IBC 2023: Inside the gallery agnostic live media production accelerator project

In the third of a four-part series, SVG Europe provides a roundup of the sport-focused IBC Accelerator discussions at IBC 2023. Next up, the ‘Real-Time XR Sport Edge’ Accelerator project.

The IBC Accelerator ‘Gallery Agnostic Live Media Production’ rather hides its light under a bushel with its title, potentially offering far more than just “the potential for a new approach to the traditional run order tool in a multi-vendor, multi-platform live production environment”, worthy though that endeavour is. It moves from developing a common interface for news broadcasts, through a seamless approach to disaster recovery to controlling a full gallery in VR.

Very ably hosted by Muki Kulhan, innovation co-lead for IBC Accelerators, the session covers the background, key aims, development, and results of this Accelerator, which Kulhan described as being “so relevant and so interesting and so important” when it was pitched that “we couldn’t resist to have it as a participant this year”.

Control issues

“We’ve noticed that a lot of broadcasters and production companies have ever-growing tech stacks,” explained Aaron Nuytemans, head of partnerships, TinkerList, in his introduction. “[No one] is single-vendor anymore. You have devices for playout, graphics, I/O, from a variety of vendors, and also very often multi formats. They can be on-prem devices, or they can be cloud devices. The difficulty is around how we can control all of these, what is the common control layer? What does the workflow to control all of this look like?

“We wanted to show that we can make live production device agnostic, meaning that from one source, let’s say a rundown, you can control any type of device, but also gallery agnostic, meaning one central location can control a variety of galleries. And that’s where we jumped off from.”

Moderator:
Muki Kulhan, Innovation Co-Lead – IBC Accelerators

Panelists:
Jon Roberts, ITN director of technology, production and innovation
Aaron Nuytemans, TinkerList head of partnerships
Morton Brandstrup, TV2 head of news technology
Russell Trafford-Jones, IET Media Technical Network chair and Techex communications manager

Champions:
ITN, YLE, BBC, TV2, and Transmixr

Said Jon Roberts, director of technology, production and innovation at ITN: “The champions all came with different use cases in mind. But in common we had increasingly varied production environments across our estates. As well as our traditional video control rooms, we might have a digital production space or a podcast production space, [so] a shared problem is how do we make it easier to move between those spaces, for a user to be able to interact with different technology.

“The most common workflow across live production is the running order,” he continued. “So how do we think about the running order in a way that moves us beyond the NRCS and MOS approach which has been great for 25 years? Maybe in this new environment, we can move beyond that and create rich and control a richer interaction between devices.”

Hybrid solution result

The result was a hybrid solution, an automator that ran in the cloud, able through the same control system and interface, to control an on-premise studio at ITV, a full cloud studio at Channel 4, and a fully cloud-based remote production in ITV studio, including robotic cameras, while a fully remote production was controlled by the host standing on a rooftop in Leuven, Belgium.

Kulhan called it the “democratisation of the device”, to which Morton Brandstrup, head of news technology, TV2, responded: “It’s more. We are not tied to a physical facility anymore, to the studio. News can be made where news is happening.”

Russell Trafford-Jones, chair, IET Media Technical Network, and communications manager, Techex, said people should think about how applicable the system could be outside of the news environment. “This is how we tested it, but just because it’s got the standard newsroom computer system scripts and loads of stuff, it doesn’t mean it has to be news.”

Trafford-Jones, for example, pointed out that the system’s disaster recovery component is “really powerful across much live production”, but later pushed for a standardisation of APIs. “As a vendor, we don’t need to control a control room or studio,” he said. “We do need to talk to all of these other small blocks that we’re bringing into our ecosystem. So the concept of a common API is just as much of a challenge.”

Kulhan highlighted the solution’s inherent sustainability credentials, as well as its inclusiveness. Nuytemans took this further by talking about the move to having VR glasses controlling the workflow, “instead of a big gallery with lots and lots of screens, one piece of equipment can run the live show”.
This was demonstrated by a video from the Transmixr research consortium, which includes 19 organisations from 12 European countries, which showed the common interface being controlled by users running the Tinkerlist CUEZ app but wearing mixed reality head-mounted display (HMD) instead of a mouse or trackpad.

“As we started to bring Transmixr to the project, we realised they’d already integrated with vMix and we realised that by adding the CUEZ interface to that environment, we could then give that operation control over video playback, and graphics playback, working to a complex system,” said Roberts. “And actually, when we first did it, the complaint was we made it too easy.

“But the reason it was easy was because of this common interface,” he continued. “I think this is a really exciting part of this proposal. Because we built the integrations to all these production systems through one workflow engine, if you then want to add a new control modality ¬– it could be goggles, it could be voice, it could be AI – you [can create] a southbound interface into your production stacks in any number of ways.”

“What I’m most intrigued by is the newsroom computer system not being for [just] a newsroom anymore,” observed Trafford-Jones. “It’s like the iPhone, its name [was derived from] a phone but we all know it now does everything else in the world.”