In many ways, the blended technological landscape may be the product of intersecting technology adoption curves and Gartner hype cycles.
By Nicolas Hans, Partner, Middle East, Broadcast Solutions GmbH
This year’s edition of IBC once again underscored our industry’s appetite for innovation. It also showcased how broadcasters are adopting, crossbreeding and integrating new technologies into their legacy tech stack. The upshot is a hybrid world where competing techs coexist and moderation prevails.
Consider the growing acceptance of SMPTE-2110 in both production and playout environments. Portrayed as the next step towards a fully digital landscape, it seeks to swap legacy baseband routers specifically built for the broadcast industry with Ethernet switches transplanted from IT data centres. Connectivity to legacy equipment is ensured via gateways that convert SDI video signals to multicast IP data streams and vice versa.
Consider the growing acceptance of SMPTE-2110 in both production and playout environments. Portrayed as the next step towards a fully digital landscape, it seeks to swap legacy baseband routers specifically built for the broadcast industry with Ethernet switches transplanted from IT data centres. Connectivity to legacy equipment is ensured via gateways that convert SDI video signals to multicast IP data streams and vice versa.
The migration to the cloud is going through a similar transition. Major hyper-scale cloud vendors like AWS, Google and Microsoft have traditionally advocated the merits of exclusive cloud set-ups – no more. Microsoft announced over the summer that it will close its Azure Media Services by June 2024, and AWS and Google emphasise hybrid architectures that leverage AWS Outpost and Google Anthos-managed solutions or integrate on-demand cloud processing with on-premises S3 storage systems.
Software-based solutions are also going hybrid. When Grass Valley initially introduced its Advanced Media Processing Platform (AMPP), the spiel was that the future would be containerised software running on Kubernetes and hosted in the data centres of public cloud service providers or on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers sourced from third-party equipment manufacturers. This year at IBC, the narrative shifted. Grass Valley started promoting its own GV AMPP cloud and introduced AMPP Grid compute nodes to facilitate hybrid or on-premises deployments. In doing so, it adapted to a market where projects have shown that many broadcasters want sovereign cloud solutions (think G42 in the UAE or Saudi National Cloud in KSA) or crave hybrid ones that leverage hardware sourced directly from a single solution vendor.
Wireless transmissions may be going down a similar path. 5G was the talk of the floor. Haivision, LiveU and TVU demonstrated field encoders that leverage these new public networks. Next-generation private wireless platforms are finally making it out of the labs. The BBC won its IBC award for deploying the world’s largest pop-up 5G stand-alone non-public network to cover the coronation of King Charles. The IRT B<>COM technology research and innovation centre in Rennes, France, announced the commercialisation of its software-based platform to facilitate the creation and management of private cellular networks operating in band 77 of the new 5G radio spectrum. The future may again be hybrid, with 5G connectivity combined with new self-healing, self-forming wireless mesh networks or low-Earth-orbiting (LEO) satellite uplinks such as Starlink or OneWeb.
In many ways, this blended technological landscape may be the product of intersecting technology adoption curves and Gartner hype cycles. As broadcasters move beyond the peak of inflated expectations for a specific technology and navigate the trough of disillusionment, they explore alternative solutions. Stacking multiple technologies might be the key to ascending the slope of enlightenment … And this was the scenario even before the surge in generative, cognitive and multimodal AI services.
