Where is IP genuinely driving convergence between broadcast and pro AV today—and where is it still falling short?
What is the difference between broadcast, pro AV, movies, episodics, gaming, video calls or social media production other than (in some cases) scale? IP is not next-generation SDI, it’s a radical change to end-to-end media production, exchange and delivery. You can use it as a simple SDI replacement for connectivity but that wastes virtually all of its potential. As far back as 2002, IP-style connectivity was being thought through by some, but as the technology was nowhere near ready for the data, the workflows and connectivity benefits were being looked at. What’s a shame is that 20 years later we still haven’t changed many of the production ‘blocks’ but replaced BNC with RJ45 connectors!
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Which workflows are benefiting most from IP—audio, video, control, virtual production—and why?
ALL OF THEM! Forget the connection (WiFi, 5G, 6G, cable), they are just carriers and all will have a place. Device identification, acknowledgement, automated routing, timing (synchronisation) and fault analysis can all be achieved. Source to destination automation from a single radio mic to a single camera up to the 100s of send/receive devices on a major OB—what will change is planning, so something like circuit or TX/RX frequency being replaced by IP addresses!
Interoperability remains a sticking point. Are current standards (ST 2110, NDI, Dante, IPMX) enough, or are we still too fragmented?
Does it matter? We understand there are different reasons for an organisation to choose different protocols and technologies in either on-premises or services provider cloud style (or both) workflows. But we are seeing organisations like AMWA with the EBU doing work to act as glue or even totally agnostic processing. As a programme maker, I am only interested in cost, flexibility, speed and availability. I think we will see a lot more of AMWA NMOS-NDI style work until eventually it won’t matter! Will we really build a whole industry on a single protocol (as we did with SDI), then have yet another big bang change?
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What are the real-world challenges when deploying IP systems—latency, synchronisation, network complexity—and how are they being overcome?
The real challenge is knowledge. We could expect analogue engineers to move to SDI with very little re-skilling, but that’s not the case with IP. It’s just as big a step for broadcast systems engineers to go from SDI to IP as it is for IP engineers to go from systems to programme making. This will take time and just as with all radical changes, localised experts will appear before we see a general level of expertise.
Looking ahead, what’s the next critical step—whether that’s standards, the Media eXchange Layer, or something else—to make IP workflows truly seamless at scale?
There will be many ‘solutions’ but there are also many different requirements, each needing a solution, so do we need to have a single operating model or do we develop ways to merge multiple systems into “my” preferred operation? When we say “seamless”, what or who is it seamless for? You could say the most needed skill in early IP (as we are now) is creating fixes and patches code to allow connections between systems and devices. Later, could we see self-patching/repairing code-based agents sitting across the equivalent of today’s control rooms?
