How Live Production Continues to Transform With IP and IT

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Broadcasters are taking advantage of internet and IT technologies to adapt to rapidly changing consumer expectations for more immersive live broadcasts.

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One of the primary trends is the shift from traditional, co-located live production setups to distributed models, but this was not the only transformation discussed by a panel of engineering experts at NAB Show. Watch the full conversation below or read on for highlights.

The move to remote production itself has been gathering speed. Also known as REMI (remote integration) or at-home production, this model sees many ,if not all, of the processes and operations typically performed in a mobile facility at the venue now returned over IP to a central hub.

This cuts down on travel and crew costs as well as carbon footprint. Plus, it enables staff to produce more content, for example by being able to shift from one live event to another with ease.

“The IP connectivity that we have both in facility and between facilities gives us the flexibility to actually have different [media] and different people in different places,” said Appear CTO Andrew Rayner.

“That’s really transformational to workflow, from a business perspective, as well as an operational perspective. It means you can make better use of your people. It means you can make better use of your equipment. And from a sustainability and environmental perspective, it is actually really positive, as well. Those drivers are being the big trend in the industry.”

Another related trend is the shift from the bespoke to the generic in terms of the way live broadcast productions are technically put together.

“We’re moving from [traditional broadcast equipment like] BNC connectors and XLR connectors towards an Ethernet interface. We’re abstracting ourselves by moving towards standard IT connectivity,” Rayner said.

“We’re tending to move our functionality from bespoke appliances into more of a software based infrastructure.

That software might not even be running in your facility, it might be running in somebody else’s facility somewhere else in the world. And that’s the dematerialization piece there.

Something almost unheard of even 10 years ago is the increasing use of public internet connectivity as part of the live production chain. 

“That is really transformational,” said Rayner. “There is a big demand for the equipment that facilitates that.”

“Our number one customer complaint is ‘I tried to play along with what’s happening on screen, and I wasn’t able to because it already happened’… Latency is my problem statement right now,” Girard explained.

FanDuel uses a combination of cloud infrastructure and direct signal acquisition to minimize latency, sometimes achieving as low as 250 milliseconds glass-to-glass using WebRTC technology.

Walid Hamri, AVP, Media Systems Engineering at Sinclair, highlighted the broadcast group’s journey towards centralizing broadcast operations in the cloud. Sinclair’s approach focuses on consolidating workflows to improve efficiency and reduce redundancy.

“What we’re doing is getting a centralized place. That’s one media in just one form factor, one format. And then it’s going to be QCed once and then delivered to everyone,” Hamri explained.

Hamri emphasized the importance of timing over latency for their operations, ensuring that content is synchronized accurately across multiple platforms and distribution points.