IP Studio at IBC 2013

is usually the most important event of the year for our type of work, and for the IP Studio team, 2013 has been no exception, with plenty of talk about how live video might move to IP networks (similarly to what happened a few years ago when recorded video started moving from tapes to files). There were plenty of manufacturers showing live streaming of production quality video at IBC, but with a range of different--and not necessarily compatible--approaches on offer, there was an amount of uncertainty expressed by end users about what they should be looking for.

So it's just as well we had agreed to put on two demonstrations of our work, and participate in a couple of conference sessions, as there was clearly an interested audience. and have mentioned this briefly in previous posts, but here's a little more information about what was a very successful show for us.

A flexible future

The EBU represents European public broadcasters and, along with and , is actively bringing together users and vendors around networked media -- they jointly issued a during IBC. To support this, the EBU asked us if we could provide an IP Studio demonstration on their elegant demonstration area in Hall 10. And could we make it do ?

We agreed, and thanks to a tremendous effort from the whole team, some long evenings, and efficient cross-site working, we were able to show live and recorded content at several picture sizes and rates streamed to both an impressive 56-inch 4K screen and a laptop (see picture). This demonstrates how our framework allows the same network infrastructure to work seamlessly with different resolution sources and destinations. The highest quality content was UHD 3840x2160 50P, compressed with I-frame H.264 at 600 Mbit/s (and the lowest was from a smartphone). To work at these rates we needed to introduce some 10 GbE to our network, and work hard at codec optimisation. The hard work was rewarded by mentions in various publications and videos, and more importantly plenty of positive feedback about our open approach from visitors to the stand.

A dynamic approach

We have recently added dynamic source and destination discovery to the IP Studio framework, and included this in the EBU demonstration -- whereas previously we had to painstakingly hand-craft the routing configuration for events such as , now senders and receivers multicast advertisements (using mDNS-SD, which is probably best known as Bonjour but isn't exclusive to Apple) allowing the routing control page to dynamically update, in this case when we disconnected and reconnected the stream for the HD camera. By the way, remember that there is no separate video router in this architecture -- this is handled by the network fabric when the control page (accessed via a tablet) tells the receiver to join a different multicast group.

Small data

After making all that work we headed back to the in Hall 8, and the R&D stand. Here we were showing IP Studio working live event data alongside video. An HD camera pointing at miniature cars going round a well-known brand of slot-racing track was connected to an IP Studio capture node and an object tracker. This created real-time data events giving the position and size of a car within the picture. As Robert Wadge has , such events are treated as first-class citizens in IP Studio and sent live around or between studios. In this case we were sending them over the LAN using ZeroMQ, where they were received by a live segmenter/compositor to create a "new user experience" that was then multicast to the receiver. Admittedly in this case the new user experience was just a close up of the car on top of the main camera view, but it shows the idea, and we were impressed by how many visitors could see the potential for productions to do something interesting with their data.

More information

We also had a conference paper about the project at IBC, which I presented as part of the New Studios session. This is available as a , and it also appears in the "best of show" publication, which can be downloaded from the .

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