After lunch, Al Kovalick, Media Systems Consulting, USA, who has been moderating the day's focus on networked media, delivered his own presentation. In "The Fundamentals of the Professional Networked Media Ecosystem," Kovalick went into detail on "new dimensions of AV streaming and transport using Ethernet/IP," more specifically with regard to 12 parameters: lossless transport methods, compressed essence tradeoffs, physical layer choices, protocol stacks, push versus pull streams, timing and alignment, methods for frame accurate stream splicing, discovery/identity, virtual media bundles, mixed media networks. "I know you're thinking this is complicated – give me SDI," he joked. "But we can get it down to an IP network over Ethernet with a transport layer, some kind of timing and some way to have flows and bundles. If you can do that, it’s a very simple system: You can take one wire and connect it, just like SDI." He described this system that can provide a range of possibilities for the high, medium and low-end facility. "Leveraging Ethernet is our future," he enthused. "We’re riding on the backs of giants for a system of infinite workflows in all sizes and cloud friendly."
Thomas Edwards, VP, engineering and development, FOX Networks Engineering and Operations, USA recounted the genesis of his presentation: being asked to quantify how many packets were dropped by Ethernet switches. He didn't know so he set about to find out. The result is his presentation, Can COTS Ethernet Switches Handle Uncompressed Video? The answer was simple. "If you walk away with one thing, it's that no packets were dropped," he said. "There's one asterisk to that, which is no packets were dropped when the switch was properly used. If you over-subscribe the switch, it will drop packets. But the switches were run for days with no packet loss. That’s the message I want to get across." But, he noted, there is more testing to come.
A team of three speakers from Discovery USA presented a case study of how they built a cloud-based infrastructure to handle their nonlinear applications. On the software side, said Brinton Miller, head, media engineering teams at Discovery’s domestic production facilities, "our linear world is still similar to how it was. But all our nonlinear scheduling systems around the world are driving automated media assembly with very little human touch." Ammar Latif, systems engineer with the Service Provider Media team at Cisco Systems; Christian Malone; manager, strategic and innovative media engineering projects, Discovery’s Global Technology & Operations gave a deeper dive into the changes made to the Discovery USA plant.
Miller encouraged attendees to look into OpenStack as part of the solution. He concluded that Discovery has had to leave hand-crafted content to the creative teams. "We support no hand-crafting for systems," he said. Discovery is looking at putting their apps and programmability between layers of service or even adopting an entire service solution such as Infrastructure-as-a-service. And they continue to investigate cloud technologies for our scaling needs, be it a private media cloud, a public cloud or a hybrid. "We're leaning towards a private cloud," he revealed.
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