Contribution and distribution: Flexibility and efficiency to the fore as sports market dynamism intensifies

Scalable methods of video contribution and distribution continue to be in high demand as viewer expectations change and the sports rights market becomes more fluid – meaning that content services often have a requirement to spin-up additional capacity at short notice.

For providers of contribution and distribution platforms, this has inevitably translated to an ever-greater emphasis on flexibility in terms of access to the different methods of delivery, including fibre/IP, cloud and satellite. Simultaneously, however, the amount of choice that sports viewers expect is continuing to grow, placing the technical challenges firmly in the context of an expanding content landscape.

John Ellerton, BT M&B

John Ellerton, head of futures and innovation at BT Media & Broadcast, summarises: “We’re certainly seeing a broadening of demand, as well as sports rights being acquired later and productions brought to air with less notice. The flexibility that we have in our networks, with a lot of sports grounds being connected using direct fibre with cabinets at the venues, means that it’s quite straightforward for us to be able to react and bring up capacity as needed.”

But underlining a multi-faceted ethos that seems to be increasingly commonplace in this area of broadcast technology provision, he says that “if capacity isn’t available, then we can make use of internet connections with Virtual Media Connect” – BT’s Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) based platform for live video delivery – “or there’s always satellites as back-up. So, yes, flexibility is a major trend and it’s important to arm yourselves with all the different tools in the box to be able to serve customers as well as possible.”

At the crossroads

For Paul Calleja, CTO and co-founder of software-defined video network technology company GlobalM, the industry is now “at a crossroads where the adoption of non-legacy networks is starting to get faster and faster. Everybody has had a chance to play around with the new approaches and is beginning to get used to internet-based protocols for delivery, be it RIST or SRT.”

The prevalence of references to SRT during interviews for this article confirms that this protocol, in particular, has been a game-changer. A prime example of ‘cometh the hour, cometh the technology’, SRT’s combination of low latency, encryption, packet loss recovery and jitter prevention means it is ideally suited to optimising video streaming performance regardless of unpredictable IP network conditions.

Paul Calleja, GlobalM

Calleja points out that GlobalM supports a whole range of formats, including SRT, RIST and RTMP. Once again, flexibility is key. “It could be that there is a combination of things that people are used to deploying, but in general we do see the federations, for example, looking deeper at IP distribution as a way of potentially reducing access costs, increasing the diversity of customers, or growing the amount of rights they have. It’s much easier to do all of that using an IP-based distribution platform.”

Enhanced security and seamless redundancy between cloud networks are among the cited features of the GlobalM platform. Calleja also notes the orchestration capabilities: “We’re focused on horizontal integration across different clouds and having an orchestrator that can sit across many different systems is really powerful. We’re using software-based tools in the cloud, so if one brand of encoder doesn’t connect with a decoder we can make that work.”

Capacity and performance

Ellerton is ideally placed to comment on the “connectivity journey” that many of BT M&B’s sports customers have taken in recent years, migrating from legacy networks to BT’s Vena software-defined network platform, which allows for the delivery of formats such as JPEG XS, HD-SDI, H.264 and H.265 from venues. As well as supporting broadcasters taking content from event locations to studios, BT M&B facilitates feeds from studios in terms of primary and, in some cases, secondary distribution.

The recent migration has been driven by the need for greater “efficiency, being able to control capacity better, and the ability to see the performance of the network. But it’s also about raw capacity as lots of people are wanting to move over to things like JPEG XS as well as the different forms of remote production that so many customers are going for in the contribution space,” he adds.

The distribution space reveals a “similar story” of more diverse expectations. “Plenty of customers are using MPEG-based compression or HEVC over our fibre networks,” he continues. “But there’s also a strong uptake in the use of SRT for contribution and primary distribution – hence the launch of Virtual Media Connect – and more and more customers wanting to move their workflows into the cloud.”

Case-by-case

The growing confidence that many sports customers now feel in using cloud-based distribution is also alluded to by Julien Mandel, solution marketing director at video delivery solutions company Ateme. In fact, it’s a development that has been integral to Ateme’s increased footprint in sports, where there is now a general expectation that service providers will be able to work with the full range of cloud services.

“In the past year, there has been more focus on sports content in terms of solutions and being present on the cloud ecosystem,” he says, adding that this applies “especially when we talk about remote production or the options you have for distribution with the cloud. Also, we are cloud-agnostic which is a point that is really important for sports broadcasters.”

Jonathan Smith, Net Insight

Echoing Ellerton’s remark about having all the necessary tools at your disposal, Jonathan Smith, solution area expert cloud at Net Insight, indicates that the “one-size-fits-all approach” still found in some areas of broadcast will continue to become increasingly unsuitable. “You have media companies dealing with lot of content, from the most premium sport rights all the way down to maybe tier two or three because they want to engage with the greatest possible number of consumers, including new viewers. But until recently there has been this sort of static view of production,” he says.

“Now that’s starting to change and you see that broadcasters want the flexibility to pick and choose the appropriate tool for each production. It really means being smart about how you work, and that could include not throwing the kitchen sink at simpler problems. I think that moving forward you will see even more customers wanting to address things on a case-by-case basis, determining the technology to use based on the attributes of the production and spinning up the capacity they need to get the job done.”