Virtuosa, the EU-funded project exploring 5G and virtualisation in broadcast production, has completed the second stage of its IP production project.
The purpose of the project is to demonstrate how 5G can be combined with virtualisation concepts to enable broadcasters to produce live content (such as sports or music coverage) more efficiently and cost-effectively across locations, to meet growing consumer demand.
In phase two, the project’s participants successfully transferred the multi-vendor IP production environment built in the first phase, to a three-site WAN environment in Germany – demonstrating a multi-site, all-IP networking of TV studios.
This phase lays the foundation for the final part of the project, which will add 5G connectivity to the production environment.
For the second part of the project, a WAN connection was established between several German broadcasters’ production facilities: the ARD Sternpunkt in Frankfurt as the MCR/Main hub, and WDR in Cologne and SWR in Baden-Baden as “remote locations”.
The basic structure of all locations consisted of a spin-leaf network topology, controlled and monitored by a separate SDN/NMOS controller. In addition, the controllers were federated so that resources (such as equipment) could be shared between locations.
Each location also had SDI/IP adaption to connect SDI equipment to the IP network, with the video transported between locations using JPEG XS compression.
The project’s participants included Nevion, Mellanox Technologies and LOGIC media solutions. LOGIC, which integrated the system, also performed tests to establish the latency between the locations was satisfactory for live production.
