Technical Evolution In The Broadcast Industry

by Nick Harper
Spectra Logic Vice President

Broadcasting technology has been evolving since the industry began. The process begins with the development of technology advances, followed by deployment in pioneering normal way of doing things. This was the pattern as videotape moved into production. The same pattern was seen when non-linear editing came along in post-production: ditto for the move to digital and the introduction of disk based video play-out servers. The list of examples goes on.

Broadcast technology evolution continues, but with a subtle change. Much of the historical change used to be controlled from the technology side. Before videotape could be adopted, it had to be invented and perfected. Technical innovation is still vital and continues to be the limiting factor in many aspects of the broadcasters life. Cameras represent an area where change at the station depends on new equipment. In many other areas, though, change is driven by developing business needs. The requirement emerges, then broadcast engineers and vendors integrate a solution from available technology. Asset management systems exemplify this class of solution, as do various workflow management initiatives.

Many, but not all, of today's really big, boardroom-level issues are coming from the commercial side of the house. There is an insatiable appetite for content that is ever more expensive to generate and a fixed amount of time and talent available to generate it. It takes twice as long to shoot 26 episodes as it does to make 13.

The cost of producing much of the content is now so high that sales in secondary markets, including syndication, are absolutely essential. In this respect the broadcast business has reached the same point as the gear and sprocket crowd: a lot of films lose money in US theatrical release and only turn a profit once DVD sales and overseas rentals start rolling in. In this environment time and availability of talent and technology set the limits. A hot concept becomes overplayed in a couple of seasons. Nothing will change that. The supply of bankable on-camera talent and experienced production and engineering staff is extremely limited and largely inelastic.

n this context, the essential business requirements are to avoid wasting time, both people's and the clock's , and to get the maximum possible use out of the content that's been created. There's ot much one can do to hurry an editor up as she works on a 15 second promo but one may be able to deploy technology to eliminate video dubs so that she can at least spend the time she has on the job at hand. The ultimate, unforgivable waste is recreating content that already exists but can't be found.

An enormous supply of on-the-shelf building blocks is available to meet these business needs: In a sense, technology has improved itself to the point where it kicked itself right out of the decision-making role. For a wide range of business solutions there is no need to have the best possible components' they're all good enough. It may be a little deflating for all the engineers designing these components, but the payouts for the users are gigantic. Costs of manufactured products are a combination of the cost of creating each unit (materials, labor, etc.) plus the cost of development spread over the entire production run. If a piece of hardware costs $50 million to develop but the maker can sell 100 million units, then he profits by charging anything more than $0.50 each plus the actual unit manufacturing cost. If the entire market is only 10,000 units then he needs at least $5,000 per unit, plus unit cost, to break even. The aggregate demand from the entire broadcast industry for any given component is often only a few thousand units. Most manufacturers can't count on capturing the whole market. Against this backdrop, it's clear that using broadcast-only gear is an expensive option when other choices exist.

Off-the-Shelf: Good News
Several benefits, in addition to cost, come from using components that are produced in high volume. The first is an increased rate of feature development. Development cost is allocated across total production but the market puts a definite limit on the price that can be charged for a product. A manufacturer can lower the per-piece development expense either by spending less money on a particular model or by delaying the introduction of its successor until the existing product has earned back its costs. Either strategy limits the pace of new technology introduction. As an example, broadcast tape formats come along every ten years or so, while IT tape drives double in performance at no increase in cost every two to two-and-a-half years.

Quality, in the form of reliability and conformance to specification, is positively correlated with higher production volumes. The higher volume allows vendors to spend more money on quality without pricing the unit out of the market. Many of the most effective ways to obtain quality depend on volume production. This includes techniques like statistical process control as well as physical tools like precision assembly robots. The romantic ideal of the lone craftsman putting his heart and soul into producing the best quality product is very appealing; sadly, a well-run sweatshop or an automated assembly line gets it right more often.

Off-the-Shelf: Bad News
The move to Common Off-the-Shelf (COTS) technologies saves money and provides more technology sooner and at a high level of quality. The price to be paid for these benefits, though, is that COTS offer almost no opportunity to have components designed to meet specific requirements unless those requirements are very widespread.

raditional broadcast components have been designed to meet specific requirements. A broadcast engineer can have very detailed discussions with a vendor about his precise requirements for play-out servers. That vendor will do everything possible to meet those requirements. If he doesn't have a product that will do the job there's a very high chance that this deficiency will be addressed in the next model.

When buying off-the-shelf, the roles of the vendor and the engineer shift. A COTS vendor should be able to describe the products and characteristics, the speeds and feeds. The buying proposition follows: if the product meets your needs, buy it. If not, don't. This isn't a product of arrogance and it isn't something that will change if the COTS vendor could just learn a little humility. Rather, COTS vendor economics are based on selling a lot of units, all the same, to a lot of people. Specialized technology, of which broadcast is example, depends on selling highly customized equipment at high prices to a limited universe of customers.

The incursion of technology that is not broadcast-specific into the broadcast environment is not new. Non-linear editors are highly specialized pieces of equipment based around standard hard disk drives. Those disk drives were designed with no consideration whatsoever of the broadcasters' needs; nevertheless, no one is really that eager to go back to editing with two-inch tape and a razor blade. Non-broadcast components, such as hard drives, continue to invade because they can often, but not always, solve problems better, cheaper or faster than their specialized counterparts. Their incorporation is not a threat to broadcast engineers, but it does present them with several challenges.

Shift from Component Selection to Component Integration
The example of non-linear editing shows that general-purpose parts can be assembled to create broadcast-specific solutions. For the broadcast engineer though, the vendor is handling that integration and presenting a highly specialized product. In many of the applications deployed today, complete components or subsystems from the IT or consumer worlds are being incorporated into a broadcast facility. This moves the integration challenge from the vendor to the broadcast engineer. The challenge of building the system might be met by a third-party integrator or by the broadcaster. Integration is not a service that comes automatically with an off-the-shelf component.

Solutions are Controlled by the Available Technology
The off-the-shelf component vendor offers products with fixed characteristics. The integrator can combine them in any way he likes to obtain almost any set of features and performance, but this effort is not free. Sometimes the requirements may need to be changed to reflect what is readily available in the technology marketplace. A prominent example is the balance between moving and storing data.

Broadcast deals with dynamic content streaming in and out of storage devices and out to air. Switchers to mange these flows are amongst the crucial elements of a broadcast facility. The computer industry deals with largely fixed data. The big-ticket purchases in a data center are the huge disk farms. In this environment, storing data has become cheap and gets cheaper very quickly. Moving data is expensive and improves quite gradually. The current high performance local interconnect is 2Gb/sec Fibre Channel. One Gb/second switched IP networks, e.g., the Internet, are the transmission media of choice to move data any significant distance. In practice, these networks are limited to a few hundred megabits per second of useable throughput. An application requiring higher bandwidth than this is very expensive and the cost is highly non-linear: 10% more bandwidth increases costs by an order of magnitude.

The high costs of bandwidth are changing the types of solutions deployed in broadcast environments. There is a growing recognition that playing multiple streams of content out of one video server becomes prohibitively expensive after a certain point. It is far cheaper to replicate content and play out from several servers' in this way, available technology (multiple cheap servers, each using lower bandwidth, instead of one server and high-cost bandwidth) is driving the solution. Although the jury is still out on exactly how video-on-demand will become universal, most of the feasible solutions involve storage either at the set-top or at the local cable head.

Merging The Islands In The Broadcast World
A typical facility is made up of a several islands. News production happens on one system. Another island holds the play-out servers and master production switcher. Promos may be handled somewhere else. The distinction between different types of content is increasingly blurred: as it sits on the storage medium, it's all ones and zeros. As such, it makes a great deal more sense to transfer the files amongst the islands instead of dumping back to videotape and re-ingesting. The elimination of the videotape shuffle may, by itself, be enough reason to welcome guest technology to the broadcast world.

Broadcast solutions will continue to evolve, and at least for now, will incorporate custom and COTS components that must be integrated. The cost savings and greater range of solutions available with off-the-shelf technology are a powerful tool in the engineer's armory.

Click here for more information on how Spectra Logic products meet the specific needs of the broadcast industry.

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Source: Spectra Logic Corporation