Net Insight still eyeing remote production potential

Several companies are using NAB 2013 to build on some of the successes achieved during London 2012, with Sweden’s Net Insight one of those highlighting the continued possibilities of remote production.

It’s probably fair to say that remote production has not quite taken off with the sheer speed and velocity that some were predicting all but two years ago. That’s not to say it hasn’t been without its successes though, with large events where production teams can lean on the resources of a broadcast centre or IBC leading the way. And, of course, they didn’t come much bigger than London 2012.

Net Insight is one of the companies highlighting its role in remote production workflows at last year’s Olympics where, as a component part of Swedish telco TeliaSonera International Carriers’ operation, it provided remote production support for 11 global broadcasters to eight TV studios located at the edge of the Olympic site.

SVT, the Swedish public service television company, for example, deployed Nimbra JPEG2000 encoders and decoders to deliver content back to base in Sweden via two broadcast channels and six internet streams. In 2008 it sent 200 people to Beijing, but with the new workflow it managed to send only 60 people to London, of which only four were technicians.

“With JPEG2000 the latency is only 130 milliseconds so we can easily cut an interview taking place at the studio [in Sweden],” said SVT’s Adde Granberg at the time. “And there is also a return picture without any latency. And even if they are talking to the mixed zones from the studio there is only 200 milliseconds of delay.”

Somewhat understandably, Net Insight CTO and vice president of business development, Per Lindgren, identifies remote production as one of the strongest trends in the industry at the moment, and the company has been instrumental in the well documented experiments in the Swedish football leagues with the technology. But there are other areas the company is targeting too.

“We believe that live events will be more important to the growing trend of OTT and multiscreen delivery, and that sports will be an even more important part of that,” he says. “And that will extend all the way down from Tier One down to Tier Three – university football in the US, regional leagues here in Europe.”

This is one of the reasons that it is launching the new Nimbra VA 210 out in Vegas. Identifying a long-tail market for live events, the idea behind the VA 201 is that it allows for the reliable transport of video signals over previously flaky connections. And by utilising unmanaged IP first-mile connections, local content, second leagues and amateur sports can be cost-effectively provided to a – theoretically – large consumer base.

“It allows you go over unmanaged IP networks or the internet where you have 5-10% packet loss, and combines forward error correction and retransmission capabilities, so if the forward error correction doesn’t recover all your packets you also have the retransmission,” says Lindgren. “That allows you to reach out to smaller and smaller arenas. Combine that with our Nimbra network, then it can also be used for media contribution…and that ties into remote production in turn.”