AIMS Reflections: Olivier Suard, marketing director, Nevion on the Alliance’s role in “bringing the industry together”

The formation of the AIMS Alliance for IP Media Solutions has been one of the major industry stories of the last six months – something underlined by an in-depth session examining its development and objectives at SVG Europe’s SportTech summit in Dublin earlier this week. SVG Europe recently caught up with representatives of a number of AIMS Alliance members to discuss their reasons for joining, as well as the outlook for the ongoing SDI-to-IP transition – beginning with Nevion marketing director Olivier Suard (pictured).

What are Nevion’s primary reasons for joining the AIMS Alliance?

Nevion has always been a supporter of standards, and has been part of many technical and marketing organizations involved in defining, testing and promoting standards (e.g. SMPTE and VSF). As IP makes in-roads into the facilities, it is essential that the industry should agree on standards for IP in production. AIMS was specifically created to bring the industry together in adopting standards that have been worked on by the recognised leading standards organisations, so it made total sense for Nevion to become a founding member of AIMS.

To what extent do you think that existing IP-based initiatives will dovetail with and complement the activities of the AIMS Alliance?

We are seeing a lot of organisations and projects, including SMPTE, VSF, AIMS, AMVA, EBU, the JT-NM project, the LiveIP project and a few broadcasters, all working together to develop and promote the best recommendations, standards and frameworks for this new era in media production. In short, the various IP initiatives are definitely converging, and will be supported by AIMS.

What do you think are the greatest challenges regarding IP adoption as the industry stands now?

There is still a lot of work to do around defining standards relating to certain aspects of the IP set-up (e.g. discovery and registration), but things are moving very fast. Projects like the VRT and EBU’s LiveIP have shown that vendors are already able to interoperate on the basic SMPTE 2022-6 standard. Demos at NAB have also shown that some vendors, including Nevion, are already moving to the next stage (TR-04 and TR-03). So the willingness to adopt the emerging standards is definitely there, as illustrated by the fact that AIMS now includes pretty much every vendor of note in the broadcast business. This is very encouraging. The biggest challenge is probably refining those standards and implementing them fast enough to meet market expectations!