The delivery of IP broadcast workflows is not always as simple as it appears to be. Nikolaos Katsampekis, Product Owner at Pebble Control, advocates adopting the IS-12 Control Protocol to streamline architects' tasks and simplify the delivery of an IP broadcast workflow.
While it is tempting to think that IP workflows are already mature within the industry, there remain definite hurdles to their adoption and implementation. Interoperability, which we can define as the ability of an application or a device to interact meaningfully and exchange information with another separately developed application or device, is not as commonplace nor as seamless as it needs to be.
This is a problem, as broadcast workflows, while exhibiting commonalities across many organisations, inevitably have a bespoke element as they are adapted to each media organisation’s individual requirements. For example, broadcast facilities often seek to tailor ingested material to specific formats for in-house processing, before then having to reformat them again to meet the needs of other facilities downstream in the chain.
True, there are sophisticated platforms that provide an end-to-end service, including an increasing number being established in the cloud, but these have disadvantages. They tend to be costly and restrictive in terms of toolsets, risk delivering poor performance somewhere in the chain, and can also introduce multiple single points of failure.
In an ideal world, the system architects would pick devices that offer ‘best’ features at a balanced cost. They’d also choose devices that provide greater flexibility in ‘personas’ and have accommodating licensing and expansion abilities. The ideal system can therefore feature many different flavours of devices from many different vendors, with even the same vendors offering different versions or variants.
However, the lack of interoperability between devices currently introduces challenges for system architects. They know that Workflow Component A will talk reliably to Workflow Component C, even though Workflow Component B is actually the best-in-class and the most favoured option.
Fortunately, there is plenty of work being undertaken to solve interoperability issues and make the truly open sandbox dream a genuine reality. The Advanced Media Workflow Association’s Networked Media Open Specifications (AMWA, NMOS) are a set of open and free-of-charge specifications published by the organisation. These effectively enable interoperability between media devices in an IP infrastructure.
NMOS specifications cover a range of applications, data models and interfaces, but the one we want to focus on here is NMOS Open Interface Specification IS-12. While it is still a work in progress and not available yet, it will play a key role in simplifying current IP workflow architectures.
IS-12 describes a standard way of exposing the different NMOS Control models on a device to the network, which can then be interacted with in turn by the NMOS Broadcast Controller. This software application is designed to discover, connect, control and in general manage resources from multiple vendors. In short, IS-12 makes interoperability easier by providing a robust method of linking different ecosystem elements together and making sure each one can talk to the other.
As a result, system architects no longer have to juggle complexity with expedience. Rather than every device in a workflow being represented by a different vendor-specific protocol and control application – with all the resource costs associated not only with keeping track of the integration but also making sure they don’t drift over time and cause issues – under IS-12 they can have a more simplified deployment. Indeed, by adopting the NMOS IS-12 Control Protocol together with the well-established IS-04 and IS-05 APIs and the associated Best Current Practices documents, they can have a system that requires simply one control protocol and one control application.
What’s more, adding a new device or replacing a failed one requires absolutely no additional development efforts to discover, interrogate and extract control parameters. Time and cost for IP deployment and system maintenance and evolution are dramatically reduced as a result.
Some may question the need for another industry control protocol, but the need in the industry for long-term stability by underwriting interoperability with open protocols and specifications, rather than proprietary ones, is very real. The involvement of both users and vendors in AMWA ensures a holistic, real-world approach to continued development, which also benefits from current and future JT-NM bench-testing activities. The hope is that its wider adoption will help to bring down barriers normally found with the exchange of information between vendors, simplifying and speeding up the deployment of end user workflows and the transition to IP as it does.
