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)."

Comments

There is another issue and it is a constant one

[SmallFurryCreature]

Replacement tech rarely catches up. 1080p signal? Please, that is so last year. 4k is the new norm. No TV's for it yet? Actually, they are already on sale which means that if you are not recording your repeatable content right now in 4k, you will have a hard time selling it again in the future. That is why some smart people recorded TV shows they hoped to sell again and again on film and not video-tape. Because film has a "wasted" resolution in the days of VHS video tapes but when DVD and now Blu-ray came out, these shows can simply be re-scanned from the original footage and voila, something new to flog to the punters.

I don't know how much data a 100GbE link can truly handle but the fact is that trying to catch up to currect tech means by the time you are finished, you are obsolete. the 4k standard created by the Japanese (and gosh doesn't that say a lot about the state of the west) isn't just about putting more pixels on a screen it is about all the infrastructure needed to create such content. And you better be ready for it now because if you are not, you will be left behind by everyone else.

The future may not be now, but it sure needs to have been planned for yesterday.