Net Insight refines open IP cloud workflows for distributed remote production

As Net Insight announces its new Digital Experience innovation platform this week, company co-founder and CTO Media Networks Per Lindgren has provided SVG Europe with an overview of what the company would have been highlighting at NAB 2020.

Digital Experience is a platform which presents Net Insight’s latest product and solution innovations. It includes an overview of new products and solutions capabilities, as well as access to webinars, videos, on-demand demos, and downloadable digital resources.

Lindgren told SVG Europe, “Before the corona there were a lot of exciting things happening at Net Insight both in divesting parts of the company and acquiring new companies. We are really transforming a lot of the solutions right now and bringing them together.

“Of course sports broadcasting is our main focus, and definitely one of the things we would have been talking about at NAB is that we have further improved our IP remote production portfolio.

Per Lindgren, CTO Media Networks, Net Insight

“We are adding low latency MPEG solutions and also lightweight compression to our existing JPEG-2000 compression on all our platforms. What’s also interesting is that we’re tying together our total Nimbra portfolio with our internet contribution platform – which was a little bit separate previously as Nimbra VA – now called the Nimbra 400 Series, and we’re also adding a lot of those capabilities into our normal, bigger Nimbra 600 platform which already sits in many of the big sports stadiums out there,” said Lindgren.

“Another big focus is our cloud-based Nimbra Edge platform, which ties together with existing Nimbra to what we want to call a fully virtualised media ecosystem focusing on remote and distributed production.

“In total, what we want to provide is greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness and provide for more agile workflows for both production and distribution of content. With the additions of Nimbra Edge and Nimbra 400 internet contribution, now you can truly talk about at-home productions – not just sitting in your home studio but actually sitting at home and being able to control your production.

“The agility that IP and cloud provide, and internet contribution and distribution, are going to be fundamental for the coming years. We truly believe that IP cloud, especially for OTT, transforms the end-to-end sports workflow. Ultimately it will provide for a more engaging viewer experience.

“Net Insight has been working for many years on a live OTT streaming platform called Sye,” continued Lindgren, “which was cloud-based and software-based for synchronised low latency OTT delivery. We have recently divested that to Amazon Prime Video. But over the last 12 months we’ve also brought all that technology into the Nimbra Edge platform, more for production environments.

“We now have a common hardware platform that we call Media Acceleration Modules. If you go back 12 months, this only did JPEG-2000 in essence and uncompressed video. What we’re doing now with the virtualisation type of environment is talking about media apps: we can transform the same generic hardware into an MPEG encoder, an MPEG decoder, JPEG-2000 or JPEG XS. It’s really adding a lot of functionality that the customer can tailor to support their needs.

“Another big thing for Net Insight this year is that we acquired the Aperi platform, which is a truly virtualised IP gateway and fits nicely into our strategy for the Nimbra portfolio and Nimbra Edge in the cloud. We are looking at virtualised generic hardware where you just add your ‘media apps’ dynamically into that hardware to transform it into the solution you want to create.

“Corona is definitely accelerating and forcing the trends towards both IP and cloud and also remote and distributed productions,” concluded Lindgren. “Together it’s just about making workflows more agile with the possibility to sit remotely or at home – or anywhere — to produce content; to be able to do a tier 1 production or else a small tier 2 or 3 production remotely, or even from home.”