Live Production

Video: 5G Technology

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

5G seems to offer so much, but there is a lot of nuance under the headlines. Which of the features will telcos actually provide? When will the spectrum become available? How will we cope with the new levels of complexity? Whilst for many 5G will simply ‘work’, when broadcasters look to use it for delivering programming, they need to look a few levels deeper.

In this wide-ranging video from the SMPTE Toronto Section, four speakers take us through the technologies at play and they ways they can be implemented to cut through the hype and help us understand what could actually be achieved, in time, using 5G technology.

Michael J Martin is first up who covers topics such as spectrum use, modulation, types of cells, beam forming and security. Regarding spectrum, Michael explains that 5G uses three frequency bands, the sub 1GHz spectrum that’s been in use for many years, a 3Ghz range and a millimetre range at 26Ghz.

“It’s going to be at least a decade until we get 5G as wonderful as 4G is today.”

Michael J Martin
Note that some countries already use other frequencies such as 1.8GHz which will also be available.The important issue is that the 26Ghz spectrum will typically not be available for over a year, so 5G roll-out starts in some of the existing bands or in the 3.4Ghz spectrum. A recurring theme in digital RF is the use of OFDM which has long been used by DVB and has been adopted by ATSC 3.0 as their modulation, too. OFDM allows different levels of robustness so you can optimise reach and bandwidth.

Michael highlights a problem faced in upgrading infrastructure to 5G, the amount of towers/sites and engineer availability. It’s simply going to take a long time to upgrade them all even in a small, dense environment. This will deal with the upgrade of existing large sites, but 5G provides also for smaller cells, (micro, pico and femto cells). These small cells are very important in delivering the millimetre wavelength part of the spectrum.

Network Slicing
Source: Michael J. Martin, MICAN Communications

We look at MIMO and beam forming next. MIMO is an important technology as it, effectively, collects reflected versions of the transmitted signals and processes them to create stronger reception. 5G uses MIMO in combination with beam forming where the transmitter itself electronically manipulates the transmitter array to focus the transmission and localise it to a specific receiver/number of receivers.

Lastly, Michael talks about Network Slicing which is possibly one of the most anticipated features of 5G by the broadcast community. The idea being that the broadcaster can reserve its own slice of spectrum so when sharing an environment with 30,000 other receivers, they will still have the bandwidth they need.

Our next speaker is Craig Snow from Huawei outlines how secondary networks can be created for companies for private use which, interestingly, partly uses separate frequencies from public network. Network slicing can be used to separate your enterprise 5G network into separate networks fro production, IT support etc. Craig then looks at the whole broadcast chain and shows where 5G can be used and we quickly see that there are many uses in live production as well as in distribution. This can also mean that remote production becomes more practical for some use cases.

Craig moves on to look at physical transmitter options showing a range of sub 1Kg transmitters, many of which have in-built Wi-Fi, and then shows how external microwave backhaul might look for a number of your buildings in a local area connecting back to a central tower.

Next is Sayan Sivanathan who works for Bell Mobility and goes in to more detail regarding the wider range of use cases for 5G. Starting by comparing it to 4G, highlighting the increased data rates, improved spectrum efficiency and connection density of devices, he paints a rosy picture of the future. All of these factors support use cases such as remote control and telemetry from automated vehicles (whether in industrial or public settings.)  Sayan then looks at the deployment status in the US, Europe and Korea. He shows the timeline for spectrum auction in Canada, talks through photos of  5G transmitters in the real world.

Global Mobile Data Traffic (Exabytes per month)
Source: Ericsson Mobility Report, Nov 2019

Finishing off today’s session is Tony Jones from MediaKind who focuses in on which 5G features are going to be useful for Media and Entertainment. One is ‘better video on mobile’. Tony picks up on a topic mentioned by Michael at the beginning of the video: processing at the edge. Edge processing, meaning having compute power at the closest point of the network to your end user allows you to deliver customised manifest and deal with rights management with minimal latency.

Tony explains how MediaKind worked with Intel and Ericsson to deliver 5G remote production for the 2018 US Open. 5G is often seen as a great way to make covering golf cheaper, more aesthetically pleasing and also quicker to rig.

The session ends with a Q&A

Watch now!
Speakers

Michael J Martin Michael J Martin
MICAN Communications
Blog: vividcomm.com
Tony Jones Tony Jones
Principal Technologist
MediaKind Global
Craig Snow Craig Snow
Enterprise Accounts Director,
Huawei
Sayan Sivanathan Sayan Sivanathan
Senior Manager – IoT, Smart Cities & 5G Business Development
Bell Mobility

Video: RIST: Enabling Remote Work with Reliable Live Video Over Unmanaged Networks

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Last week’s article on RIST, here on The Broadcast Knowledge, stirred up some interest about whether we view RIST as being against SRT & Zixi, or whether it’s an evolution thereof. Whilst the talk covered the use of RIST and the reasons one company chose to use it, this talk explains what RIST achieves in terms of features showing that it has a ‘simple’ and ‘main’ profile which bring different features to the table.

Rick Ackermans is the chair of the RIST Activity Group which is the group that develops the specifications. Rick explains some of the reasons motivating people to look at the internet and other unmanaged networks to move their video. The traditional circuit-based contribution and distribution infrastructure on which broadcasting relied has high fixed costs. Whilst this can be fully justifiable for transmitter links, though still expensive, for other ad-hoc circuits you are paying all the time for something which is only occasionally used, satellite space in the C-band is reducing squeezing people out. And, of course, remote working is much in the spotlight so technologies like RIST which don’t have a high latency (unlike HLS) are in demand.

RIST manages to solve many of the problems with using the internet such as protecting your content from theft and from packet loss. It’s a joint effort between many companies including Zixi and Haivision. The aim is to create choice in the market by removing vendor bias and control. Vendors are more likely to implement an open specification than one which has ties to another vendor so this should open up the market creating more demand for this type of solution.

In the next section, we see how RIST as a group is organised and who it fits in to the Video Services Forum, VSF. We then look at the profiles available in RIST. A full implementation aims at being a 3-layer onion with the ‘Simple Profile’ in the middle. This has basic network resilience and interoperability. On top of that, the ‘Main Profile’ is built which adds encryption, authentication and other features. The future sees an ‘Enhanced Profile’ which may bring with it channel management.

Rick then dives down into each of these profiles to uncover the details of what’s there and explain the publication status. The simple profile allows full RTP interoperability for use as a standard sender, but also adds packet recovery plus seamless switching. The Main profile introduces the use of GRE tunnels where a single connection is setup between two devices. Like a cable, multiple signals can then be sent down the cable together. From an IT perspective this makes life so much easier as the number of streams is totally transparent to the network so firewall configuration, for example, is made all the simpler. However it also means that by just running encryption on the tunnel, everything is encrypted with no further complexity. Encryption works better on higher bitrate streams so, again, running on the aggregate has a benefit than on each stream individually. Rick talks about the encryption modes with DTLS and Pre-shared Key being available as well as the all important, but often neglected, step of authenticating – ensuring you are sending to the endpoint you expected to be sending to.

The last part of the talk covers interoperability, including a comparison between RIST and SRT. Whilst there are many similarities, Rick claims RIST can cope with higher percentages of packet loss. He also says that 2022-7 doesn’t work with SRT, though The Broadcast Knowledge is aware of interoperable implementations which do allow 2022-7 to work even through SRT. The climax of this section is explaining the setup of the RIST NAB demo, a multi-vendor, international demo which proved the reliability claims. Rick finishes by examining some case studies and with a Q&A.

Watch now!
Speakers

Merrick Ackermans Rick Ackermans
MVA Broadcast Consulting
RIST Activity Group Chair

Video: News in the New Norm

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Whilst television marches on despite the pandemic, whilst not to overlook the decimated sports broadcasters, the mantra is ‘the show must go on’ so everyone has been trying to find ways to make TV production safe, practical yet still good! There is so many practical issues behind the camera from the typical packed OB trucks to simple bathroom sharing in the office which needs to be considered. In this video, we hear from BBC News explaining how they have managed to reshape their production to keep the news reaching the public.

“It’s hard to do your job in these circumstances.”

Morwen Williams

Morwen Williams, Head of UK News Operations at the BBC, describes the news workflows that have been created to make the news work. The term ‘Zoom workflow’ is in the fore, in the same way as a ‘Dropbox workflow’ has, perhaps forever, changed many file-based workflows, for live production a ‘Zoom workflow’ is the same. Though Morwen is quick to point out the work is as much technological as practical with the need for ‘long poles’ to ensure social distancing for sound engineers and the like. Workflows have had to remove roles, such as vision mixing, or move people to otherwise spare galleries.

Morwen explains that within the mobile journalism team, there was a pilot last year to test how well an iPhone X would be able to capture real packages which had some good results which ran on the national news. This is just one example of how the technological groundwork to enable mobile journalism during this crisis was already being laid.

Meeting virtually has its advantages, we hear, because when you have a lot of staff physical space is hard to acquire at the best of times. Since attendance can never be 100%, it’s better to have meetings more frequently to give people a better chance of attending some. Whilst this is certainly no replacement for physically meeting with people, it is likely to be retained when that is again possible.

Robin Pembrooke then takes some time to explain the shifts in production that he’s seen. All of the digital teams are now working from home. 15,000 people went from the offices to working from home which was a fraught transition but with no major outages. Radio shows are often now being presented and run by the presenter themselves from home. Talkback now takes many forms whether that be WhatsApp or other more broadcast-focused talkback-over-broadband products.

Watch now!
Speakers

Morwen Williams Morwen Williams
Head of UK Operations,
BBC News
Robin Pembrooke Robin Pembrooke
Director, News Product and Systems,
BBC News

Video: RIST and Open Broadcast Systems

Posted on by Adam K

RIST is a streaming protocol which allows lossy networks such as the internet to be used for critical streaming applications. Called Reliable Internet Stream Transport, it uses ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) retransmission technology to request any data that is lost by the network, creating reliable paths for video contribution.

In this presentation, Kieran Kunhya from Open Broadcast Systems explains why his company has chosen RIST protocol for their software-based encoders and decoders. Their initial solution for news, sports and linear channels contribution over public internet were based on FEC (Forward Error Correction), a technique used for controlling errors in transmission by sending data in a redundant way using error-correcting code. However, FEC couldn’t cope with large burst losses, there was limited interoperability and the implementation was complex. Protecting the stream by sending the same feed over multiple paths and/or sending a delayed version of the stream on the same path, had a heavy bandwidth penalty. This prompted them, instead, to implement an ARQ technique based on RFC 4585 (Extended RTP Profile for Real-time Transport Control Protocol-Based Feedback), which gave them functionality quite similar to the basic RIST functionality.

Key to the discussion, Kieran explains why they decided not to adopt the SRT protocol. As SRT is based file transfer protocol, it’s difficult or impossible to add features like bonding, multi-network and multi-point support which were available in RIST from day one. Moreover, RIST has a large IETF heritage from other industries and is vendor-independent. In Kieran’s opinion, SRT will become a prosumer solution (similar to RTMP, now, for streaming) and RIST will be the professional solution (analogous to MPEG-2 Transport Streams).

Different applications for the RIST protocol are discussed, including 24/7 linear channels for satellite uplink from playout, interactive (two-way) talking heads for news, high bitrate live events and reverse vision lines for monitoring purposes. Also, there is a big potential for using RIST in cloud solutions for live broadcast production workflows. Kieran hopes that more broadcasters will start using spin-up and spin-down cloud workflows, which will help save space and money on infrastructure.

What’s interesting, Open Broadcast Solutions are not currently interested in RIST Main Profile (the main advantages of this profile are support for encryption, authentication and in-band data). Kieran explains that to control devices in remote locations you need some kind of off-the-shelf VPN anyway. These systems provide encryption and NAT port traversal, so the problem is solved at a different layer in the OSI model and this gives customers more control over the type of encryption they want.

Watch now!

Speaker

Kieran Kunhya Kieran Kunhya
Founder and CEO,
Open Broadcast Systems