In Broadcast - July 2014 - 64

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 33 - JULY 2014

N E W S

InMEDIA
The Changing Face Of Broadcast IT And Automation Systems Cont.
Shawn Maynard,
Florical Systems

"

...We're deﬁnitely
seeing less and less
of the traditional
automation with RS422
control cables with
hardware and much
more with IP control
and streaming

"

64

boxes with software offerings,"
said Jan Weigner Co-Owner and
Managing Director of Cinegy. "Some
of these vendors have embraced
the migration to IP or at least they
say so, some have real products
already, others not."
Weigner sees SDI being pushed to
the edge of the infrastructure map,
as all-IP designs sit at the core of
the broadcast infrastructure. "The
challenge is how to keep your
installed base of customers with
hardware boxes happy while you,
as a vendor, really need to start
providing a pure software-based
offering as quickly as possible. This
is not going to be a smooth journey
for many vendors.
"Mergers and acquisitions are
the symptom of that challenge
and many hardware vendors will

A multichannel automation schedule
monitoring screen from Imagine
Communications' ADC automation
software suite

disappear, as will most CiaB vendors
that sell hardware-based products."

Beyond The Box

MCR automation technology is
increasingly required to extend its
support to parts of the workﬂow
outside the MCR room. It's now
providing encoding for web
streaming, delegating functions
to ad or programme scheduling
or supporting distribution rights
management for second screen.
Pebble Beach Systems has
responded to the demands for
both linear and non-linear delivery
by providing an open API that allows
the system to 'see' the status of
upstream media preparation. "It
allows those upstream systems
to have a real-time view of what's

Pebble Beach Systems Marina
provides advanced playout and
distribution automation

happening on-air, on the automation
layer, such that they can be closely
coupled," said Gittins.
The automation system may be
used to initiate the web streaming
encode and to interact with the
encoder for stop/start, or pause/start
operations, according to Salyards.
"And with our recent acquisition
of Digital Rapids, we're looking
more and more into how a linear
automation system can interact
with a VOD or a web streaming
application," he said.
"Any broadcaster out there should
be actively working towards
multiscreen," commented Jennifer
Baisch, Senior Director of Product
Marketing at iStreamPlanet, a
company that focuses on live
encode, transcode, packaging
and publishing for multiscreen.
"We're really becoming a piece
of that broadcast workflow, as
broadcast engineers start to
view multiple screens as a musthave solution, in addition to the
workﬂows that they have in place
for traditional broadcast."
iStreamPlanet integrates into
the existing workﬂow, to extend
automation to live multiscreen
delivery. NBC Sports made use of
the company's ever evolving cloudbased live video workﬂow SaaS
(Software as a Service) during the
recent Sochi Olympics.
"In Vancouver, we had a team
of a dozen people on the ground
conﬁguring and managing racks of
equipment to do the encoding and
publishing of live video feeds," said
Baisch. "In Sochi, we had nobody

on-site in Russia, the feeds were
delivered to Las Vegas via IP on
a ﬁbre network. Because the endto-end workﬂow was in IP, it was
easier to automate and conﬁgure
those streams."
It's an exciting time for automation,
according to Salyards, who predicts
automation systems will continue
to be developed, albeit in different
and varied form. "We're headed
towards what we call 'event based
automation', which allows edgecasting and gets you into very hyperlocal or regional type of content
distribution."

Jason Salyards,
Imagine
Communications

"...We're headed
towards what we
call 'event based
automation', which
allows edge-casting

"

Meanwhile, Maynard declares
that in ten years, automation is
likely to be invisible. "It's going to
be so engrained in the workﬂow
of your business that it's really a
business process management tool
as opposed to independent systems.
"It's a sea change, as we're so
used to the hardware workﬂow. TV
Everywhere is popular today, well
we offer Automation Everywhere."

Grass Valley Features STRATUS Cloud-based Playout
A

t Broadcast Asia 2014 in
Singapore, the new Grass
Valley, now a Belden Brand,
featured GV STRATUS Playout.
GV STRATUS Playout is a truly
groundbreaking playout technology
that combines the efﬁciency and
ﬂexibility of cloud computing with
the performance and reliability of
an on-site solid-state playout server
- all on a single card. This cloudenabled Software as a Service
(SaaS) technology enables facilities
to regionalise channel content and

begin playout in minutes.
"This ingenious approach to
playout is unprecedented, and
we believe it is the future of rapid
deployment playout in our industry,"
said Stephen Wong, SVP, Asia
Paciﬁc, Grass Valley. "GV STRATUS
Playout simpliﬁes playout control
enabling new revenue generating
business models while lowering
operational costs."
GV STRATUS Playout works with
Grass Valley's Densité SSP-3801
solid-state playout card, which
enables broadcasters to
leverage the immense
ﬂexibility of the cloudenabled playout
c o n t ro l s y s t e m
with the security of
housing all media
GV STRATUS
Playout offers cloud
performance coupled
with on-site reliability
on a single card

content on-site.
Using high-grade media storage,
the module is easily conﬁgured and
installed. The card sits at the edge
of any network where it provides
frame-accurate playback and
displays still and animated logos and
high-quality pre-rendered graphics.
Wong added that "because GV
STRATUS Playout is a solid-state,
standalone card, there are no
moving parts to wear out. This not
only makes it very attractive in terms
of long-term performance, it is also
highly resilient to network outages.
The card stores 24 hours of playlists
and will continue with uninterrupted
playout, automatically updating
itself once network connectivity
is restored."
In vastly diverse cultural regions
such as Asia-Paciﬁc, regionalisation,
localisation and even hyperlocalisation is seen by many as
the holy grail of playout. All of
these are easily achieved with

GV STRATUS Playout, not just for
commercials, but for specialised
promotions and long-form
programming to cover blackouts.
With GV STRATUS Playout, costprohibitive dependence on satellite
bandwidth and audience speciﬁc
complex playout systems are no
longer concerns.
GV STRATUS Playout makes use
of Microsoft's Azure cloud "platformas-a-service," which is hosted in
Microsoft Data Centres, and is vastly
superior in terms of performance,
resilience and scalability to anything
that could be economically viable
within a broadcast facility.
All GV STRATUS Playout metadata
is stored within the local Microsoft
Data Centre and automatically
synchronised to a geo-redundant
data centre - making data supremely
redundant and unassailable.
"There is simply no more
compelling playout solution on the
market today," said Wong.
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