The promised revisions to the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) Roadmap – crucial to the fast evolving era of networked media open interoperability – have thrust the term ‘dematerialised aspects’ into our lingo. The roadmap now leads with aspects around cloud-fitness and non-media specific IT.
The vital pathways for an industry demanding something to trust and consult required prescribed inputs from AMWA, the EBU, SMPTE and VSF. The original roadmap focused on virtualisation, but that is just one aspect of a rapidly changing media scene.
The bigger trend is facility creep beyond conventional structures, towards apps running on non-media specific IT kit.
Brad Gilmer, executive director of AMWA, observed: “While the partners were doing good work on our own prior to the JT-NM effort, the roadmap has helped immensely in co-ordinating the activities of the sponsors, and has served to increase end user confidence that we are working together towards a common goal – open interoperability using IT technology.
Dematerialised facilities are where people are headed in the mid-term.”
From the standards aspect we have the much-lauded SMPTE ST 2110 suite of tools for professional media over managed IP networks, plus the AMWA NMOS IS-04 discovery and registration and IS-05 connection management specs.
The meat includes the recently published Cloud Security for Media Companies (EBU R146), the promise of more flexible and efficient workflows, UHD support and mezzanine compression.
SMPTE director of engineering and standards Howard Lukk observed: “We hope that the roadmap continues to signal the industry on the expected timeline of the standards process. One of the keys is how we work with groups to bring specifications into the standards cycle.
“Tools are turning into standards, and this gives the industry confidence in the interchange points becoming stable,” he added.
