Filling the void before Video over IP

Posted: 17/01/2018

The Video industry has changed drastically in the last 10 years, 3D stereoscopic has come (and gone) and video resolutions have risen to 4K and beyond. As demands for providing video content for ‘every platform, everywhere’ reach a crescendo, digital content providers are challenged with achieving speed to market.
Video Over IP (VOIP) addresses the issue of remote access and speed to market without affecting the quality of the content or compromising the reliability of the brand. Video over IP allows video signals to be sent over standard network connections rather than dedicated Serial Digital infrastructure (SDI), making the solution more viable and cost-effective.
In Sports production, for example, where a single control room can have access to content from multiple venues, Video over IP provides a huge advantage in terms of flexibility, and reduces costs, as content can be streamed live from the source to a remote location for post-production. VOIP allows it to be widely adopted for media connectivity, for both uncompressed and lightly compressed video.
There is still progress to be made in establishing standards and making sure different systems can talk to each other effectively. Changing from a dedicated SDI infrastructure to Video over IP is a highly complex process, requiring the purchase of new hardware and installation of high bandwidth connectivity, often over fibre optic connections. In summary, it’s not at a ‘plug-and-play’ stage, and not a quick solution.
So, what can broadcasters and digital publishers do, without building new Video over IP capacities and skills from scratch? They can approach the challenge with Blackbird, which works over standard internet architecture and does not require a huge investment in new infrastructure.
Blackbird converts the full resolution media into a lightweight proxy at the venue/location, streaming content to remote users over a connection as low as 2Mb/s. Content can be logged, clipped, edited, captioned and published, all from one platform using a user-friendly web-based interface.
Full resolution (hi-res) content remains on servers at the venue, while a lightweight proxy resolution can be published to social media directly from the Blackbird video platform. Metadata is automatically created in the Blackbird platform and can be sent to legacy post-production systems for compliance and finishing.
Gain the competitive advantage of working remotely and collaboratively, whilst planning for the move to VOIP in the not too distant future.
Author – Neil Roberts, Solutions specialist