Blurred broadcast lines

AV Magazine

The dividing line between broadcast and AV has never been more blurred. The emergence of IP has acted as a great unifier in both broadcast and AV environments with crossovers in product, workflow and quality that render most production indistinguishable bar the purpose and funding of content.

https://www.avinteractive.com/features/technology/blurred-broadcast-lines-02-04-2021/

It wasn’t always this way. The broadcast world tended to look down on corporate video as the budget end of the market aspiring to ‘broadcast quality’ as the apex of achievement.

“Broadcast has traditionally been focused on generating the highest quality image and sound possible within somewhat rigid parameters to maintain consistency,” observes Liam Hayter, senior solutions architect at NewTek. “AV has been less rigid, often working with a wider range of source and device types.”

Advances in display and acquisition technology (think iPhone) have democratised production while uplifting consumer expectations of quality to raise the bar in AV. Conversely, intense pressures on costs have caused broadcast to look to AV for innovation.

Equipment overlap
“The move towards IP has revolutionised the approach and architecture of both broadcast and pro AV, with the main driver in broadcast being to reduce the cost of broadcast services, particularly in relation to remote production,” says Steve Purkess, head of sport and broadcast, Creative Technology.

IP may have opened the floodgates for the two verticals to merge but there has always been overlap. AV runs highly-produced content during live events that uses a lot of the same products as broadcast.

“When it comes to infrastructure for extending, switching, and managing performance media, the optimisations for these different workflows have focused on the needs of the respective markets,” says Samuel Racine vice-president, sales, AV/IT Group, Matrox. “Because broadcast and AV are both able to leverage the advances in performance media management over IP, there has been even more of an opportunity to cross-pollinate best practices.”

For Creative Technology, the integration of broadcast technologies into pro AV has been an ongoing process which only accelerated when it joined NEP Group.

“Broadcast equipment is however fairly defined in its purpose, working to specific aspect ratios and resolutions,” says Purkess. “Whereas pro AV equipment has a wider number of applications, several of which do not have an equivalent in broadcast so we also see an increase in hybrid solutions being delivered to live audiences in theatres, arenas and stadia.”

Spot the difference
A key difference between the sectors is target audience. “The end customers in broadcast have a commanding share of the conversation when it comes to insisting on protecting their investments and building the most useful long-term infrastructure solutions,” says Racine. “In pro AV, the market is much more diverse and customer power is distributed across a much broader and more diverse spectrum of users.”

The main distinction between AV and broadcast equipment may be as straightforward as the relationship between operational and capital expenditure. “In broadcast it may be natural to capex ‘static’ facilities (eg. TV and radio studios),” explains Kieran Walsh, director of application engineering, Audinate. “This would be paralleled with the need to have ‘core’ facilities in the traditional professional AV market, where boardrooms and huddle spaces are fairly static facilities.”

Corporate video kit
From an imaging perspective, however, corporate video kit is virtually identical to what may be found in a TV studio. “In both scenarios, when engaging an operational expense, it is likely that this will come with external personnel with particular skillsets,” says Walsh. “The mobility between a corporate award ceremony one day and a TV sports OB is the ‘spice of life’ for the freelance specialist and facilities provider, which will often use the same professional broadcast equipment in both applications.”

For higher end equipment capable of managing complex live video and audio demands, including support for higher resolution feeds and the ability to manage a high volume of sources, there is an even greater overlap between traditional broadcast and pro AV gear.

In response, broadcast technology vendors have developed versatile solutions that are suited for a range of production scenarios, from on-set and studio use, to in-venue, live environments, mobile trucks, online video communications, education and beyond.

“The difference is when you move into more niche areas of AV such as video conferencing or corporate,” says Darren Gosney, technical sales manager EMEA, Blackmagic Design. “Then the demands for AV become more defined around user interface and control. Video systems become a communication device and not a production-based technology. Here is where we see more specific product development and integration with other AV vendors.”

VC is a broadcast tool
The last year has seen many of these technologies become nigh on essential for business continuity in broadcasting. “We’ve had SkypeTX which is powerful and widely used in our product line for years,” says Hayter. “The pandemic has really pushed platforms like Zoom into mainstream adoption for broadcast.”

At the same time, video conferencing and live streaming are two areas benefitting from broadcast technology. The capabilities of devices such as PTZ cameras are one example as they improve image quality exceptionally.

Virtual or XR studios are a great example of pro AV technology being combined with broadcast technology. The studio technology (content servers and LED displays) are all pro AV applications but the broadcast technology is used for the capture, switching, IP encoding and distribution.

“We’ve seen this approach prove particularly successful during the periods of social distancing where corporate events were replaced with high quality streamed events,” says Purkess.

AJA has also seen an uptick in high-end LED displays used for broadcast virtual production. Bryce Button, director of product marketing, says: “For virtual production workflows, massive high-resolution LED walls allow display environments, sets, and background effects to be shot in realtime, effectively capturing the interaction between actors and backgrounds in-camera. Additionally, game engine technologies, like Unreal Engine and Unity, are serving up realtime graphics and virtual sets, providing a lot of value at low cost for cinematic and episodic production, as well as for online live award shows, sports programming, and much more.”

CGI tech almost exclusive to cinema
Technologies that remain principally in the broadcast realm are few and far between. Prime examples include large OB facilities and satellite uplinks. “The principal preserve of broadcast or cinema-only technologies appears to be almost exclusively in the CGI space,” remarks Walsh. “While chromakey techniques are becoming a useful tool in enterprise conferencing, the kinds of glorious expositions of creative houses, such as Pixar, don’t seem to have an everyday application in AV.”

Conversely, from the common use of ‘touch screen’ displays and the utilisation of the MIDI API for hardware control, “the AV business has been catering for less well-trained users, ‘on a budget’ for many years,” contends Graham Sharp, Broadcast Pix CEO. “More broadly, video over IP driven by off-the-shelf hardware and associated lower costs have made high quality video available to everyone. Networked video, which pro AV started using before broadcast, has developed to become robust, highly scalable and operable and at a price that broadcasters can no longer afford to ignore.”

It is the networking glue which has been the huge driver between technology lines blurring. At the same time each industry still maintains different standards for content creation and delivery.

“Seamless interoperability between traditional broadcast and pro AV equipment is a desired end goal for both industries, with standards like NDI, ST 2110, DANTE audio, and more helping to bridge both for IP-based live video production,” says Button.
What’s being discussed on a bigger scale just now applies to the transition of performance media from high-performance digital baseband technologies (like SDI and HDMI) to high-performance digital technologies over internet protocol – AV-over-IP in the AV world and SMPTE 2110 in broadcast.

“End users from both worlds want the same thing,” argues Racine. “Cost-effective, highly reliable, useful infrastructures that can meet all the needs of today and can scale and morph as market requirements change tomorrow.”

New media over IP standard
Thanks to the efforts of SMPTE and multi-vendor promotional body AIMS (Alliance for IP Media Solutions) in galvanising broadcast around the open standard ST 2110, broadcasters are able to build new IP-based facilities using best of breed equipment from a whole range of vendors. In this regard, the AV community lags behind.

“SMPTE 2110 is an accomplishment that drew in end users, manufacturers, and all other stakeholders in products and services,” says Racine. “It may take longer, but this is inevitable in pro AV as well.”

Standardisation proposals
A proposal to standardise media over IP in the AV space is on the table. IPMX (Internet Protocol Media Experience) is being promoted by AIMS and adapted from ST 2110 specifically for pro AV needs. For example, adding a KVM-style extension that doesn’t require a separate control system.

“There have been a number of compressed IP protocols in use by the pro AV market for a while, some proprietary (NVX), and some more widely adopted (NDI, SDVoE),” says Sid Lobb, CT’s head of vision and integrated networks. “Each has their own advantages and disadvantages but importantly limit the types of equipment that will work with each other, and therefore the flexibility of solutions that can be offered. IPMX will offer integrators and AV companies much more flexibility.”

Racine thinks there is no way for pro AV to fully harness new developments like AI without the volume and scale of a standard.

“The market is too global and too fast for 500 pro AV companies to use their r&d budgets to re-invent the same proprietary implementations of AV infrastructure and AV edge devices in un-interoperable variants,” he says. “The inevitable pull from the market towards more useful infrastructures will nudge pro AV towards truly open standards.”