STOCKHOLM—The media industry is undergoing a period of unprecedented change and viewers continue to flock to the cash-rich facilitators of the ‘new age of content,’ be it Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google or Apple (FANGA). In the past, this mostly applied to on-demand content, but it is now becoming increasingly crucial for high quality live events. Consumers want it all with high quality picture: UHD, HDR, HFR, multiscreen, VR, 360… and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
While end-users have a tendency to focus on what FANGA and the major traditional broadcasters are bringing to the table, what they’re often unaware of is the strain their new demands put on content production and distribution. Demands met with changing workflows and new technologies such as cloud-based production, remote production, distributed production and file-based workflows.
All of these workflow changes are enabled by the technology shift to IP in production, and more specifically to the adoption of 2110 standards for IP based production.
One company that is determined to help address these end-user demands, new production workflows and technology shifts is Net Insight. With all this in mind, they are releasing a next generation terabit platform, Nimbra 1060, to provide flexibility and agility with assured service quality for terabit IP needs. This new product is unique in that it brings IP-based media services across national and global media networks easily, without the complex traffic engineering typically associated with high-quality media transport. It reportedly also provides the industry’s highest capacity density.
Net Insight’s Nimbra 1060 provides “a hassle free solution” to increasing workflow demands to keep up with demand of live content.
“We are very largely driven by the end user demands for more interesting and higher quality content, especially from live events. Content which also has a very high intrinsic value for both content owners and broadcasters,” said Alexander Sandström, strategic product manager at Net Insight.
End-users are now watching on various different sized screens and have much higher demands with regards to resolution, picture quality, pixels, which inevitably causes bandwidth issues.
“Production has changed and will continue to do so to handle this large number of different viewing methods and expectations, something that of course affects our position in the marketplace," said Sandström.
Capacity demands are increasing at an alarming rate. Net Insight expects the core capacity of wide area media networks to triple in the next three years, while the capacity demand on remote production sites could increase tenfold in the same period.
Clearly, these new demands mean future media networks will need to provide more capacity on each site, on each link and throughout the entire wide area network core.
One challenge with the shift to IP is retaining the high quality that live production has delivered in the past. What complicates matters more is that networks will also have to be agile enough to adapt to changing workflows and traffic patterns. All this must be achieved while supporting the shift to IP, and more specifically, to the 2110 standards.
Net Insight's Nimbra 1060 is designed to retain all the characteristics from its existing Nimbra MSRs in an all-IP world. Service providers and network operators get a carrier grade platform, with assured service quality and service agility guaranteed at any level of network utilization. With this combination of assurance and agility, users are able to use all available network capacity without sacrificing quality.
“What we see is that production is expanding out from single OB vans and locations and things like remote production is becoming much more prevalent,” Sandström continued.
“There’s also an increasing pressure on companies to use their resources more efficiently. We see the launch of our next generation media transport solution as a large step in aiding these changes, where resources may be distributed over large distances.”
“With remote and distributed workflows the network is becoming the most crucial common production resource, and that’s what we want to provide a simple and future proof solution for," concluded Sandström.
This story first appeared on TVT's sister publication TVB Europe.
