ABC News

For decades, media production facilities have been constructed using proprietary methods dedicated to the video industry, starting in black and white television, to analog color, and through to digital versions of standard and high-definition TV.  As the media industry has converged towards the information technology sector, new standards have evolved that enable the use of Internet protocol standards.

Constructing a new media production facility should take into account many of the trends and requirements the industry has placed on the business over the last decade or so: 1) it must be expandable to grow with additions and changes of production requirements, 2) it must be adaptable, to react to the changes in media formats and distribution and 3) it must enable hybrid workflows, to deal with the fact that creatives may now choose to work within a facility or from a remote location.

Key Components of the Facility

There are several components that should be integral to the design of a facility poised to move forward:

• IP – IP standards in media production, most notably SMPTE 2110, allow the scale that previous dedicated standards did not.  Practical cross-point matrices using SDI (serial digital video) could only achieve practical sizes of 1152x1152 inputs and outputs.  While this may seem large, many current production facilities are significantly larger than that.  Additionally, IP allows the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) components that are typically more available and follow the trends/growth of the IT industry.

• IT principles – Using the methods developed in the IT industry allows a much more automated process in the installation, updating, and growth of a production facility.  Using techniques to automatically deploy, segment, and protect IP addressing schemes are just a few of the methods the IT industry has developed that can be leveraged, eliminating manual naming and tracking that can become quite problematic in large systems.

• Software Based – By focusing on vendors that have migrated their production applications to software, one can now plan a facility that can migrate out of a physical space, allowing potential migration (or as a disaster recovery option) to a regionally diverse co-location facility or even the eventual migration to the cloud.  Content owners need to be conscious of the storage and protection of their intellectual property, and where this is eventually placed, but often, cloud vendors are more cognizant of security concerns than the creators themselves.

• Compressed and Uncompressed Content – Content does not always originate from within a facility; often, production content is produced and delivered from remote locations.  These production elements often require compressed delivery mechanisms, so the facility needs to be able to accept content in a variety of formats and methods.

As the media industry has converged towards the information technology sector, new standards have evolved that enable the use of internet protocol standards

• Hybrid Workflows – Previous designs often used completely isolated networks for security purposes, allowing no entry from the outside.  With today's hybrid workflows, this is no longer acceptable; content creators need remote access to deliver and produce their content.  Cloud providers can help here with secure paths, such that a remote creator can log into a cloud account and then reach the infrastructure of their facility in a much more secure manner than methods such as a VPN could ever provide.

These are just a few of the points that should be considered when building a facility that can survive well into the next generation of media production.  This essentially enables what can be considered a 'Software Defined Media Production Facility’ that can grow and adapt to future production needs without requiring a forklift to replace all the equipment.

Mike is the Director of Engineering and Technology at ABC News in NY, part of the Walt Disney Company.  For the last 33 years he has been at the forefront of just about every technical advancement that the ABC TV network has made, from the conversion from analog to digital, through the HDTV transition to the migration to video over IP and the expansion of streaming platforms.   Mike has over 50 US patents, with several others still in process.  Mike is fairly active in the standards communities, has been an active SMPTE NY board member since 1997 and is a SMPTE Fellow.  Prior to ABC, Mike spent 7 years at Standard Microsystems Corporation as part of a semiconductor design team.  He has a bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering Technology from SUNY Polytechnic University in Utica/Rome.  Mike lives in Bohemia, NY with his wife and a few of their combined 5 children.