The participants of 5G-VIRTUOSA, the EU-funded project exploring 5G and virtualization in broadcast production, has announced that the second phase of the project has been successfully completed.
This phase involved transferring the multi-vendor IP production environment built in the first phase to a three-site WAN environment in Germany – demonstrating a multi-site, all-IP networking of TV studios.
This phase lays the foundation for the final phase of the project, which will add 5G connectivity to the production environment.
The purpose of the EU project VIRTUOSA is to explore “Scalable Software Defined Network Architectures for Cooperative Live Media Production exploiting Virtualized Production Resources and 5G Wireless Acquisition”.
In practical terms, this means demonstrating through real-life examples how 5G can be combined with virtualization concepts to enable broadcasters to produce live content (such as sports or music coverage) more efficiently and cost-effectively across locations, to meet growing consumer demand.
The project participants are: Nevion AS (Norway), Mellanox Technologies LTD (Israel) and LOGIC media solutions GmbH (Germany).
In phase 2, a WAN connection was established between several German broadcaster’s production facilities: the ARD Sternpunkt in Frankfurt as the MCR/Main hub, and WDR in Cologne and SWR in Baden-Baden as “remote locations”.
The basic structure of all locations consisted of a spin-leaf network topology, each controlled and monitored by a separate SDN/NMOS controller (Nevion’s VideoIPath).
In addition, the controllers were federated so that they resources (such as equipment) could be shared between locations.
Each location also had SDI/IP adaption to connect SDI equipment to the IP network, and the video was transported between locations using JPEG XS compression. All this functionality was provided by Nevion Virtuoso.
LOGIC, which integrated the system, also performed the tests to establish that the latency between the locations was satisfactory for live production.
The 5G-VIRTUOSA team will be running a webinar on Tuesday 23rd November at 17:00 CEST, to explain the outcome of phase 2 of the project, and lay out the plans for phase 3 (including a call for real life use cases).
More details can be found here: https://5g-virtuosa.eu/exploring-5g/