NMOS

Video: M6 France – Master Control and Playout IP Migration

Posted on by Adam K

French broadcast company M6 Group has recently moved to an all-IP workflow, employing the SMPTE ST 2110 suite of standards for professional media delivery over IP networks. The two main playout channels and MCR have been already upgraded and the next few channels will be transitioned to the new core soon.

The M6 system comprises equipment from five different vendors (Evertz, Tektronix, Harmonic, Ross and TSL), all managed and controlled using the AMWA NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 specifications. Such interoperability is an inherent feature of SMPTE ST 2110 suite of standards allowing customers to focus on the operational workflows and flexibility that IP brings them. Centralised management and configuration of the system is provided through web interfaces which also allows for easy and automated addition of a new equipment.

Thanks to Software Defined Orchestration and intuitive touch screen interfaces information such as source paths, link bandwidth / status, and device details can be quickly accessed via a web GUI. As the system is based on IP network, it is possible to come in and out of fabric numerous times without the same costs implications that you would have in the SDI world. Every point of the signal chain can be easily visualised which enables broadcast engineers to maintain and configure the system with ease.

You can see the slides here.

Watch now!

Speaker

Slavisa Gruborovic
Solution Architect
Evertz Microsystems Inc.
Fernando Solanes
Director Solutions Engineering
Evertz Microsystems Inc.

 

Video: What’s New in NMOS? – A Tutorial on the Latest in Video over IP Control and Security

Posted on by Adam K

The Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS) have been developed to provide a control and management layer along side the SMPTE ST 2110 transport layer. The idea behind NMOS was to deliver an open specification to provide the software layers that abstract a lot of complexities of ST 2110 and make it easy to interface with any control system.

The NMOS family of specifications began with projects for Discovery & Registration, Device Connection Management and Network Control, but has grown to include many other important subjects such as Event & Tally, Audio Channel Mapping and Interoperable Security.

In this video, Jed Deame discusses the latest advancements including IS-08, IS-09, BCP-002, BCP-003 and IS-10. These additions allows NMOS to surpass the level of control provided in SDI while also adding a layer of security.

The following Interface Specifications and Best Current Practices are presented:

  • IS-04 (Registration and Discovery) – new features: support for GPI over Ethernet (IS-07) and authorisation signalling for security layers BCP-003-02
  • IS-05 (Connection Management) – new features: MQ Telemetry Transport and WebSocket Transport, support for supplementary externally defined parameters
  • IS-08 (Audio Mapping) – audio routing / shuffling facility
  • IS-09 (System Resources) – System ID, server priority, security with HTTPS support, advertisement of system resources such as RDS (Registration and Discovery Server)
  • BCP-002 (Grouping) – uses tag resources in IS-04 in order to achieve a natural groups of senders and receivers (e.g. to tie audio, video and metadata)
  • BCP-003-01 (Security) – uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) in order to encrypt communications between API servers and their clients
  • BCP-003-02 (Security) – covers client authorization for the NMOS APIs
  • IS-10 (Authorisation API) – accompanies the BCP-003-02 specification to restrict what users are authorized to change in an NMOS system (core technologies: PKI, HTTPS, REST, JSON, Oauth 2.0 and JWT)

The presentation finishes with the customer case study – secure KVM all over an IP network.

You can download the slides from here.

Watch now!

You might also be interested in the following videos we have published on The Broadcast Knowledge:

Speaker

Jed Deame
CEO
Nextera Video

Video: AMWA BCP 003 NMOS API Security

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Building security into your infrastructure is more and more important for broadcasters with many now taking very seriously a topic which, only 6 years ago, was only just being discussed. Attacks on broadcasters like TV5 Monde have brought into focus that it’s not just copmanies who have high value rights who are ripe for breach – attacking a broadcaster is a high impact way of getting your message accross.

We have seen how the internet, which was built on very open and trusting protocols, has struggled in recent times to keep abuse to a minimum and to implement security to keep data safe and to keep out unauthorised persons.

And so AMWA is looking at its recent specifcations to ensure there is a clear and interoperable way of implementing security. The benefit of IP should be that that as an industry we can benefit from the work of other industries before us and here, having based these specifications on HTTP interfaces, we can do exactly that. Just like sites on the internet can implemnt HTTPS, we, too use the same mechanism of security certificates and TLS (colloquially known as SSL) encryption to ensure that not only is our data encrypted but also that no one can impersonate anyone else on the network.

Simon Rankine from BBC R&D explains the work he has been part of in defining this secure interface which not only protects from mal-intentioned actors, but also offers some protection from accidental mistakes by staff.

Simon gives a good intorduction to not only how this is a benefit but also how the underlying mechanisms work which are just as applicable to the NMOS APIs as they are to general websites.

Speaker

Simon Rankine
Simon Rankine
Project Research Engineer,
BBC R&D

Video: ST 2110 – From Theory to Reality

Posted on by Adam K

Delivering an all-IP truck is no mean feat. tpc explains what they learnt, what went well and how they succeeded in delivering a truck which takes no longer to fire up than a traditional SDI truck.

A common question among people considering a move to IP is ‘do I need to?’ and ‘how can I get ready?’. Here at The Broadcast Knowledge we always say ‘find a small project, get it working, learn what goes wrong and then plan the one you really wanted to do.’ The Swiss broadcasting service provider ‘Technology and Production Centre’, known as ‘tpc’, has done just that.

tpc is currently working on the Metechno project – a large, all-IP news, sports and technology centre for Swiss radio and television. In order to acquire necessary experience with the SMPTE ST 2110 standard, tpc designed the UHD1 OB van ahead of time which has been used in TV production for 6 months now. In this video, Andreas Lattmann shares the vision of the Metechno Project and, critically, his experiences related to the design and use of the truck.

The UHD1 is a 24-camera OB van with all IP core based on Arista switches with non-blocking architecture. It is the equivalent of an 184-square UHD SDI system however, it can be expanded by adding additional line cards to network switches. The truck is format agnostic, supporting both HD and UHD formats in HDR and SDR. IP gateways are incorporated for SDI equipment.

The SMPTE ST 2110 specification separates video and audio into discrete essence streams which boosts efficiency and flexibility, but we hear in this talk that more attention to latency (lip-sync) is required compared to SDI systems. Andreas talks about the flexibility this truck provides with up-/down-conversion, colour-correction for any video plus how IP has enabled full flexibility in what can be routed to the multiviewer screens.

Andreas spends some time discussing redundancy and how IP enables full redundancy – an improvement over many SDI infrastructures and how SMPTE’s ST 2022-7 standard makes this possible.

The main GUI is based on a Lawo VSM control system which aims to deliver a familiar experience for operators who used to work in the SDI domain. Network training has been provided for all operators because troubleshooting has changed significantly with the introduction of essences over IP. This is not least because NMOS IS-04 and 05 standards were not mature enough during the design of the truck, so all IP connections had to be managed manually. With more than 50 thousand IP addresses in this system, AMWA’s NMOS IS-04 which manages discovery and registration and IS-05 which manages the setup and take-down of connections would have helped significantly in the lean management of the truck.

Lattmann emphasizes the importance of using open standards like SMPTE ST 2110 instead of proprietary solutions. That allows you to choose the best components and not rely on a single manufacturer.

The learning’s the Andreas presents us involve difficulties with PTP, IP training, the benefits of flexibility. From a video point of view, Andreas presents his experiences with HDR->SDR workflows, focussing in HDR and UHD.

Watch now!

Speaker

Andreas Lattmann Andreas Lattmann
CTO, Head of Planning & Projects
tpc Switzerland AG