The Canadian company is actively researching how IP can be effectively applied to live production broadcasts. The premise from Ross is that live production facilities producing content such as news will be increasingly based on data centre technology because it promises the benefits of utilisation, automation, flexibility, scalability, resilience and even choice of business models.
The systems that unlock this promise do so by distributing production content as IP video and audio, virtualising software production applications and orchestrating production workloads over their lifecycle, said Ross.
At the Ross stand here at IBC, an entire news production workflow has been virtualised, making use of Ross DashBoard. It includes inception news rundown authoring and control, OverDrive production automation, Streamline
asset management and four channels of XPression motion graphics.
Its media control plane uses MOS, and AV content is transported as NDI.
The whole system deploys onto 2RU of COTS server and uses generic switches, to demonstrate a major increase in system density.
In the next phase, the orchestration will be extended to manage SDI-based systems such as logically partitioned production switchers and routers; and the IP video options will be augmented to offer ST-2110 in addition to NDI.
John Naylor, technology strategist, Ross Video, said: “From the work done so far, we contend that hybrid solutions will be commonplace, and will include existing SDI equipment, new software-defined hardware and fully virtualised applications.
It will require a new set of tools and open standards to deliver software-defined production.”
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