CBS Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

RIST is a protocol which allows for reliable streaming over lossy networks like the internet. Whilst many people know that much, they may not know more and may have questions. Today’s video aims to answer the most common questions. For a technical presentation of RIST, look no further than this talk and this article

Kieran Kunhya deals out the questions to the panel from the RIST Forum, RIST members and AWS. Asking:
Does RIST need 3rd party equipment?
Is there an open-source implementation of RIST?
Whether there are any RIST learning courses?
as well as why companies should use RIST over SRT.
RIST, we hear is based on RTP which is a very widely deployed technology for real-time media transport and is widely used for SMPTE 2022-2 and 6 streams, SMPTE 2110, AES67 and other audio protocols. So not only is it proven, but it’s also based on RFCs along with much of RIST. SRT, the panel says, is based on the UDT file transfer protocol which is not an RFC and wasn’t designed for live media transport although SRT does perform very well for live media.

“Why are there so many competitors in RIST?” is another common question which is answered by talking about the need for interoperability. Fostering widespread interoperability will grow the market for these products much more than it would with many smaller protocols. “What new traction is RIST getting?” is answered by David Griggs from AWS who says they are committed to the protocol and find that customers like the openness of the protocol and are thus willing to invest their time in creating workflows based on it. Adi Rozenberg lists many examples of customers who are using the technology today. You can hear David Griggs explain RIST from his perspective in this talk.

Other questions handled are the licence that RIST is available under and the open-source implementations, the latency involved in using RIST and whether it can carry NDI. Sergio explains that NDI is a TCP-based protocol so you can transmit it by extracting UDP out of it, using multicast or using a VizRT-tool for extracting the media without recompressing. Finally, the panel looks at how to join the RIST Activity Group in the VSF and the RIST Forum. They talk about the origin of RIST being in an open request to the industry from ESPN and what is coming in the upcoming Advanced Profile.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Rick Ackermans RIST AG Chair, Director of RF & Transmission Engineering, CBS Television
	David Griggs Senior Product Manager, Media Services, AWS Elemental
	Sergio Ammirata RIST AG Member, Chief Science Officer, SipRadius
	Adi Rozenberg RIST Forum Director AG Member, Co-Founder & CTO, VideoFlow
	Ciro Noronha RIST Forum President and AG Member EVP of Engineering, Cobalt Digital
	Paul Atwell RIST Forum Director, President, Media Transport Solutions
	Wes Simpson RIST AG Co-Chair, President & Founder, LearnIPvideo.com
	Kieran Kunhya RIST Forum Director Founder & CEO, Open Broadcast Systems

Delivering high scale in streaming really exposes the weaknesses of every point of your workflow, so even those of us who are not streaming at maximum scale, there are many lessons to be learnt. CBS Sports Digital delivered the Super Bowl using the principles of ‘practice, practice, practice’, keeping the solution as simple as possible and making mitigation of problems primary to solving them.

Taylor Busch tells walks us through their solution explaining how it supported their key principles and highlighting the technology used. Starting with Acquisition, he covers the SDI fibre delivery to a backup facility as well as the AWS Direct Connect links for their Elemental Live encoders. The origin servers were in two different regions and both received data from both sets of encoders.

CBS used ‘Output locking’ which ensures that the TS segments are all aligned even across different encoders which is done by respecting the timecode in the SDI and helps in encoder failover situations. QVBR encoding is a method of encoding up to a quality level rather than simply saying ‘7000 kbps’. QVBR provides a more efficient use a bandwidth since in the situations where a scene doesn’t require a lot of bandwidth, it won’t be sent. This variability, even if you run in capped mode to limit the bandwidth of particularly complex scenes, can look like a failing encoder to some systems, so the fact this is now in ‘VBR’ mode, needs to be understood by all the departments and companies who monitor your feed.

Advertising is famously important for the Super Bowl, so Taylor gives an overview of how they used the CableLabs ESAM protocol and SCTE to receive information about and trigger the adverts. This combined SCTE-104, ESAM and SCTE-35 as we’ll as allowing clients to use VAST for tracking. Extra caching was provided by Fastly’s Media Shield which tests for problems with manifests, origin servers and encoders. This fed a Multi-CDN setup using 4 CDNs which could be switched between. There is a decision point for requests to determine which CDN should answer.

Taylor then looks at the tools, such as Mux’s dashboard, which they used to spot problems in the system; both NOC-style tools and multiviewers. They set up three war rooms which looked at different aspects of the system, connectivity, APIs etc. This allowed them to focus on what should be communicated keeping ‘noise’ down to give people the space they needed to do their work at the same time as providing the information required. Taylor then opens up to questions from the floor.

Watch now!
Speaker