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100GbE To Slash the Cost of Producing Live Television
New submitter danversj writes "I'm a Television Outside Broadcast Engineer who wants to use more IT and Computer Science-based approaches to make my job easier. Today, live-produced TV is still largely a circuit-switched system. But technologies such as 100 Gigabit Ethernet and Audio Video Bridging hold the promise of removing kilometres of cable and thousands of connectors from a typical broadcast TV installation. 100GbE is still horrendously expensive today — but broadcast TV gear has always been horrendously expensive. 100GbE only needs to come down in price just a bit — i.e. by following the same price curve as for 10GbE or 1GbE — before it becomes the cheaper way to distribute multiple uncompressed 1080p signals around a television facility. This paper was written for and presented at the SMPTE Australia conference in 2011. It was subsequently published in Content and Technology magazine in February 2012. C&T uses issuu.com to publish online so the paper has been re-published on my company's website to make it more technically accessible (not Flash-based)."
In the last studio upgrade we did, we retrofitted everything with Ethernet -- 10G switches. Cameras are all ASI -> GigE (MPEG-2 Multicast), switchers, and final outs.
Uncompressed, at full rate, an ASI feed uses 380 MB/s. An uncompressed 1080p melted feed is 38 MB/s.
You need to do careful network planning, but remember these are switches -- you shouldn't see traffic you didn't request. Right now we usually have about 8 cameras, plus the mixer, plus the groomer, plus the ad-insert. It then goes right out via the internet (Internet2 -- FSN is also a partner so we can send right to them), and a satellite truck as a backup. Our plan next year is not to have the satellite tuck on site anymore.
This is for a live-sports studio that feeds about 300 cable / satellite providers, reaching about 73M homes.