24 TVBEurope ForumChannel in a Box A mirrored effect
Jan Weigner, MD & CTO Cinegy, analyses CiaB in terms of mirrored boxes, reducing complexity and the move to playout as software service
CHANNEL IN a Box (CiaB) is a marketing buzzword to catch as many customers as possible. Traditionally CiaB solutions were aiming at small broadcasters with limited budget. The limited budget is still the
case but the interesting thing is that also larger broadcasters are now using them or considering to use them. Either they are convinced by the technology advance — or the big budgets to get a channel to air have gone away. The CiaB concept has one
inherent problem that is pinpointed by the word ‘box’. A single box is a single point of failure. Worse yet, today’s high- end ‘boxes’ or IT servers can run 16 SD or six-to-eight HD channels, of course less with branding and transport stream encoding turned on, but still a fair number. If that single box fails a lot of channels go black. So if your revenue depends on having close to 100% up-time, a single box is a considerable risk factor and two mirrored boxes are a must.
100% uptime But there is another big attraction factor of the CiaB concept other than just price and the fact it can all be done in a single box: the reduction of complexity. To get a single channel to air one traditionally would buy an automation solution, a video server, a logo inserter or a channel branding solution, Dolby encoders, MPEG-2/H.264 TS encoders and, depending on geography, yet more inserters.
Jan Weigner: Where I personally do not like the term CiaB is the direct association with hardware. The really interesting move is to playout as a software service
CiaB product offerings
reduce the complexity by offering many of these separate offerings in one turnkey solution, reducing integration and operation complexity dramatically. This has matured over the years and what is available now from companies
like ours can do more than the traditional offerings we are competing with while offering more flexibility. Where I personally do not
like the term CiaB is the direct association with hardware. The really interesting move is to playout as a software service.
Cinegy’s Channel in a Box is completely software-based and can happily run in a virtualised/hosted environment. Not to use the word cloud
again — despite the fact that that is exactly what our enterprise customers are now doing — running virtualised CiaBs as VMs in VMWARE ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V clusters. This allows you to dynamically launch channels as needed in seconds and also provides 100% uptime thanks to the high-availability features a clustered VM environment provides. While this is perhaps beyond
the requirements of a small station, for playout centres it’s very interesting as it increases density to hundreds of channels per rack and makes deployment and management extremely easy. This will drive the costs of hosted playout down dramatically which again will make this an appealing option for a smaller station — instead of running their own playout
24/7 operation in the station it is compelling for field use — the OB truck or van may be replaced by a car or just someone with a backpack. With a top-end laptop you can today simultaneously record an HD SDI feed, edit it while recording, and play it out via WAN/IP link and/or SDI. CiaB solutions can equally be used for sport highlights playout (with trick mode/slomo), studio playout, news playout or clip jockeying. So for me the traditional video servers are the odd-balls these days that are inexplicably limited in what they can do. So if the question is: ‘Is there still a compelling reason to use traditional playout servers?’ — then the answer has to be a clear and resounding No. There is no technical reason to go with traditional playout servers. Reliability is on the same level for a while. Complexity? The traditional solutions are strung together with RS-422, SDI and a prayer and sometimes even frame accurate. The CiaB solutions are inherently frame accurate and require much less or no integration — so they either work or they don’t.
Another CiaB aspect that’s interesting is that any laptop can now become a playout server — thanks to Thunderbolt and USB3.0 also with HD SDI in/out
operations. This is not the future — this is happening now. Another aspect that’s
interesting with the CiaB concept is that any laptop can now become a playout server — thanks to Thunderbolt and USB3.0 also with HD SDI in/out. While this is nothing for
Financial reasons maybe?
Replacing traditional playout servers with a new integrated playout solution offering is often cheaper than the SLA for just one year for the existing playout. That’s just the playout server. If you still have separate automation, branding etc. — do the math!