SMPTE And CCW+SATCON Explore Topics Shaping Media Facilities

During CCW+SATCON, Nov. 12-13 at New York City's Javits Center, SMPTE will offer sessions examining two of the key technical issues and trends affecting modern media facilities: migration toward IP-based facilities and the use and benefits of the newly released SMPTE Archive eXchange Format (AXF) standard.

As one of the United States' largest media, entertainment, video, and communications technology conference and expositions, the event will draw an array of top industry figures, many of whom will participate in SMPTE sessions.

SMPTE President-Elect Robert Seidel (pictured), who is vice president of engineering and advanced technology at CBS, will moderate the session 'The IP-Based Facility: Is It for You? If So, When?' Joining him to discuss these questions will be guest panelists including Mario Vecchi, chief technology officer at PBS; Steve Fastook, senior vice president of technical and commercial operations at CNBC; and, representing the SMPTE Standards Group, Michael Koetter, senior vice president of media technology and development at Turner Broadcasting.

The group will discuss how the core infrastructure at the network level is evolving and how the move to full IP infrastructure software-defined networking (SDN) will affect the industry for the next five years or more. Moving into specifics, these experts and decision-makers will address the impact of SMPTE's 2022 standard (ST 2022-1:2007 'Forward Error Correction for Real-Time Video/Audio Transport Over IP Networks') on the use of packet-based media networks in the media facility.

Since its introduction in 2007, this SMPTE standard has expanded to address numerous IP protocols, and it is expected to play a key role in the strategy mapped out by the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM), sponsored by SMPTE, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), and the Video Services Forum (VSF). Together, these organisations are working to drive development of a packet-based network infrastructure for the professional media industry. Their joint efforts are intended, ultimately, to stimulate new business opportunities through the exchange of professional media across networks that take advantage of affordable IT-based technology.

Within a year of its creation in April 2013, the JT-NM completed Phase 1 of its work, delivering a comprehensive overview of user requirements and technologies with the potential to meet them.

Launching Phase 2 in February 2014, the group began defining a reference architecture and critical components for interoperable packet-based networks. At CCW+SATCON, Seidel and his colleagues will examine the progress made by the JT-NM and the impact of this work on real-world implementation of IP networking.

Turning to the topic of SMPTE's AXF Standard, S. Merrill Weiss, president of the Merrill Weiss Group and chair of the SMPTE Working Group on AXF, will moderate an in-depth session, co-produced with CCW+SATCON, titled 'In Support of Interoperability: The New Archive eXchange Format (AXF) Standard'.

Weiss and colleagues from a variety of stakeholder organisations – from sports and entertainment networks to cultural archives – will discuss how the AFX standard, which codifies interoperability standards among data archive systems, yields benefits with respect to operational storage, transport and long-term preservation.

Serving as containers capable of holding virtually unlimited collections of files and metadata related to one another in any combination, 'AXF Objects' can package all the specific information different kinds of systems would need in order to restore the content data. Using the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to define the information in a way that can be read and recovered by any modern computer system to which the data is downloaded, AXF Objects are essentially immune to changes in technology and formats. The use of 'spanned sets' allows AXF Objects to hold files of any kind and any size, across multiple storage media.

AXF already has been employed around the world to help businesses store, protect, preserve and transport many petabytes of file-based content, and the format is proving fundamental to many of the cloud-based storage, preservation, and IP-based transport services available today. Session panelists will draw on these real-world examples as they discuss practical implementation, as well as the use of AXF to future-proof digital storage so that content remains available despite changing formats and storage technologies. Within this discussion, they also will examine how AXF allows content owners to move content from their current archive systems into the AXF domain in a strategic way.

Working with CCW+SATCON, SMPTE has constructed an impressive lineup of experts, who will convene to discuss some of the most important developments of the day, as well as their potential impact on the creation, transport, and storage of all variety of media assets. These sessions on the IP-based facility and the value and utility of AXF promise to offer valuable insight into the technologies and standards shaping modern media facilities.

The article is also available to read in BFV online.

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