Production switchers are a fine balance between the technical—handling multiple incoming video sources—and the creative, mixing between various sources to create seamless, exciting or engaging and comprehensive coverage of a live event or studio production. High-end broadcasters have always put high demands on this key piece of equipment, but now other users have equally exacting requirements.
Keith Vidger, principal technical consultant for media and entertainment at Panasonic Connect, sums this situation up in four words: “More, fewer, higher, lower. These relate to more content being created by people who use fewer traditional outlets to distribute at higher production values with a lower cost.”
As Vidger observes, switchers are generally thought of as the province of those involved in live broadcasting, such as broadcasters and call-letter stations.
“Those that derive their revenue from selling advertising [and] create cool content, including news and sports, are still there, but in addition there are corporate customers who used to produce fairly straightforward content to a group of people within their own domain, in other words employees, which are now producing shows with enormously high production values at a lower cost,” he says.
Vidger explains that new technologies—”cutting-edge software and reliable hardware” —have been applied to switchers and reduced costs while achieving “if not the same results as we had before, maybe even better ones.” This, he adds, has allowed users to achieve their high production goals for less money.
Surface-Level Advances
Another sector likely to benefit from the evolution of production switchers is the second-tier sports market. Satoshi Kanemura, president of FOR-A Americas, says another factor is the budget and staff cuts being made by some of the large U.S. broadcasters.
“Broadcasters are facing up to how they can do productions more cost-effectively [but without] gigantic 4 M/E [mix/effect] 100 input switchers, which were very useful for live events but are difficult to afford now,” he says.
This, Kanemura explains, has led to companies like FOR-A producing smaller-scale switchers featuring only 2 M/E and 40 inputs. In addition to this, he adds, the younger generation of operators and technical directors now coming into the business are familiar with touch panels, iPads and iPhones, but unfamiliar with big traditional switcher panels.
“The trend is that the production-switcher surface stays the same but has more of a web GUI [graphical user interface] setup and control,” he says. “In the near future, with the number of younger people in broadcasting increasing, maybe web GUIs or touch panels will be the main interface. This may be seen especially in coverage of minor-league sports that prefer to go to cloud operations. It could be the next trend and although it’s not coming soon to the broadcast market, we are in a transition period.”
‘Wow Factor’
A key function of switchers is to help set the visual style for a TV station, observes Greg Huttie, vice president of production switchers at Grass Valley. “In general, broadcasters are interested in developing the look and feel [of their output],” he says. “People might tune in to a football match or a baseball game or auto racing from a particular network that has only eight cameras, or it could have 32 or, as with the Super Bowl, 96 to 100 cameras,” Huttie says. “But the broadcasters don’t want the viewer to realize how many cameras there are. They want something that looks the same [regardless of the number of cameras] and has an impact.
“The ‘wow factor’ is an important element in how manufacturers and their R&D departments develop switchers because there needs to be a consistency across the board, whether you’re on site or doing something as a remote or what kind of processing engine you’re using,” he adds.
While IP is now moving steadily into the broadcast market, Scott McQuaid, product manager for switchers at Sony Electronics Professional Solutions Americas, comments that SDI “still has a significant role to play” but points out that large broadcasters and networks are moving towards IP.
“Most anyone building a brand-new facility would probably tend towards IP, but in the smaller [station] market, they’re still going to go SDI because IP is very expensive to implement,” he says. “But whenever we speak to customers about a new switcher, whether they’re still SDI or not, they’re looking for an upgrade path to IP.”
Big Impact, Small Size
McQuaid says more customers are looking for smaller switchers with hybrid processing and a mix of hardware and software.
“The frames are more compact, but we’re still able to handle multiple inputs,” he explains. “One IP connection at 100G can handle up to 32 ins and 32 outs, so your smaller panel/switcher hardware can deal with 64 ins and
64 outs in IP.
“The infrastructure will include extensive 100, 200, 400G switches and be connected to a broadcast controller, which is basically the old SDI router, handling the 2110 video, audio and metadata all at once,” McQuaid adds. “You can choose where you send those individual signals or send all three to the switcher or the audio board.”
IP and the idea of a small, software-based control surface has led to discussion of “virtual switchers,” although, as McQuaid observes, everyone has their own name for the concept.
“I call them hybrid cloud software switchers, which is a virtual switcher that lives up in, say, an AWS or Google cloud,” he says. “The software lives in the cloud and you access it from anywhere you want. You can also go with that software running on a COTS server that’s on-prem, it just depends on how you want to move signals and where you want to go with them.”
Virtually Anywhere
Nigel Spratling, vice president of switchers and servers at Ross Video, comments that to support remote production workflows, switchers now offer various operating modes to enable remote control and operation.
“Control panels, which were once tethered to local processing frames, can now be located remotely and connected via VPN [virtual private network] technology,” he says. “Additionally, comprehensive software-based control panels allow operators to manage productions from virtually anywhere.”
In these scenarios, FOR-A’s Kanemura says, the processing engine will be virtual but people can continue to use a hardware panel connected to a software-based switcher. “Eventually all operations will be on a touch-panel basis, but I don’t know how long that’s going to take,” he says.
Grass Valley demonstrated switching control in conjunction with the Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality headset at IBC 2024. Huttie confirms that some end-user testing is now taking place “in the realm of virtual monitoring” combined with a physical panel, such as the company’s Maverik MAV GUI modules.
“Broadcasters are open to anything that achieves their goal,” he says. “But for major events, it’s all about the content and what it looks like. Whether they can achieve that with a software-based switcher or a traditional engine, they flip the coin. People are trying a lot more things today if it’s what their production needs and it’s reliable.”
