By Shirish Nadkarni
There are strong reasons why REMI (Remote Integration model) or remote production, also known as at-home production, has been forecast to grow at 60% or more annually. REMI is an increasingly employed broadcast workflow where content is captured live from a remote location, such as a sporting venue, while production is performed in a main studio and control room, thousands of miles away.
The drive towards IP (Internet Protocol) technology combined with recent events has changed this model further by replacing large studios and control rooms with distributed or decentralised production workflows spread across multiple broadcast facilities and home-based staff.
IP technology, including secure and reliable internet streaming, has also enabled remote event broadcast productions to evolve from the traditional approach of using costly Outside Broadcast (OB) trucks, expensive satellite uplinks, and large crews, to more flexible and efficient remote production workflows.
“Driven by surging consumer demand for more live coverage whether it be news, sports, or music events, broadcasters are increasingly turning to flexible remote production workflows that rely on the public internet for broadcast contribution, return feeds, and monitoring,” says Suitcase TV’s Ed Calverley, whose career has included stints at the BBC and Grass Valley.
“Correctly implemented, IP-enabled remote production can reduce the movement of both people and equipment, increase the utilisation of resources, and maximise the efficiency of production teams, providing broadcasters with the flexibility to produce, distribute, and monetise more video content with fewer resources.”
Much has been said over the past few years about the benefits of moving to use more IP in broadcast, most of which has focused on simply replacing the existing serial digital interface (SDI) connections with IP ones.
However, remote production is an area where latency cannot be avoided; hence, the search is on to find more flexible methods of production that reduce latency to a minimum, and which could drastically change the cost models for live production of outdoor events.
Coverage of live events that are held away from a production centre can be very expensive due to a range of factors. In addition to technical facilities to capture and mix sound and pictures, there are typically teams of people ranging from one to well over a hundred, depending on the size of the event. The costs for travel and transport, accommodation and subsistence can make it uneconomical to cover some events.
Coverage of live events is a great way to attract and retain viewers, whether broadcast live on a linear TV channel, streamed live online, or packaged for access through on-demand platforms. As viewing habits are changing and people are consuming content in new ways, viewers expect a wider choice of content, and broadcasters are struggling to provide this as budgets are being continuously squeezed.
Following are some cost-efficient examples of IP used in REMI models for the remote broadcast of sports and entertainment events:
- After a hiatus lasting almost 10 weeks, NASCAR racing returned to screens in May 2020, thanks to live coverage provided by Fox Sports. In order to ensure the health and safety of its employees, Fox Sports deployed a remote production approach to deliver high quality race coverage while reducing crew to barest minimum on the track.
With 16 live video feeds leaving the track to video decoders located in Fox Sports’ network centres in Charlotte and Los Angeles, both the production and broadcast engineering teams were able to work remotely and interact seamlessly with the on-site production crew. This was achieved via a private Ethernet network between the track, LA and Charlotte, and a public network providing low latency internet streaming for executives and production staff working from home.
- Throughout the eighth season of China’s most popular talent show, Singer 2020, Hunan TV, one of the country’s biggest broadcasters, was forced to rethink the entire production of the show because of the restrictions brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. Up against tight deadlines, limited resources, and logistical constraints, Hunan TV deployed an ambitious plan to ensure the success of the live grand finale.
Leveraging the combination of innovative Haivision technology and the SRT (speech recognition technology) protocol, Hunan TV was able to deliver its first ever live remote production of a TV show in China across three locations – Changsha, Taipei and Tokyo – to a record-breaking audience.
- Leading cable sports broadcaster, ESPN, deployed an IP-powered remote production solution to 14 collegiate athletic conferences that have been used to produce more than 2,200 events via low-cost internet connections, in place of using traditional satellite uplink services that would have incurred huge costs.
- Esports giant, Riot Games, used a remote production workflow for its League of Legends World Championships, a mammoth undertaking spanning four cities over six weeks, serving a global audience of nearly 100 million viewers.
The Championship tournament was broadcast from South Korea while IP was employed for central management and production from the Riot Games headquarters in Los Angeles. With 18 studios dedicated to 18 different regions/languages, Riot Games delivered an impactful viewing experience to fans rivalling some of the biggest professional sports events.
- New York-based full-service production company Live X started a few years ago to remotely produce the USGA amateur championships in both 2018 (California) and 2019 (North Carolina). With multi-camera coverage of the commentator and additional wireless cameras covering the golf action at key locations, the team were able to run the production entirely remotely from New York at a fraction of the cost of a regular OB production.
Live, low latency (sub 500 ms) audio and video feeds were successfully transported from six live synched camera feeds and, from controlling cameras to mixing the audio live … and, everything was done remotely.
The main driver for remote production is to reduce costs, the priority being a reduction in people onsite as the facilities costs may be small in comparison.
If the correct architecture is chosen, the cost savings may be significant enough to make even low-profile events economical to cover. Compromises on operational flexibility may be necessary with some architectures, but these must be weighed up against the cost savings. Some architectures may not be achievable with traditional broadcast hardware.
True remote production should not be underestimated as simply being “remote control” of equipment at a different location. To be useful in many productions, it requires methods for handling video and audio mixing of sources that originate at the production centre as well as the event location — which is unachievable with a simple remote controlled architecture.
On real-world problems like reducing costs while maintaining quality, Brian Henry, Vice-President of Haivision, says, “By compensating for latencies introduced by using software processing and IP links with limited bandwidth, distributed processing using multi-stage mixing can deliver viable architectures providing significant cost reductions.
“This provides opportunities for broadcasters to consider televising events which would be uneconomical with traditional outside broadcast methods. Such innovations should lead to an overall increase in live content being made available for viewers with an ever-increasing appetite and expectation for variety.”
Haivision, a specialist in low-latency video streaming and video encoding solutions for broadcasters, has just won a second Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; this time for its innovation in “Management of IP Multicast Video Distribution to Desktops and TVs in News and Media Production Facilities”.
Looking to the future, it is clear that the advantages of IP and internet video streaming for remote production include not just cost efficiencies, but also the potential for broadcasters to innovate with new ways to create and consume content.
More employees are working from home than ever before, and this trend is likely to continue as broadcasters realise the benefits of reducing the need for travel, improving work-life balance, and being able to hire the very best talent no matter where they are located.
Decentralised production offers the flexibility for broadcast engineers and producers to work together in real-time to create and deliver more high-quality events. With the near ubiquity of high bandwidth internet and the ongoing rollout of 5G networks in several parts of the world, live video streams for remote production can be shared in real-time from anywhere to anywhere.
As in-house broadcast facilities deploy SMPTE 2110, it is likely that many more broadcast workflows will be IP-enabled over both public and private networks. Furthermore, remote production workflows are encompassing a mix of on-premise, at-home, and cloud-based elements for encoding, decoding, and video processing, all accessible via IP networks.
To ensure that internet streaming does not become a bottleneck, technologies such as SRT can ensure low latency streaming, reliability, and security for decentralized remote production workflows. The potential for remote production over IP is, indeed, limitless.
Just how important remote broadcasting over IP has become to the broadcast world can be assimilated at the forthcoming NAB Show in Las Vegas (April 24 to 27) — whatever you do, do not miss the IP Showcase.
https://nabshow.com/2022/destinations/connected-media-ip/
Question: Do you know the secret of managing IP multicast video distribution to desktops and TVs in news and media production facilities?
If not, talk to Haivision at NAB 2022 and share your views with maven@editecintl.com.