BROADCAST 3.0
IP MEETS CONTENT By Andreas Hilmer, director of marketing and communications, Lawo
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he broadcast industry is currently facing its biggest challenge — and one of its biggest opportunities. Without a doubt, the migration to IP technology, which is already well under way, will change our industry. The change will be more profound than one usually expects from a technological leap. The notion of Broadcast 3.0, originally coined by Lawo, encompasses all aspects and trends triggered by the move to IP, like increased flexibility and unlimited scalability, to name but two. The industry’s transformation will go far beyond the pure deployment of IP technology, resulting in what we call “smart production facilities” which are able to keep pace with the rapidly growing demand for content. Broadcast 3.0 specifically describes the broadcast and broader content creation industry’s shift to production and content delivery utilising Internet Protocols (IP) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware to transport and distribute video, audio and metadata, as well as ancillary and control data, as elementary streams. The term refers to the broadcast industry’s third evolutionary step, after analogue baseband signal transmission over dedicated point-to-point hardware (Broadcast 1.0), followed by the industry’s transition to digital audio and video baseband signal transport over dedicated or specialised hardware and, in some cases, the leveraging of early-stage telecom- or computer-based tools for
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transmission, routing and storage (Broadcast 2.0). IP technologies as such are not really new; other industries have relied on them for years. Today, however, these technologies — including the principles of data centre management and cloud computing, coupled with the availability of high-speed dedicated fibre networks — are being harnessed for content production applications and applied to core plant infrastructure as well as to remote or distributed production workflows. Together, the current trend toward IP-based production and content delivery and the operational ethic of maximising flexibility and versatility open up new possibilities for workflows and production principles. In an increasingly competitive environment, time and flexibility have become even more critical. One way of saving time is by finding faster ways of getting source signals to the required destinations. Physical patch changes take time and are error-prone even when operators are not under stress. In an OB truck, the process of changing cable routes is even more intricate because space is limited. In addition to efficiency, flexibility is a key consideration. On an IP network, all streams can be automatically available wherever they are needed. Plus, adding more source or destination devices is just a matter of connecting them to a switch. Add to that the possibility of using a