video as well. Although different beasts, video and audio are both media streams that can be broken down into a sequence of data that can be IP packetised and transported. Both AES67 and SMPTE with ST 2110 have chosen the same approach using RTP (real-time transport protocol) over UDP (user datagram protocol) and time aligned with PTPv2 (precision time protocol). For most intents and purposes, AES67 and ST 2110-30 can be thought of as interchangeable and compatible. However, ST 2110-30 does define some additional details and not all AES67 devices will be fully compliant with the standard.
FEATURE Perhaps the most important difference is SMPTE mandating support for IGMPv3. IGMP basically relates to ‘multicast’; a one-to-many approach that allows multiple devices to receive the same stream, rather than unicast, which is a point-to-point connection. Multicast makes production more efficient by not having to duplicate a stream for each device that needs to receive it. IGMPV3 Both AES67 and ST 2110 support multicast streaming, but ST 2110 takes it one step further by supporting v3 of the the internet group management protocol (IGMP). V3 allows for source-specific-multicast (SSM), which offers a more robust approach by allowing devices to register for a stream by source address as well as its multicast address. This ensures it’s getting the intended audio/video and not any rogue sources that may be transmitting to the same multicast address. Note that IGMP is backwards compatible, so a device using IGMPv2 can operate on a 2110/IGMPv3 network. Also, a device supporting v3 will not necessarily support SSM, so if you wish to use SSM you should explicitly ask your vendors if they support it rather than asking about 2110 or IGMPv3.
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With AES67 and PTP, any endpoint on a network has the potential to become the sync leader. Typically, users know which device(s) they want to allow to be leader, such as a dedicated PTP GM or another reliable and always-on device. They would be set to have a very low priority one value. Devices that users accept to become leader in the event of the preferred one(s) failing would be given a slightly higher value, and devices they never want to become leader given the highest value, although this doesn’t prevent them becoming leader in the event of all the preferred sync leaders going offline. SMPTE has taken this a step further by mandating devices support a follower-only option. By setting a device to follower-only, one is ensuring it will never become a leader, even in the absence of any other viable leader. This isn’t a particularly important addition, assuming devices conform to having a mid-range priority one value by default, and that you have preferred device(s) that are always on when needed and set with a lower value. Another difference between AES67 and ST 2110 in relation to sync is that ST-2110 states devices should support a wider range of PTP parameters, as defined by the ST 2059-2 profile. In practice, there is some crossover between the AES67 and 2059-2 profiles, so common
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FEATURE ground can be found even if devices only support one of these two profiles fully, although most vendors are likely to support both. One more difference is that RTP streams allow for a media clock offset and AES67 follows the RTP standard by stating this offset should be randomised. The thinking behind this is to provide some basic security, making it harder for unauthorised users/devices to decode streams if they do not know what offset has been applied. ST 2110 goes against this, stating the offset should be 0, allowing faster initialisation of streams. SMPTE ST 2022-7 As discussed, AES67/ST 2110 use UDP to stream audio/video, and unlike TCP (transmission control protocol) there’s no checking or resending of missing or corrupted data. Neither standard mandates redundancy to mitigate against this, although ST 2110 states that where redundancy is offered it should conform to ST 2022-7. Under -7, devices can send and receive multiple duplicate streams, typically (but not limited to) two. For best resilience, devices should have two physically separate connections for these streams, and they should pass over two physically separate networks. There is no real primary, secondary or failover mechanism; a receiving device accepts both streams on a packet-by-packet basis, checks the packets are intact and places them into a buffer based on their timestamp/ sequence numbers awaiting playout. If and when a valid duplicate packet is received on an alternate stream, the receiver simply overwrites the original with the new one and plays out the last one it received. Being able to send/receive duplicate streams protects against packets being dropped by the network as well as physical cable connection and network switch failures. JT-NM Both AES67 and ST 2110’s primary concerns are around the encoding, transport and synchronisation of media streams, allowing cross-vendor decoding. They don’t cover important aspects such as discovery (finding devices on a network), an area where vendors have taken different approaches. For wider interoperability between vendors, users should look to industry consortium AIMS and the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) who are defining wider requirements to make IP-based technologies more usable in the real world and to better fit into dynamic broadcast workflows. NMOS IS-04 is one of these. It provides a mechanism for a device to advertise what media streams it is outputting, vastly reducing the amount of manual configuration needed to set up a stream connection.
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NMOS IS-05 provides interoperable connection management. IS-04 allows devices to advertise their streams to a controller/orchestrator and IS-05 forms connections between different devices. NMOS IS-07 is an up and coming NMOS protocol and is starting to gain some uptake. In its basic form it will provide GPIO-style switching/tallies, removing the need for physical GPIO pins and bespoke cabling by passing the signalling between devices using the IP network. As well as simple signals and tallies, NMOS IS-07 provides the potential to stream status and control data, so we may finally see a true versatile cross-vendor control protocol, and uptake may increase exponentially. UPTAKE Our lives are already reliant on IP; transport of video and audio is just another step in this direction and has the potential to provide similar benefits of convenience. Broadcast IP infrastructures are cost-effective and offer versatility and flexible workflows that are truly scalable, enabling remote working and reducing reliance on expensive bespoke central video routers, cabling and format converters. We’re in an era where there is a lot of crossover between IT and broadcast engineering. However, multicast and PTP sync are not your typical run-ofthe-mill IT practices; it’s important that IT/broadcast engineers understand these requirements and their configuration, to be able to host a scalable network supporting numerous vendors’ kit as media endpoints. IP is scalable, not just in terms of capacity, but also in terms of adopting new layers or protocols to improve and enhance usage without needing to change hardware or ‘throw out the old’. IP is now a standard offering for broadcast equipment and there are many fixed and mobile reference sites demonstrating its versatility and success. Even at sites where IP isn’t the primary focus, there’s generally some form of IP connectivity being leveraged; even if that’s just a small Dante network, it’s a toe in the water that can be expanded upon as new equipment is introduced. n
Calrec’s audio digital signal processing and processing engine with AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110 connectivity
FINISHING THE IP TRANSITION
FEATURE
John Mailhot, CTO of infrastructure and networking at Imagine Communications, looks at standards for television signals over packet-based (ethernet/IP) networks
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elevision production and distribution has been migrating towards IP infrastructure for more than 20 years. Control protocols for video servers moved from 9-pin serial RS422 onto VDCP (IP over ethernet). Routing control panels moved from bespoke coaxial loops onto IP connections. In most facilities, even the automation protocols for master control and routing control are now connected over IP networks rather than traditional serial ports. Similarly, storage area networks (SANs) are moving away from application-specific connection technologies like Fibre Channel and InfiniBand, as ethernet speeds and capacities develop. Another factor driving this change is economics. The IT industry is much larger (and richer in R&D resources), so it makes sense to take advantage of its standard technologies. Ethernet adapters, cabling, switches, and routers are more common, less expensive to own, and easier to wire and connect than their television-specific counterparts. IP works for these applications, and as its line speed improved over the years, it took on more and more jobs as it surpassed other technologies. As far back as the early 2000s, some even contemplated using gigabit ethernet in place of 270 Mb/s SD SDI. Almost ten years ago, to the surprise of no one, the decreasing cost and growing availability of 10-gigabit ethernet began to put pressure on ‘traditional’ 1.5G and 3G HD-SDI for pixel data. In anticipation of widespread adoption, standards bodies such as the Video Services Forum (VSF) and SMPTE took up the task of defining standards for moving studio signals over capable IP networks, leveraging work that had been done years earlier in the IETF and Pro-MPEG Forum. These standards (VSF TR-03, which led to SMPTE ST 2110) are the basis of most new designs for television facilities worldwide today. These standards for media over IP – SMPTE ST 2110 in particular – go far beyond merely replicating SDI over IP. They break the rigid boundaries of SDI in two major ways: • scalability to arbitrary picture shapes, sizes, and frame rates including UHD and 8K • scalability to a wide and extensible variety of bit depths, sampling structures, colour representations, and transfer characteristics; including wide colour gamut (WCG) and high dynamic range (HDR) capabilities
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Importantly, the SMPTE ST 2110 standards (unlike SDI) do not define the physical layer; they pack the signal into IP packets and allow the IP packets to be delivered over whatever network infrastructure is at hand. During the development and deployment of ST 2110 systems so far, we have seen the IT industry launch 25 gigabit and now 50 gigabit single-lane technologies into mass market, with port speeds of 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 Gbps. Physical layer standards and technology developments for 800 Gbps and 1.6 Tbps ethernet interfaces are underway. The television industry has immediate access to all these new physical layer technologies without needing to develop any new television-specific standards. This shift to packet-based IP technology for the interconnection of devices presents a change in how signal switching is done. Historically, SDI required every signal to connect back to a single crosspoint switch, and signals were switched by controlling this crosspoint; end devices simply consumed whatever came down the wire towards them. In packet-based IP systems, the destination devices have a more active role in the process, where they need to request the right packet-flow from the network (typically using multicast joins). This requires the control system to have a management relationship with the endpoint devices, and in SMPTE ST 2110, we use the NMOS (Network Media Open Specification) specs from the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA). In parallel with the development of SMPTE ST 2110, AMWA developed the NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 specifications to allow control systems to have a universal device driver for endpoint devices, signalling not just which network streams to consume, but also the related metadata about the streams – the colorimetry, transfer characteristics, sampling structure, frame dimensions and rate, and more – ensuring the receiver can correctly interpret the stream it gets. Through the careful coordination of the Joint Taskforce on Networked Media (JT-NM), the involved standards organisations – VSF, AMWA, SMPTE, AES, and the EBU – have delivered to the industry a set of standards and specifications that allow the construction of IP-based media systems that surpass the capabilities of SDI. The industry has responded by endorsing this effort and using these standards and specifications as the basis of design for new facilities worldwide. n
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FEATURE
EDUCATING THE NEXT GENERATION As the media tech industry continues to struggle with a skills gap, Polly Hickling tells Jenny Priestley how Solent University is helping to educate the workforce of the future
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escribing herself as the “eternal student”, Polly Hickling is course some fantastic facilities and to be honest, it’s what a lot of students say is leader on Solent University’s Live Event Technology degree the reason that they come to us,” states Hickling. course. The degree offers students both theoretical and practical “We’ve got a Dolby Atmos cinema, and we can mix Dolby Atmos in experience in outside broadcasting, live events and live music. there as well. [We have] loads of audio recording facilities. We’ve got an The degree course launched last September, having grown out of a ADR suite as well as dubbing. We’ve also got an outside broadcast truck, number of different media courses offered by the university. In fact, Solent and for a while we were the only university that had that.” University has been educating future media professionals for a number of As well as operating three Ikegami cameras as part of the OB facilities, years, including this author. the students also get the opportunity to both vision mix and guarantee “During 2020, the university wanted to refine the titles they were offering the truck. It is often used during the summer, travelling to music festivals and they came to me and said, ‘you can have one title’,” explains Hickling. where it can be on hand to either archive audio and visual for the festival “So I chose Live Event Technology because it kind of sat in the middle itself, or even travel to Glastonbury where the students have previously of what we wanted to offer. People who work in broadcast work in live helped cover the Silver Hayes stage for BBC Three. television. Lots of the applicants that are coming to us now actually come But as well as practical experience, the students at Solent also study from a theatre background; they’re working in their the theoretical side of the industry. “We had a school theatre doing the lights and doing the sound, module this year called Formats and Workflow, so they see how it links with that. And then there’s which was a crash course in cloud, IP and remote also the live music side of things. So we can still production,” explains Hickling, “we’ve had tick all the boxes as much as possible with that one flexibility to give this year’s graduates some really title. It encompasses all of the places where our detailed knowledge. students end up.” “Moving forward with the Live Event One of the big positives of the Live Event Technology course, we are finding we have to cram Technology degree is that it offers students lots stuff in wherever we can. So we’ll look at the overall Solent graduate Oliver Simpson wins a of hands-on experience, something that always picture, and we’ll say obviously we need to have IP SMPTE-sponsored prize appeals to prospective employers. “We do have technology throughout. We also have a computing
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FEATURE THE STUDENT’S POINT OF VIEW Graduate Oliver Simpson (pictured on the opposite page) explains why he chose Solent University
Solent University students and lecturers: Polly Hickling sits centre, bottom row
module in the first year. We’ve just split that in half and decided one half is just going to be a very light Cisco course. In the second year, we’ve got a module that’s about formats, where we’ll look at the file formats that might travel through a workflow.” Hickling adds that the team at Solent work closely with the media tech industry to establish what graduates need to know in order to enter the workforce. “What’s lovely is that they ask to look at our module descriptions to see where they can help. They need us. We need them. We had a great meeting recently with AWS, we haven’t taught any AWS stuff before because it’s quite hard to teach, but they recognised that and said they would train us up to be able to teach it to the students. “The stuff that comes up that I don’t have the necessary knowledge or ability to teach, we rely heavily on guest lecturers for,” continues Hickling. “Because of our extensive contacts, we can just ask the industry if they can give us a case study. We had a trip to IMG Studios recently, one of our grads, Tom Giles, heads up engineering there. They talked us through the whole building, how feeds come in, feeds go out, and talked to us about how they think the future will be, which was great.” Work experience is also a key opportunity for students, especially now things are opening up again post-pandemic. “We had a couple of students work with BT Sport on their remote cricket over Christmas. I think it was a bit of a shock to the students’ system,” Hickling laughs. “They were like, ‘whoa, we’re working during the night’. It was good for them to have that experience of something that’s really quite experimental. They came back with way more knowledge than me!” It’s that hands-on experience that really helps inspire many of Hickling’s students, sometimes a little too much. “Our first years get so inspired, I have to kind of calm them down,” she laughs. “It’s great, because that’s the kind of people that you want coming into industry as well. You want people who are pushing boundaries.” However, while having students who know about and are excited by the media tech industry is all well and good, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to educate younger school-aged pupils about the opportunities available to them. “The key bit that’s missing is having the ability to inspire the people who are thinking about career destinations,” states Hickling. “That’s why organisations like Rise are so key. We had a careers day on International Women’s Day, loads of those kids had already decided what they wanted to do. “You have to get them younger,” she says. “We’re in a sticky situation where the inspiration needs to start a lot earlier, but the industry desperately needs people right now. It doesn’t quite match up.”
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WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THE LIVE EVENT TECHNOLOGY DEGREE, AND DID IT LIVE UP TO YOUR EXPECTATIONS? Initially, I didn’t! I started out on a (now discontinued) audio course, which I’d been led towards through the subjects my school offered. However, by the end of the first year, once I’d been able to speak to the lecturers and in particular my course leader, it became apparent that the lecturers, staff and community as a whole wanted what was best for me, and that would be Film and TV Production Technology; the course that would become Live Event Technology. But the reason I chose this degree at Solent specifically remains the same: the sense of community within the department, and the opportunities afforded here, from work experience (including paid) to more guest lectures from people in the industry than you can shake a stick at. It’s actually very easy to forget that you’re here to study for a degree (in a good way!). WHAT’S BEEN THE BEST PART OF THE DEGREE COURSE? That’s an impossible question! There have been so many different aspects that I have enjoyed thoroughly and that have given me lifelong memories that it’s hard to choose. If I had to pick just one, I’d have to say it’s been the access to the industry. Every member of staff has either countless connections to companies and individuals; or is a part-time lecturer whose primary job is in broadcast. It adds a great deal of assurance to the teaching when so much of it can be followed up with ‘and I was talking to so-and-so who works at xyz about this just last week’. DO YOU FEEL IT HAS ADEQUATELY PREPARED YOU TO ENTER THE MEDIA TECH INDUSTRY? Absolutely. It’s been amazing to be able to get plenty of handson experience in production roles (despite Covid’s best attempts to get in the way!), and the advice from lecturers on the industry, techniques, jobs, and so forth has been invaluable. WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS AFTER GRADUATION? Once I graduate I’ll be taking a month or so off before, likely by the end of the summer, starting my new job at Techex. Had it not been recommended to me by a lecturer, it would have likely completely passed me by! Finally, for anyone who might be interested in studying at Solent, what are the course requirements? “It’s always going to help if they’ve been that theatre tech at school, or they’ve studied the slightly more techy A-levels like physics, maths, or computing,” explains Hickling. “But I’m interested in anybody who asks to come on to the course because they want to do it, and they are enthusiastic about doing it. We interview every applicant, but that’s about having a conversation, so I can see why they want to be here and why they like tech. If you like tech, you’re interested in it, that’s all you really need. We teach you the rest of it. That’s our job!” n
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FEATURE
REDEFINING THE RESELLER
Jigsaw24 Media’s business development director, Jason Cowan, outlines how the media systems integrator is adapting to meet the changing needs of an evolving marketplace
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JASON COWAN
igsaw24 reported revenues of over £155 million and 19 per cent growth in the 2020/21 financial year but, despite this undeniable success, the company has recently revealed plans to redefine its media business in 2022. It’s a move that, at first, appears to be in stark contravention to the old adage ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, but according to Jason Cowan, who joined Jigsaw24 as media business director in September 2021, it ensures that the company continues to offer value to a sector that has been through a period of accelerated change. The new strategy has already seen the creation of Jigsaw24 Media; a division of the broader Jigsaw24
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business with separate sales, marketing, pre-sales, professional services, systems integration, support and operations teams dedicated to servicing the media and entertainment industry. “Jigsaw24’s media customers have always benefitted from the buying power of the broader business, particularly when it comes to end user compute equipment,” explains Cowan. “We also rely on Jigsaw24 to provide backend services, finance and legal support, and to spearhead our sustainability efforts. But, although the media business has steadily increased yearon-year, the perception amongst our M&E customer base going into 2020 was that we were becoming increasingly IT-centric.”
FEATURE THE VALUE OF AN END-TO-END SOLUTION PROVIDER Jigsaw24 Media is reclaiming its reputation for media expertise in 2022 by adopting a service-led approach with a focus on post production. Its industry-recognised teams offer solution design, consultancy, sales, support and professional services that are underpinned by partnerships with over 30 leading technology vendors including Avid, Adobe, AWS, Nutanix and EditShare. As the only UK-based company of its kind that has in-house system integration capabilities, one of only two Avid Elite partners in both video and audio in the UK, and the recent winner of Avid’s Global Partner of the Year award, the company’s credentials in this area are irrefutable. Cowan explains that the decision to focus on post production is driven by the business’ intention to provide value as an end-to-end solutions provider rather than simply supplying technology, “When you’re a box shifter you can cover a wider gambit because you don’t need expert knowledge to support all your product lines. When something breaks or goes wrong, the customer phones the manufacturer,” he says. “The difference is that we’re providing full support on the technology we supply. If something fails, rather than the customer chasing 20 vendors who all point fingers at each other, we’re the single ‘throat to choke’ and it’s up to us to resolve any issues.” It’s a commitment that the company takes seriously. It has doubled the size of its support team in the six months prior to April 2022 and has centred its provision around its Golden Square base in London, a stone’s throw from many of the country’s top post production houses. SUPPORTING THE MOVE TO SAAS Realistically, the traditional ‘box shifter’ Cowan describes is a dying breed in a market where most solutions are now being sold as SaaS or on a subscription basis. But many vendors don’t have the capacity to implement these solutions, install them and support them locally on behalf of their customers. Instead, they rely on local partners like Jigsaw24 Media to fulfil these functions. “I worked in cloud services for ten years before the pandemic and there was always a reason why people couldn’t move to remote, virtualised or public cloud workflows. Then Covid just forced people to do it and suddenly, all those reasons didn’t really matter anymore,” explains Cowan. “But no one thought the pandemic would last as long as it did. After initially coming up with temporary ways to work remotely, now our customers are trying to figure out how to transition to hybrid workflows in perpetuity.”
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Implementing sustainable remote workflows isn’t the only – or even the most challenging – issue facing the industry (and the world at large) at present. Massive skill shortages and supply chain issues are threatening the sector’s recovery and growth plans, prompting Jigsaw24 Media’s move into the provision of managed services and infrastructure. PROVIDING A NEW KIND OF IAAS “Infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] is not something new; people have been offering it to the post community for a number of years. Traditionally, this has been done on a capitalised basis where customers would almost lease the infrastructure over a long period,” says Cowan. “But our customers in the post community work on productions that don’t normally run for years; they’re dealing with weekly budgeting, production and billing cycles.” Jigsaw24 Media’s IaaS solution provides post production companies with underlying infrastructure that can be spun up and used on a per-project basis. Offered on weekly, monthly or annual terms, the service is designed to provide burst capacity for rental companies whose resources are oversubscribed over certain periods and post production houses that need to support additional productions when their facility is already full. This will help mitigate some of the supply chain issues and, because Jigsaw24 Media supplies the technical expertise to run these solutions, will also relieve technical capability and staff shortages. Cowan, though, is quick to stipulate that the company is strictly providing the infrastructure. “We don’t offer services in post production, we’re not in the business of managing post workflows, transcoding media or providing post talent. Our focus is on providing best-of-breed technology, putting solution workflows together and managing that infrastructure on behalf of our customers.” He likens the situation to using the AWS or Microsoft Azure platforms – where Jigsaw24 Media provides the technology platform layer and its clients run creative applications on that platform – without having to worry about how the infrastructure is supported. Ultimately, despite all of the new developments, Cowan believes Jigsaw24 Media’s role in the industry today isn’t actually that different to what it was two (or even ten) years ago. “There are different reliances and different questions being asked of resellers, but intrinsically we’re providing the same service we always have; acting as our customers’ go-to consultants on new technology, providing advice on products and technology within their estate and keeping them updated on new developments. That’s always been the cornerstone of what it means to be a reseller.” n
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FEATURE
SHINING A LIGHT ON SOFTWARE Jenny Priestley meets the team behind new media tech company Backlight to discuss their plans to add value and flexibility to content production workflows
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ust before NAB Show in April, a new company launched itself into the media technology industry. Backlight’s stated aim is to serve media, entertainment, and video-forward customers with cloud-based solutions that “dramatically improve every step of the media content lifecycle”. In order to do this, the company has spent over $20 million on acquiring five start-ups already operating in the industry: production tracking platform, ftrack; cloud-native SaaS media management solution, iconik; Celtx, an all-in-one solution for writing, planning and managing media production; live and near-live content creator, Wildmoka; and digital video cloud-based platform, Zype. Backlight’s investment has been supported by growth equity firm PSG, which partners with software and technology-enabled services companies to help them navigate transformational growth, capitalise on strategic opportunities, and build strong teams. “I was a senior advisor at PSG, which basically means I’m a CEO or executive in residence there,” explains Backlight’s president and CEO Ben Kaplan. “Working at PSG I sat on boards, I worked with portfolio companies and I helped evaluate different deals. And along with some colleagues there, and this is now going back about two years, we began to look at the explosion of content, the democratisation of video
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content creation, the proliferation of endpoints and means of video consumption by consumers. “Not surprisingly we saw an amazing market, one that was growing incredibly fast and one that we also saw had lots of fragmentation. As we began to evaluate investment opportunities in that category, one of the other pieces that we were struck by is that, while the high-end of media and entertainment is technically advanced in many ways, they were somewhat slower to adopt cloud-based software applications relative to other industries.” That led to the creation of Backlight as a media tech holding company that brings together best-in-class solutions across the media value chain. “As a modern SaaS company our expectation is that we’re going to be easy and flexible to work with and work with customers to integrate with the systems that they need us to,” states Kaplan. “The vision is 100 per cent not to build a monolithic, integrated platform where all of our customers need to use everything. We want to have value added integrations,” he continues. “We want to invest in these products and companies, invest in innovation, invest in customer success to really help each of these solutions, each of these businesses become the best version of themselves. And make customers as successful as possible.”
FEATURE
BEN KAPLAN
MIKE GREEN
THE AVENGERS Kaplan is not a media tech veteran, but he believes that will help him offer a new perspective on the industry. “Maybe I’m able to see a little forest from the trees on certain aspects,” he says. “At my core, I think I’m also a good team builder, and I’ve surrounded myself with people who are steeped in the domain and I think bring incredible vision. If you look at the CEOs, and co-founders that we have partnered with in building Backlight there is so much vision and knowledge and expertise. To use a Marvel reference, I’m just Nick Fury surrounded by people with great superpowers.” One of those key people is Mike Green, Backlight’s chief growth officer, who says he was attracted by the passion behind the company. “When I was considering joining up with Ben as he was building Backlight and I met him and the PSG folks, I was really impressed,” he says. “They’d been working on this for maybe 18 months before I joined last year. I wouldn’t want to come to places that were only seen as some sort of financial instrument. There’s a lot of passion and a lot of knowledge and Ben had a really deep technical understanding of the companies he was talking to about coming into this holding company structure. So that was really exciting for me to see the resources but also the domain knowledge and passion.”
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“I’m not a growth equity or venture deal person,” adds Kaplan. “That’s not my background at all. I like to build and scale SaaS businesses. It was incredibly valuable to work at a growth equity firm and just sort of see that perspective and understand how they think about businesses and how they think about investing. But the things that I derive joy from are building teams and investing in products and trying to deliver value to customers.” Kaplan also pays tribute to the foresight and knowledge of each of the CEOs and co-founders of the companies Backlight has acquired. “I give a tonne of credit to each of the CEOs and their co-founders for recognising the power of what we could be together in a pretty unique model,” he states. “Each of these companies is a leader in what they do. So as we thought about the pipeline, we really started on this creative collaboration idea, and then it began to extend and we vetted our vision with customers and the market every step of the way. “To be honest, all of these entrepreneurs and CEOs, they had other options. Each of them believed in our vision and it resonating with them was as much or more validation than anything else that we got.” The team at Backlight believe now is the time for them to work with each of their new units on some of the more day-to-day aspects of running a business, so that they can concentrate on ‘blue sky thinking’. “We want each unit to be the best version of themselves, while the holding company structure where I sit deals with things like HR, recruiting, finance, taking those operational tasks off of these companies,’ explains Green. “Ed Laczynski at Zype used to have to spend time raising money or preparing for his board meeting with nine different investors. He doesn’t have to do that anymore. He is entirely focused on product innovation, OTT and streaming and helping their customers, and bringing great talent and reviewing product innovations. So that’s a really exciting evolution for each of these companies.” Another key positive of bringing the five business units on board is that they will be able to work together. “Over time, there are logical synergies between some of the business units and some of the products and one of the things that Mike is charged with is driving and coordinating cross-sell across the business units where it makes sense,” explains Kaplan. “There may be a lot of opportunities between, let’s say, Zype and Wildmoka because they’re both video management largely on the distribution side. You can absolutely see opportunities between ftrack, which is on the creative work and process side, and iconik which is a media asset management platform. What’s also interesting about iconik is everybody on the video management and distribution side also needs media asset management. So the cross-sell opportunities for iconik might be across the entire spectrum of our solutions, where in other areas the opportunity for integration might be on those that are more proximate to each other.” However, Kaplan is keen to stress that if a customer needs one of the solutions to work with a competitor of another unit, then they’ll do that too. “If iconik needs to integrate with a competitor of ftrack, or Wildmoka needs to integrate with a competitor of Zype and vice versa, then that’s what the customer needs,” he states. “We’re going to have an open approach. We reserve the right to try to sell your software, but we’re always going to be focused on solving customer problems.” n
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FEATURE
THE SPORTS PORTAL OF THE FUTURE Jenny Priestley meets Unity Technologies’ Peter Moore to discuss how volumetric video could have as big an impact on the way we watch sport as the introduction of colour
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PETER MOORE
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et’s be honest, most of us watch sport passively. We might shout at Mo Salah to get the ball in the back of the net, or Lewis Hamilton to overtake his rivals, but mostly watching sport is a lean back experience. But Unity Technologies wants to change that. It wants to make watching sport interactive; and that doesn’t mean scrolling through Twitter while you’re watching. In early 2021 the company named former Liverpool Football Club CEO Peter Moore as its new SVP and GM of sports and live entertainment. Moore’s background is in video games; he previously ran Xbox for Microsoft and was also president of EA Sports before joining Liverpool. But with his latest role, Moore is aiming to combine the two worlds by creating virtual recreations of real sporting events. The team at Unity has been working on creating sports events within Metacast, its real-time 3D engine that uses volumetric video to enable the viewer to interact with
what they’re watching. One of the key benefits of the technology is that it provides the viewer with multiple camera angles that aren’t available to a traditional production team. Moore believes the technology could help to bring the much sought-after younger audience back to TV. “This next generation coming through are used to playing games and seeing those environments, seeing those camera angles in ways that in real life you can’t,” he says. “The volumetric capture element of using multiple cameras to capture data is a quantum leap from my world of video games, which is motion capture in suits and then skinning that imagery. It just caught my imagination when I first saw it.” The workflow includes multiple cameras set around a defined space. To test the technology, Unity worked with UFC. “We went down to Los Angeles last year and captured two UFC fighters on a soundstage using 106 cameras,” explains Moore. “It gives the viewer what we
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FEATURE
ABOVE: Unity Metacast enables users to capture, produce, view, and interact with real sports events in 3D
call six degrees of freedom. They can choose different cameras, they can even watch from the actual fighter’s perspective, which at the moment is an impossible camera angle to achieve.” Unity chose UFC for the initial trials because the sport involves just two bodies in a defined space, it’s indoors (which at the moment is important), has consistent lighting, and a structure to which the cameras can be attached. “The camera catches millions of what’s known as voxels, which is a three dimensional pixel, and ingests that as data,” explains Moore. “Where Unity comes into play is that data comes into our platform and we render it as these incredible images that are not video game characters, but real images. You can interact with them and manipulate them.
Unity Metacast Volumetric Editor
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“I can go back in time if I want to see a certain kick again. I can spin the characters around, look down from above. The octagon is green screened in, so you can put any environment in; they can be anywhere. There are also dynamic advertising capabilities too. The posts of the octagon can change during the fight, so you can drop anything in locally, regionally, or globally for advertising opportunities.” AS BIG AN IMPACT AS COLOUR Moore likens this new technology to the introduction of colour during the 1970 FIFA World Cup. “That’s when we realised Brazil play in yellow,” he laughs. “It was that moment where all of a sudden, you were engaged in a deeper way.”
FEATURE “Black and white to colour just blew our minds,” he continues, “it was just like, ‘Oh, my God, this is unbelievable’. But what I think will be really important here is that the content will be going from passive to interactive. Even black and white to colour, you just sat there and it washed over you. But this is where the viewer is going to interact with a goal. The TV producers will show viewers all their angles, but the fans might want to look at it from a completely different angle because they think they saw something, or they want to see whether it really was a penalty. “When a viewer is watching a Liverpool match a few years from now and Mo Salah scores, they’ll be watching on television, but if they want to see that goal in 3D, they’ll go to their tablet, wait five or six seconds for the imagery to come down and they’ll be able to see it from so many different perspectives.” “The business model of football when I was growing up was there was no football on television because it was all about money through the turnstiles,” adds Moore. “Everybody was afraid that if you broadcast sports and in particular football then nobody would go to the stadium. Nothing could be further from the truth and they work together very, very well. So when we start thinking about what is the next quantum leap for the way that we will look and more importantly interact with sports action, it’s volumetric capture, and it’s three dimensional.” There have been trials before of bringing sport out of the screen and on to a coffee table, for example. Back in 2018, researchers at the University of Washington developed a machine learning algorithm capable of transforming 2D football clips into 3D reconstructions. Could this be a new way of watching viewers will be using any time soon? “There will be a time when viewers are sat at home and the game is on their coffee table,” says Moore. “It’ll be on the screen and in augmented reality on a coffee table. But we think real fans want to see the action again and that’s why we’re putting tools in the hands of fans to be able to analyse what they’re watching to that next level. We can offer fans so many different angles, you can see the plays coming right at you from an angle you’ve never seen before.” For traditional TV, this technology could also be used by pundits as they analyse a team’s performance. “If you think of Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville at half-time with a big screen, right now they kind of fake it a little bit with the annotation, but it’s still two-dimensional,” says Moore. “I look at it and I know we’re going to do better than that. “Using our technology they can show the viewer the pitch as the player sees it because you can drop to a camera angle right behind him or her. If you can get the camera down at that level and see what the player is seeing, I think that’s a huge breakthrough.
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“At the moment broadcasters are using cameras that are part of the main stand so they’re quite a way from the pitch,” he continues. “With volumetric, the cameras are data points, they’re not cameras. Using what we call a virtual dolly, you could move your perspective down to a data point on the pitch and in two or three years from now the broadcaster will be able to show you the goal being scored as if you were stood in the penalty area, or as if you are the goalkeeper, because we can drop a data point right in front of the keeper or in the back of the net as the ball hits. “For this next generation of viewers, bringing them back into sports is going to be critica, and I think this is the technology that does it.” So how long before fans can watch Mo Salah score amazing goals from his perspective? Well, the next step for Unity is to get its technology into arenas, such as the ones used for basketball or ice hockey. “Because the cameras are starting to move further away it’s my dream that by the time we get to World Cup 2026 in North America, each of those stadiums will be volumetrically outfitted,” states Moore. “We’re only four years away from cameras that will capture this type of action.” n
The Unity Editor provides smart analytics, annotation tools, ‘impossible’ camera angles, visual effects, and dynamic advertising
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PRODUCTION AND POST
THE SUPERHEROES BEHIND
When the pandemic hit one of the most anticipated blockbusters of recent years, Hula Post employed technology from Avid to help keep the film on track
I James Tejeda
t doesn’t matter whether you’re a superhero or not, when the Covid pandemic hit, everyone felt the impact, including Matt Reeves’ blockbuster The Batman. The production had been shooting at Warner Bros Studio, Leavesden prior to lockdown in March 2020, using five of the facility’s stages with about 25 per cent of filming completed. At the same time the film’s editors – William Hoy who had previously worked with Reeves on his Planet of the Apes films, and Tyler Nelson – were also in London beginning to put together an initial first cut. However, in mid-March the UK government instigated the country’s first lockdown, leading the production to cease filming until mid-June, by which point Hoy had returned to his home in Los Angeles. This led to a problem. The editors were unable to return to London, and not due to start working at Warner Bros’ facility in Burbank, California until after filming had wrapped, Instead, Warner Bros called in Hula Post to install an Avid Media Composer editing system at both editors’
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homes so they could continue working on the project. The company already had a close working relationship with Hoy, explains James Tejeda, senior support engineer at Hula Post. “We were asked to assist both editors along with the Warner Bros. engineering team. Originally, they were going to be editing in London, and as soon as the pandemic shutdown happened in early 2020, the project got shelved for a little bit, then when it came back, everything had to be remote. “There was footage already that they were using and so everything had to be transferred over to a hard drive and other external storage for multiple backups,” he adds. “We worked with Warner Bros engineering and with StorageDNA on a workflow where the assistants in London would work during their day, everything would be backed up to the cloud, and from the cloud it would be downloaded during the evening so that it all mirrored what they had in London. In the morning, when the editors started their day in Los Angeles, they would have all the updated media, and they were good to go.”
PRODUCTION AND POST
© Photo Credit_ Jonathan Olley_™ & © DC Comics
Of course dealing with such a high-profile project meant major security protocols were put in place to allow Hoy, Nelson and the team to access the files they needed. “Warner Bros had a VPN hardware installed at the editors’ homes so that the editing systems stayed completely off the internet.,” explains Tejeda. Dailies were sent from London to both editors’ homes each night via StorageDNA’s DNAfabric with the editors using Avid Media Composer editing software as well as Apple 6.1, a small cylinder-like computer which is referred to as a trashcan, and 100 terabyte external hard drives at home.
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Work continued in this way until February 2021 when Hoy and Nelson moved from working at their homes to Warner Bros’ Burbank offices. But even though they were all working in the same building, the editing team and director Reeves were still not allowed in the same room. Hula Post came to the rescue once again. The company outfitted nine Avid Media Composer workstations for the editorial team, alongside 160 terrabytes of Avid NEXIS storage available to each room, taking up an entire floor. Hoy and Reeves are used to working side by side on each of their projects, which proved to be a real challenge. Hula Post worked with
William Hoy
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PRODUCTION AND POST © Photo Credit_ Jonathan Olley_™ & © DC Comics
Andy Serkis and Robert Pattinson
the film’s other editor Tyler Nelson to create a separate system for the director in his own room, which showed him Hoy’s Avid interface and output feed, essentially mirroring what Hoy was seeing in his own room. Reeves was given a non-working Avid, complete with a mixing board, a 5.1 surround sound set-up, a 65in OLED playback monitor and two desktop screen playbacks, helping to make him feel as if he was looking over Hoy’s shoulder. “We created an environment so that the entire editing team could work in a collaborative environment and see each other’s playbacks via additional hardware,” explains Tejeda. “It’s something that we have never deployed before and it was definitely not your standard set-up, but it worked out perfectly for us.” Hula Post also created a unique solution whereby the director’s system used two Mac Minis hooked into the local NEXIS network to accomplish multiple Avid screen shares. Reeves was also connected to a video switcher so his client monitor could receive outputs from any Avid in the cutting room, meaning he could connect to any member of the editorial team whenever he wanted to.
William Hoy’s set-up in Burbank
“The good thing is that Hula is able to make all that happen,” Tejeda continues. “Our engineers are so knowledgeable about how to do this, that they can make any scenario happen, whatever is needed. In fact, it took the Hula Post team around two weeks from coming up with the idea to Reeves entering the building. Ben Insler, Nelson’s first assistant editor, wrote the scripts that were controlled by the Stream Decks, which allowed the director to easily view the other editors’ desktops,” he adds. It was challenging for Hula Post to support the editing team due to the strict protocols set forth by Warner Bros. Everyone understood that the measures were in place to keep post production moving in the right direction during the worst of the pandemic. “There was definitely an understanding on that part.” Tejeda is full of praise for the adaptability of the Avid Media Composer because it is so robust that it works with almost every scenario. “Avid really set the standard when it comes to sharing projects,” he says. “You never really have to worry about relinking media. So without a doubt Avid has been the standard for so many years and their secret sauce just works.” n
Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson on set
Matt Reeves’ room for reviewing edits © Photo Credit_ Jonathan Olley_™ & © DC Comics
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PRODUCTION AND POST
CREATING A SPACE FOR VIRTUAL PRODUCTION How multiCAM created the first multi-camera, virtual production TV set with real-time LED screen tracking
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ultiCAM SPACE is a mixture of technology and innovation, primarily developed in France, offering flexibility and cost-effective solutions for smaller productions with little requirement for additional technical resources. Designed by multiCAM Systems, the cutting-edge virtual production set is equipped with a 270° LED wall, providing viewers with an immersive 2D and 3D environment that can be synchronised with camera movements. The production workflow is built on the ATEM Constellation 8K production switcher and URSA Broadcast G2 cameras. “We live in a visual world, and we want to demonstrate the ability of our technology and the potential it holds for the future of television,” says multiCAM Systems’ Arnaud Anchelergue. “It was apparent to us that building a next-gen studio was needed to aid smaller productions in their transition to XR and LED wall technology.” The immersive TV set can be used for any kind of production, from a magazine-style talk show to more traditional live broadcast formats. “We knew that as part of the design, we’d need to consider backdrops for the on-screen talent if we were to create a truly immersive environment,” adds Anchelergue. “Guests are typically seated around a table, so we designed a hexagonal shape to mirror that. The structure’s opening allows a robotic track dolly to travel around the space. “We spent two years trying different models and manufacturers. We worked actively with a manufacturer to deliver the most reliable and precise technology. And with refresh rates and synchronisation so critical for any multi-camera workflow, we had to design dedicated firmware as part of the configuration process,” he explains.
multiCAM Space, complete with LED wall
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Blackmagic’s URSA Broadcast G2, with Canon lenses
“With shows requiring external feeds such as PowerPoint, remote guests or simply videos, the feeds must be managed and routed between the various systems. So, the ATEM Constellation 8K serves as our production switcher and as a matrix for distributing those sources. Combining the switcher with Companion and a Streamdeck, camera operators can easily switch between pre-set configurations.” Another essential requirement was the ability to control the switching using a solution multiCAM calls Backdrop. It says it is the first XR solution that supports native multi-camera switching. The virtual background has to match the viewing angle of the on-air camera. However, displaying a picture on an LED wall takes around six frames. The final delay is about three frames when taking all of the feeds that need capturing into account. So, the final switching requires a delay. The ATEM SDK is then used by Backdrop to control switching precisely at the right time. “We invested in four URSA Broadcast G2 cameras, which proved to be an ideal solution for us,” continues Anchelergue. “They’re the best upgrade to a pan-tilt-zoom camera. It is simply the best choice for value for money whilst also helping us address issues with moiré on the LED displays.” The camera also supports HD, 4K and 6K resolution depending on the configuration. It also enabled the multiCAM team to use its existing Canon lenses. This enabled the team to develop a camera control solution based on the Blackmagic 3G-SDI Shield for Arduino, enabling the multiCAM team to control the camera directly from its software using SDI. n
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TECHNOLOGY
HOW RIST AND SRT CAN ADDRESS SRT’S LIMITATIONS By Adi Rozenberg, founder, Alvalinks
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roadcasters and video content providers are becoming increasingly aware that adopting IP to transport content can bring many benefits. What is less well known is that reliable internet secure transport (RIST) can be binded with and used alongside secure reliable transport (SRT) to address the limitations of SRT.
over unmanaged networks. It is divided into profiles: simple, unicast, multicast, main (which defines an encrypted GRE over UDP tunnel), and the new advanced profile that is a protected tunnel. The tunnelling part of the specification uses a server/client architecture regardless of the transmission direction. The RIST specification allows other vendor solutions supporting RIST to interconnect.
WHAT IS RIST? RIST is an open specification protocol spearheaded by Video Services Forum (VSF). RIST implementation comes from multiple vendors and is supported by an open-source implementation, LibRIST. RIST is targeted at professional users with the aim to connect and stream
WHAT IS SRT? SRT is an open-source protocol used by many vendors and users to connect over unmanaged networks. It provides ARQ functionality and encryption to the stream and uses a caller/listener (server/client) architecture regardless of the transmission direction. The SRT protocol
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TECHNOLOGY allows different vendors to interact and provides a secure, reliable connectivity across most networks. The protocol is based on a client server architecture allowing a seamless traversal through firewalls and routers using a single UDP port. While it is widely known that the SRT protocol is based on a UDP protocol, an unknown fact is that SRT is using a UDT in which every session is unique.
LIMITATIONS OF SRT For regular usage, there is little difference between SRT and RIST. However, for a more advanced user, SRT is lacking in some key professional features: • • • •
Seamless switching: for multipath and fast packet recovery and link failure resilience Load share: for using multilink and spreading a stream among multiple links NULL packet deletion: reduces the payload overhead but removing TS NULL packet SRT with DTLS authentication and security
Binding the two protocols together can overcome SRT’s limitations. SRT can take any UDP packet and deliver it securely to the other side. The packet can be of any length and of any payload. It is possible to use the RIST advance RTP transport capabilities coupled with SRT delivery to overcome the limitations that exist in SRT. Let’s look at how using SRT and RIST together works in practice.
Both RIST and SRT include buffering for the purpose of transmission and receiving, as well as allowing the user to set the delay configuration to the buffer.
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Example 1: SMPTE 2022-7 implementation Firstly, let’s look at sending a stream and archive SMPTE-2022-7 with seamless switching. In this example, an incoming stream consumed by a RIST simple profile sender is split into three identical copies. Each copy is forwarded as an RTP stream to the SRT application, such as the
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TECHNOLOGY SRT-Live-Transmit, which in turn forwards the stream to the destination. Each output is then forwarded to a recipient RIST simple Profile Receiver. The RIST receiver then outputs the stream. If one or more links breakdown, the RIST receiver will compensate for the link loss.
Example 2: Load share implementation Load share capability is one of the well-known features of RIST but is missing from SRT, which can be problematic for users. A RIST sender, capable of load sharing, can split an incoming stream into three ISPs and push the stream into respected SRT senders. Each SRT sender will treat the stream portion as one session and deliver to the other side. On the receiver side, the SRT receivers will push the stream portions to a waiting RIST simple profile receiver to reaggregate the stream portion into one stream.
Example 3: Null packet deletion In this scenario, we will look at how RIST can be used to support NULL packet deletion (NPD) which is part of the RIST main profile. NULL packet deletion allows the sender to remove any NULL packet in the TSovIP stream before transmitting it between two RIST end points. The receiving RIST receiver reinserts the NULL packet in the
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exact original location. This capability allows the user to reduce the streaming overhead by five to 20 per cent. A RIST sender performs the NPD function on the incoming stream and the stream is then sent through a SRT sender and receiver. The SRT receiver then forwards the stream to a RIST receiver that brings back the stream to its original structure with Null packets in their original location.
Example 4: SRT with DTLS In the final scenario, SRT is using PSK and session authentication between listener and caller. There are, however, concerns over using PSK for cybersecurity reasons. To mitigate the cybersecurity concerns, users can instead use RIST main profile DTLS-based tunnelling. DTSL-based security is well known and trusted so is a preferred alternative to using PSK. In this example, a DTLS RIST main profile tunnel is created between two end points with SRT creating a link through the secure tunnel.
As these examples show, SRT and RIST protocols are not mutually exclusive. As well as being used seperately, they can be used jointly to provide the end user with an improved connectivity solution that brings many benefits to their application. n
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PRODUCTION AND POST
THE RINGS OF POWER NHK has developed a new gamut ring framework for visualising the range of reproducible colours. The standard has already been adopted by multiple standards organisations. Here, the team reveal more details behind the development and why they believes it is a better way of showing colour reproduction than the previous representation WHY DID YOU DEVELOP THE NEW GAMUT RING FRAMEWORK? Dr Masaoka at Science and Technology Research Laboratories (STRL) proposed a red, green, and blue (RGB) primary set for 4K/8K ultrahigh-definition TV, which was standardised in Recommendation ITU-R BT.2020 (Rec. 2020) in 2012.
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Since then, new display technologies, such as quantum dots, laser diodes, and other narrowband sources, have rapidly achieved vivid colour reproduction. Currently, many current ‘wide-gamut’ consumer displays support Rec. 2020 input. However, there are still variations in their native gamut size.
PRODUCTION TECHNOLOGY AND POST In the display industry, areal units in the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) 1931 (x, y) and CIE 1976 (u’, v’) coordinates have been – and still are – used to compare the size and coverage of colour gamuts between displays and with respect to reference gamuts, often claiming the larger of (x, y) versus (u’, v’) to give the more favourable value. Another problem is that the chromaticity diagrams do not contain the luminance or lightness dimension. Recently, the colour gamut is increasingly being expressed in terms of colour volume, including the luminance dimension. With the advent of high dynamic range (HDR), however, many threedimensional (3D) plots of display colour gamut now use perceptually inhomogeneous spaces that exaggerate parts of the colour space, with the result that a fair comparison of colour gamut is impossible. It has therefore been a challenge to develop a method to convert the 3D colour gamut in a homogeneous colour space into a 2D format. HOW LONG DID IT TAKE? About four years. In March 2017, Dr Masaoka attended his first International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM) meeting in San Diego, where volumetry of display colour gamut was the biggest topic. A colour scientist prepared colour gamut objects made by a 3D printer. Dr Masaoka then realised that 2D visualisation of the colour solid is the key to volumetry, and came up with his idea of gamut rings on the flight home. A year later, Dr Masaoka presented his gamut rings idea at the ICDM meeting at Samsung Research America in March 2018. Then, after a series of tests and software developments by experts, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ICDM, and CIE adopted the gamut ring framework as an international standard in January, July, and November 2021, respectively. HOW MANY PEOPLE WORKED ON THE PROJECT? AND WHAT WERE THEIR ROLES? At NHK STRL, Dr Masaoka was mainly responsible for everything from devising the gamut ring framework to standardisation. Since November 2017, he has chaired the ICDM Colour Metrology Subcommittee to develop a tutorial guideline on display colour metrology. The subcommittee consists of approximately 60 members made up of colour scientists and display engineers. WHY IS THIS FRAMEWORK A BETTER WAY OF SHOWING COLOUR REPRODUCTION THAN THE PREVIOUS REPRESENTATION? Gamut rings enables accurate evaluation because it considers lightness, which is not the case in the previous 2D representation. Another conventional way to represent a colour gamut is a 3D plot of colour gamut that can represent the lightness dimension. However, a singleangle view in a 3D plot can often be misleading because parts of the gamut are always obscured from the view. In the gamut ring framework, a gamut solid is cut into pieces at regular intervals of lightness (L*). Each piece is then stretched into a slice of unity lightness; the top surface area of the slice corresponds to the volume of the piece. Gamut rings are formed by placing one slice at the lowest lightness level, followed by positioning the others (with a hole for each) around the bottom slice consecutively. The rings are delineated according
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4K/8K (Recommendation ITU-R BT.2020) color gamut
to the constant-L* loci. In the case of ten rings, the area of the innermost ring (with no hole) equals the volume for 0 < L* ≤ 10. The next outer ring is stacked cumulatively around the innermost ring and has an area equal to the volume for 10 < L* ≤ 20. Around the second ring, the third ring for 20 < L* ≤ 30 is stacked. This stacking is repeated for the tenth ring, whose area corresponds to the volume for 90 < L* ≤ 100. Thus, the colour gamut volume is visualised using proportionate gamut rings in a 2D diagram that provides the information needed to describe the ranges of hue, chroma, and lightness. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO NAME THE FRAMEWORK ‘RINGS’? The ‘rings’ were so named because they look like annual growth rings found in the cross section of tree trunks. HOW DO YOU SEE THE FRAMEWORK BEING USED IN THE BROADCAST INDUSTRY? The gamut ring framework was standardised about nine years after the release of Rec. 2020 in August 2012. As mentioned earlier, many current ‘wide-gamut’ professional monitors and consumer displays support Rec. 2020 input, but they vary in colour gamut size. We expect the gamut ring framework to be used as a suitable and unified gamut size measurement method that facilitates proper display development. HOW COULD YOU CONTINUE TO DEVELOP THE FRAMEWORK? Dr Masaoka worked at ICDM, IEC, CIE, and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT); full of brilliant scientists and miraculous experiences. Their seminal contributions to the development of gamut ring framework facilitated its standardisation, having a profound impact on the display industry for the foreseeable future. n
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TECHNOLOGY
JPEG XS: THE NEW CODEC ON THE BLOCK In recent months, we’ve been hearing more and more about the benefits of JPEG XS. Fraunhofer IIS’s Professor Siegfried Foessel explains how it can help with live production
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nitially released in 2019, JPEG XS is an interoperable, low-latency video codec that is seeing growing adoption within the media tech industry. The codec is built on core technology from both intoPIX and Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits (IIS), with the XS acronym believed to have been chosen to highlight the eXtra Small and eXtra Speed capabilities of the codec. The ISO standardised JPEG XS codec makes it possible to handle high-quality media workflows from acquisition to distribution using both IP and ethernet infrastructure. “JPEG XS is a mezzanine codec, which is a good fit between quality and complexity,” explains Professor Siegfried Foessel, head of the moving picture technologies department at Fraunhofer IIS. “If you have a complex codec, you need a lot of resources either in software or in hardware,” he says. “You can achieve very high quality but then you need either a dedicated integrated circuit or you need a really powerful machine. “With JPEG XS we created a codec which is exactly for this purpose where we want to have a compression between 2:1 and 10:1, so not too high, but with high visual quality, and with a low complexity so that it can be implemented in many devices.” Foessel adds that the main reason for developing this specific codec was that many broadcasters are still using SDI interfaces in the field, but transmitting uncompressed video over SDI means working with either 4K video at 12 Gbps or with 8K video at 48 Gbps. Too much for affordable standard ethernet interfaces. “You always want to go a little bit lower with the bandwidth, typically one magnitude of order lower so that you can go with 4K below 1 Gbps or with 8K below 10 Gbps, so that you can transmit it effectively with the best quality possible,” he explains. JPEG XS is described as being a perfect codec for use in live broadcasts, gaming, and virtual reality due to low latency. “That’s also important for cloud-based processing,” adds Foessel. “More and more broadcast centre facilities are transmitting news directly to the cloud, and processing a lot of things in the cloud instead of on-prem, which requires low latency, especially if you want to monitor the different
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steps of the processing. That’s one important reason why JPEG XS is so popular in the broadcast arena at the moment.” “Typical applications like contribution are the right choice for this codec,” Foessel continues. “JPEG XS is perfect for getting the signal from the camera and processing it before it is passed on to a distribution encoder.” JPEG XS is tailored to the specific requirements of the broadcast and film production industry and to high-quality in-house distribution. “We are looking forward to further solutions that make the advantages of JPEG XS available to the market, because this is an essential part of Fraunhofer’s applied research and development technology transfer activities,” adds Foessel. “To this end, we have set up a licence programme that enables each manufacturer, developer or provider to find the right licence model for their business.” n
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THE FINAL WORD
THE MEDIA TECH INDUSTRY NEEDS A REFRESH IN TERMS OF THINKING From 3D to UHD, new SMPTE regional governor for Europe Dagmar Driesnack has seen it all How did you get started in the media tech industry? I studied media technology as I was interested in how television works in a technical way. I started my professional career in 2006 at the Institut fuer Rundfunktechnik (IRT), the research and development institute of the German speaking public broadcasters. I had a chance to test and evaluate new technologies and products, learning from the experiences of my older colleagues, and was involved in various test productions in HD, UHD, and 3D TV. I worked within EBU groups and later chaired some as well. I also had the opportunity to support several students in writing their theses. In 2021 the IRT closed and I moved to a new challenge and started my job at Rohde & Schwarz as a solution manager. How has the industry changed since you started your career? When I started, the transition from 4:3 to 16:9 was done, but still in SD. The first test transmissions in HD started in MPEG-2. During my diploma thesis, I evaluated the first real-time H.264 encoders for HD, and I was involved in the introduction of it in production, contribution, and distribution in Germany and also in Europe while working in various EBU groups. Later came the phase where 3D TV was the hot topic, which then led into improvements for immersive television. Higher resolution, high dynamic range, wide colour gamut and high frame rate resulted in the development and standardisation of UHD. Besides the various TV formats, the move from SDI to IP-based production infrastructure started, file-based production was settled, tapes were mainly history. And the developments still continue today. What makes you passionate about working in the industry? The media industry is like a big family. While working for IRT, I had the chance to meet so many people; manufacturers, service providers, and broadcasters from all over the world. The industry is always moving forward, and the requirements differ from customer to customer, but everybody is passionate to fulfil them. How inclusive do you think the industry is, and how can we make it more inclusive? The media industry is, from my point of view, an open industry. But yes, as a female engineer you are still a kind of exotic in the male techy world. Being a presenter on a conference or on a booth at a convention, you are known because the number of women is still low. There are initiatives to improve the situation, but I’m disappointed that such initiatives are still needed today. I was and still am quite lucky that I had so many supportive colleagues around me, which made it easy for me to have fun in the industry.
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How do we encourage young people that media technology is the career for them? Showing young people the possibilities they could have in the media industry, working as part of a team, giving them the chance to try it out, making them aware that making a mistake is not the end of the world but a great learning experience. We have to trust young people. There is so much potential out there, but we need to promote work in our industry by going to schools, involving the young generation in initiatives, and supporting their interests irrespective of colour, gender or anything else. Where do you think the industry will go next? I assume that the traditional media transmissions will decrease but not go away, the non-linear consumption of media will increase; anywhere, any time, on any device. And depending on the demands of the individual, media will need to be personalised with respect to duration, environment, access services, type of devices, etc. The production has to be adapted, mindsets will change. And, of course, remote production will increase, and sharing infrastructures might be a topic. This became quite clear in recent years during the Covid situation. Beside this, the media cybersecurity aspect of the industry becomes more and more important on both sides; for the manufacturer and the service provider. What’s the biggest topic of discussion in your area of the industry? There is no one big topic as they all relate to each other. So I would say the move to IP-based production is the underlying big topic that influences the move to cloud, remote production and security for production, contribution and distribution, and with it the flexibility to react to change increases. What should the industry be talking about that it isn’t at the moment? For whom are we all working? It’s the consumers’ satisfaction. Sometimes it is necessary to change workflows much earlier than planned. A certain flexibility is needed to meet this requirement. To do it in a good and efficient way, we need standardised interfaces with a good opportunity to adapt in all areas of the workflow chain. Interoperability is the key. But creating standards also needs (joint) input from the industry so that as many people as possible can benefit from it. n
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