Video over IP, in the sense that’s used in film and television, sometimes feels like a newer idea than it really is. That might be because the high-end, uncompressed ST 2110 standard took a while to finalize, or because of its rather forward-looking demands on IT infrastructure, both of which made a quick uptake less feasible than many might have preferred. The compressed alternatives might be a reaction to that—but alternatives inevitably mean choices with profound implications.
“I think the original promise was that if you go IP, you save money” says Axel Kern, senior director, Cloud and Infrastructure Solutions at Lawo. “Pretty quickly the industry confirmed the opposite. Investing in switches is definitely not saving you money [and] you have to deal with the complexity and abstraction of IP.”
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With that in mind, Kern contends, considering ST 2110 to be a direct replacement for SDI is missing the point. “That wasn’t the original promise—it [offers] higher agility and significantly higher flexibility of doing things. Now, with IBC 2024 coming, there are many options where you can really see flexibility that’s not possible on an SDI backbone.”
Kern suggests that the circumstances of specific installations tend to suggest an approach. “if you’re a truck owner, there is a decision between baseband and IP. If you’re a facility, you have this option to go IP and if it’s a ‘brownfield’ approach, where you take part of your facility… brownfield would allow you to go IP and test it out. Greenfield approaches would go IP full stop. The other topic you have to consider is how much of the gear you’re putting in your truck can be found with purely SDI capabilities.”
Somewhat-compressed alternatives allow facilities to sidestep the need for extremely expensive networks, as Kern says. “We see this when people use NDI or even SRT [Secure Reliable Transport] over the wild internet to connect facilities and do remote production,” he said. “This is the logical consequence of things like NDI, which are still high quality but for a fraction of the bandwidth.”
Involving the public internet makes cloud resources more available, though there’s recently been caution over the sheer bandwidth of video in circumstances where cloud providers charge per unit data leaving the network.
“The egress costs on cloud are sometimes outweighing the inventory cost you would have going your own way,” Kern adds. “Doing a like-for-like in the cloud is not the way forward. What we look for is whether we can make use of the technology the cloud brings us, microservices and software-as-a-service applications which you can spin up on commercial, off the shelf IT gear.”
“We introduced video over IP a long, long, long time before it became a standard,” says Edgar Shane, general manager, Engineering and Product Development for JVC. “We integrated [it] into video cameras well before the infrastructure was ready. Most of the stuff I see on a daily basis today is stuff we’ve been doing for years.”
JVC’s Connected Cam architecture handles video at modest bandwidths, making wireless and public networks a plausible alternative to costlier modes of transport. The software-definability of the camera’s encoder also offered a degree of future-proofing.
We introduced video over IP a long, long, long time before it became a standard."
Edgar Shane, JVC
“It used to be that you had to have your camera and an IP encoder separately,” Shane says. “So, we integrated IP encoders into the cameras… enabling NDI in those cameras is easy, because we already have the encoder built in. On our cameras today you can select NDI or SRT, which is still needed when you send video over the internet.”
The explosive success of NDI might suggest an industry still cautious about the bandwidth demands of ST 2110, though Shane is clear about the different intent. “[2110] is pretty demanding of IP infrastructure,” he said. “You need to have minimum latency and precise switching… but it’s for a different audience. If you’re routing the whole house for broadcast it absolutely makes sense.”
At the higher end, though, even NDI can begin to demand more than an average office network. “NDI exists in two formats,” Shane says. “There’s full NDI, which is 180 Mbps, then there’s NDI HX2 and HX3 which is only 20-30 Mbps. This is important because customers are using standard gigabit Ethernet and people are saying they can have several cameras. [But ] for full NDI, people are putting in 10-gigabit networks.”
Economies of scale in the IT market seem likely to make ST 2110 steadily easier. But as Shane relates, the brute force approach of more bandwidth is just one solution in a world with ever more CPU horsepower.
“Cameras evolve,” Shane says. “The front end with the lens and sensor evolves less because it’s traditional. Newer sensors have more sensitivity and 4K and beyond, but we’re exploring better codecs. HEVC allows us to send video with lower bitrate and higher quality. We’re also exploring AI, because our latest PTZ cameras feature object tracking. They can recognize human beings and you can select which person out of three, four, five people.”
Sony, too, describes a combined approach. “In broad strokes, IP and 2110 have become pretty common within broadcast, live production,” says Deon LeCointe, director of Networked Solutions at Sony Electronics’ Imaging Products & Solutions. “And that’s not just 2110—we find a lot of our customers are using 2110, NDI... some people have started using SRT.”
LeCointe concurs that costs remain a bugbear at the high end. “From where I sit, 2110 is being sold as a premium over SDI. SDI has been around for decades. The cost to build the chips is lower, the cost to build a product that can support 2110 is higher.” Even so, he predicts, the finances seem likely to ease naturally. “The cost of COTS equipment is coming down… we’re in a space that moves forward much faster than the broadcast industry does.”
“What’s new,” LeCointe says, “is people focusing on how to leverage IP. We can add 5G live production, private 5G or even in the future public IP… there’s a potential for 5G to be leveraged by smaller networks and vendors as well to get from camera to a control room to a broadcast head end.”
Sony’s approach combines purpose-built hardware with software-based solutions—something video over IP was always intended to facilitate. “From a hardware perspective,” LeCointe concludes, “cameras, switchers, and monitors all have 2110. We have been really pushing the envelope on 5G, we introduced our new RPU-7 with the NXL-ME80, which is a little box that can do eight channels of video. Nevion is a software solution that has visibility across your entire media environment, to ensure that media flows get from sources to their destinations.”
Craig Heffernan, UK technical sales director, describes a considered approach. “We looked at how everything had settled in the IP market… and decided that 2110 was the route we wanted to go, in comparison to NDI or an alternative. It lets us do what we do best, which is to put some customization into it. We can have Blackmagic connected technologies but also be open enough to bring in third parties.”
The company’s key innovation is a codec that handles high-resolution, high-frame-rate material on 10-gigabit networks. “We’re compliant in terms of how 2110 works, but within that is the Blackmagic IP10 codec, which for us replaces TICO… we needed to get 2160p at 50 and 60 frames into a 10-gigabit space, with headroom. We wanted it to be entirely lossless and we wanted to keep the Ethernet network costs down.”
Attractive as that is, the advantage of IP has often been manufacturer agnosticism. Heffernan assures us that the company intends to make IP10 a standard. “We’ve released the whitepaper. The nature of the world is we’re happy to be part of the portfolio but we’re not everything to everyone. We want to create a network of OEM and developer support so the interaction between Blackmagic and non-Blackmagic is there for the customer. It’s being discussed with SMPTE.”
Blackmagic’s approach summarizes the ambitions of the industry: Economies of scale are making video over IP more affordable. Task-specific hardware seem on the way out. Flexibility is a watchword.
“Our cameras’ ability to stream back to control via SRT means we get a high quality, reliable connection into the bonded 5G at very low latency and very high quality,” Heffernan concludes. “The cost of satcom, private uplinks and all of those environments could be done away with.” Video over IP, in all its forms, is probably closer than ever to fulfilling its promise. “It’s quicker to deploy, faster to set up, easier to manage.”
