20 TVBEurope News & Analysis
www.tvbeurope.com June2013
“Files are the wrong abstraction for our industry”
The internet of frames
One of the most startling pronouncements at NAB this year was that we are wrong to think in terms of files, and we should instead consider “the internet of frames based on the fundamental concepts of the internet”. Dick Hobbs talked to Quantel’s senior software architect, Richard Cartwright, the developer behind this radical concept
“FILES ARE the wrong abstraction for our industry,” said Richard Cartwright. “They do not work well with large amounts of data. The IT industry is moving towards cloud-based storage of blocks of data.” We are all agreed that one of the critical issues limiting broadcast uptake of cloud solutions is that it is ill-suited to the large files with which we have to deal. But what is the alternative? The Quantel proposal is that our module should be the frame, not the whole piece of content. It certainly makes for more manageable files to ship to and from the cloud, but how does it work in real world broadcasting? “SDI is a streaming format. HTTP is a streaming format. So
why do we need to move files in advance just to work with them?” he asked. “HTTP allows us to pull material, so we can use it to create just-in-time production.” The internet of frames is based on the fundamental concepts of the internet, making it infinitely scalable and dependent upon relationships between files. Just as calling up a web page results in a chain of links — to graphics and to related pages — being implemented, so calling up a video frame would also bring up its links. Those links might be the same frame at different resolutions, or the next frame in the sequence.
Quantel suggests that “this
approach eliminates the need for complex media asset
URL, and that frame file contains all the sequential, rendering, synchronisation, descriptive and creative information it requires.
Richard Cartwright at NAB: “We just need a different identity model. We should not be bound to files, we should be bound to relationships”
management systems: every frame inherently knows its relationship to every other
associated frame”. In this new vision, each frame is an individual unit, with its own
Moving away from the content factory approach Although Richard Cartwright is an IT professional by training he has spent his career in broadcasting, including a spell with the BBC. He clearly understands that, if the internet of frames is going to be more than a curiosity and a debating point it needs to be available to a broad range of equipment, which implies standardisation. He suggests that the AS-02 MXF file format developed by AMWA is an ideal open basis for the concept.
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