100GbE To Slash the Cost of Producing Live Television

New submitter danversj writes "I'm a Television Outside Broadcast Engineer who wants to use more IT and Computer Science-based approaches to make my job easier. Today, live-produced TV is still largely a circuit-switched system. But technologies such as 100 Gigabit Ethernet and Audio Video Bridging hold the promise of removing kilometres of cable and thousands of connectors from a typical broadcast TV installation. 100GbE is still horrendously expensive today — but broadcast TV gear has always been horrendously expensive. 100GbE only needs to come down in price just a bit — i.e. by following the same price curve as for 10GbE or 1GbE — before it becomes the cheaper way to distribute multiple uncompressed 1080p signals around a television facility. This paper was written for and presented at the SMPTE Australia conference in 2011. It was subsequently published in Content and Technology magazine in February 2012. C&T uses issuu.com to publish online so the paper has been re-published on my company's website to make it more technically accessible (not Flash-based)."

It will become affordable...

[jamesh]

It will become affordable right around the time 1080p is obsolete and replaced by 10Kp (or whatever is next), requiring 1TbE networking to handle the bandwidth...

Re:Why?

[forkazoo]

The latency problem i can understand, but that will be a problem regardless of compression or not.
Encoding and decoding will not add that much cost compared to the network.
Compressing/uncompressing only destroys the pic if its lossy. There are numerous lossless codecs that should do the trick and save tons of money in the process.

I know it isn't cool to read the headline anymore, but this is about production not watching. Yes, a frame of latency makes a big difference when you are *inside* the studio, and need to keep things sync'd to within less than a frame so that you can do live switching without flickers or delays. If you try to do live switching to take between two cameras, and you have a few frames of latency in the encoder of the sources, and the decoder in the switcher and the buffer in the switcher the sync the frames, etc., you can make the process of doing live Television appreciably worse than it is today, which isn't something anybody would spend money on. You can only sell new gear to people if the new system isn't worse than the old.

Re:It is going to be awhile

[kasperd]

Thus no one has an incentive to slash prices.

But then they have incentives to ramp up production.

10 GigE should be enough for most situations...

[quetwo]

In the last studio upgrade we did, we retrofitted everything with Ethernet -- 10G switches. Cameras are all ASI -> GigE (MPEG-2 Multicast), switchers, and final outs.

Uncompressed, at full rate, an ASI feed uses 380 MB/s. An uncompressed 1080p melted feed is 38 MB/s.

You need to do careful network planning, but remember these are switches -- you shouldn't see traffic you didn't request. Right now we usually have about 8 cameras, plus the mixer, plus the groomer, plus the ad-insert. It then goes right out via the internet (Internet2 -- FSN is also a partner so we can send right to them), and a satellite truck as a backup. Our plan next year is not to have the satellite tuck on site anymore.

This is for a live-sports studio that feeds about 300 cable / satellite providers, reaching about 73M homes.