Guest Blog by: Roger Sherwood, Cisco Manager of Sales Business Development for Service Provider
The idea was born in Paris late 2015. 42 Mediatvcom and the R&D Department of public broadcaster France Televisions wanted to build a proof‐of-concept demonstration for broadcasters interested in interconnecting their television studios over IP.
The design parameters: it had to be end-to-end, interoperate across multiple vendors and showcase how studios can migrate to IP using open source components.
Next-generation IP Video routing is part of Cisco's new "Media Blueprint," to help broadcasters, content providers and media and entertainment companies make the move to all-IP infrastructure. Cisco's part in the project involved our Nexus series of IP switches, which make it easier to connect and manage disparate data center resources using software-defined networking (SDN). In the demo, our Nexus IP switches were part of the studio migration of production media networks to IP. We collaborated with a great mix of companies in the experiment including:
- EVS
- Embrionix
- Imagine Communications
- GrassValley, a Belden Brand,
- Nevion
- S-A-M
- Tektronix
Studios migrating production-grade content to IP is both a new opportunity and a challenge for broadcasters worldwide - moving live television in real-time over IP requires best-in-class reliability and stability, particularly for high-profile, must-see events.
The Paris demonstration included the engineering departments of all major French TV channels and broadcasters, which delivered spectacular, real-time, uncompressed video inside a full IP production environment - cameras, switchers, multi-viewers, SMPTE 2022-6-based gateways, slow motion servers and clock generators, in addition to our carrier-class Nexus switching platform.
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