Digital TV Europe July/August 2010
Technology focus > Playout and automation
Arqiva’s Chalfont playout centre is equipped for multi-screen delivery (left), as is Grass Valley technology (right).
More flexible
Openness, flexibility and scalability are key considerations for the technology architec- ture, says Sue Farrell, head of architecture at media services company Red Bee Media: “The systems supporting these services need to evolve continuously to keep pace with market developments.” The growing ‘non-linear’ on-demand mod- els require completely new back-end infra- structure and business systems to support the customer service model that accompanies them. “Customers that will be successful in this new era will embrace the non-linear model for content delivery and forge new part- nerships to deliver content to the broadband audience and to manage those accounts,” says Ray Baldock, chief technology officer at broad- cast and content solutions provider, Grass Valley. “They will also upgrade to put in the infrastructure to manage content in more and more formats producing for different delivery platforms. This needs to be automated and supported with more complex tracking of rights to the content. Companies with busi- ness interests rooted in both models will have a decisive advantage in the future, if they bring those business assets and systems together.” The industry has been preparing for years for value added services such as on-demand and catch-up to come on stream. It is not caus- ing a revolutionary change in the actual play- out. “The challenge is, not so much in the con- tent, but in the method data that goes with it,” says Jon Try, vice-president, technology of Chellomedia’s playout and content manage- ment company Digital Media Centre (DMC). The move to IP and IT-centric infrastruc- ture has helped to make method data and all content much more adaptable and transfer- able for different formats. “With a move to lower power consumption models, and an acceptance that ‘broadcast quality’ is available in broadcast-enabled IT equipment, more and more broadcasters are migrating to a more IT- centric playout solution,”says Mark Errington, CEO of playout technology provider OASYS. One of the benefits of this IT-centric playout approach, says Miranda Technologies’ Michel Proulx, is that it “tends to have fewer compo-
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nents because more of the functions of a play- out chain are integrated in one ‘PC-based’ box”. Miranda offers a combination of playout and branding graphics in the channel playout boxes. According to Proulx, because these boxes are so integrated, they will often only have video spigots on the output and accept files at the input. This means that more of the infrastructure around these boxes handles files and is, therefore, IT-centric. “Fewer boxes overall and IT-centric infrastructure makes for less expensive, more commodity device-based systems,” he says. “Initially, people shunned these solutions because they considered them
Geoff Hutton, chief functional architect of media management software provider Pilat Media says that the migration to IT- and soft- ware-based infrastructures is having a signifi- cant impact on every aspect of broadcasting and playout. “In many ways, this trend is greatly simplifying operations because many software-based transmission systems are capable of handling complexities, such as gen- erating secondary events, which once required multiple hardware-based systems,” he explains. “From a scheduling point of view, an IT- and IPTV-based infrastructure opens up a new world of content that can be tailored and delivered to individual set-top boxes. This means that the delivery targets are much smaller but there are also far more of them. This requires a new approach to scheduling – one that enables broadcasters to manage a much wider diversity of broadcast streams, including not only local and national advertis- ing but tailored ads for delivery to set-top boxes. A robust business management sys- tem that provides a unified interface to these different services can help manage these com- plexities.”
“Well-designed IT-based automation and playout systems deliver great advantages. Innovation will provide even greater benefits”
Ian Fletcher, Omnibus
more risky or less ‘broadcasty’, but because of severe pressure on their capital expenditure budgets they are now more open minded.” A transmission infrastructure that does not have IP at its core puts the operator at a disad- vantage in operational and business terms. “A well-designed IT-based automation and play- out system delivers enormous advantages, and the next generation of innovation will pro- vide even greater benefits,” says Ian Fletcher, chief technology officer for OmniBus Systems. “OmniBus iTX brought automation and transmission within the sphere of the IT revolution in broadcasting, delivering sub- stantial economies and workflow efficiencies. The next stage of innovation is the complete integration of end-to-end operations from ingest to output under a unified system that brings those economies into the entire work- flow.”
File-based
Everything is increasingly becoming file- based. “Programming is no longer an ‘audio- follow-video’ world,” says Baldock at Grass Valley. “Much of our finished content is pro- duced and stored as files and increasingly transferred within the facility and between facilities as files. In the cable and satellite busi- ness we are now seeing files being cached locally for on-demand access and to person- alise some content.” Try adds that all DMC’s broadcast content is kept in its digital data archive at high resolu- tion and stored with audio and subtitle tracks in multiple languages, so that it is always avail- able for any kind of media. “Our in-house sys- tem often has to interface with converging external broadcast systems to extract this data
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