SDN solution will enable distributed production between the broadcaster’s two main locations

Nevion, award-winning provider of virtual media production infrastructure, announced that TV 2 (www.tv2.no), the largest commercial television broadcaster in Norway, has selected Nevion to provide the IP-based software defined network (SDN) solution that will connect studios, control rooms and data-centers within and between the broadcaster’s two main production facilities. The solution, which is part of TV 2’s move to IP across the production workflow, will enable the broadcaster to make better use of production talent, equipment and locations.

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TV 2 is planning to move to brand new production facilities in Norway’s second-largest city, Bergen, in 2017. The new facilities in Media City Bergen (MCB) will be IP-based, with an SDN core network for all live production and broadcast routing requirements, and multiple vendors providing a mix of standards-based native IP and existing baseband equipment. The MCB facility will also be connected via IP to another new all-IP facility located in the Norwegian capital, Oslo (460km/290 miles away). A key objective of the project is to gain flexibility and efficiency in live production by enabling any control room to be used with any studio across both locations, and by sharing processing capabilities located in the data centers.

The solution provided by Nevion is the SDN IP media core network under the control of Nevion’s orchestration software, VideoIPath. The software will be used both for connection management and monitoring.

The network at MCB is based on a distributed spine-leaf architecture, with Cisco Nexus 100G spine switches at the core and Nevion eMerge 10GE and 40GE switches deployed as redundant top or rack leaf switches.

Nevion Virtuoso software-driven media nodes will be used to provide adaptation, processing and monitoring of uncompressed and compressed signals for in-facility adaptation requirements. Virtuoso will also provide JPEG 2000 encoding and uncompressed transport between Bergen and Oslo. High availability is ensured by using dual path network transport with SMPTE 2022-7 seamless IP protection switching (SIPS) for all media streams.

Media transport within the facilities will be based initially on SMPTE 2022-6 for video and AES67 for audio, all synchronized to PTP, with a migration to SMPTE 2110 planned in due course once the standard is ratified.

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Ole Johan Skogheim, Lead Systems Architect at TV 2, explains: “We saw our move to new facilities as an opportunity to rethink how we produced content. We could have taken the safe route of building a baseband infrastructure, but the benefits of moving to IP in terms of flexibility and cost effectiveness were compelling. Nevion proved to us that the technology has reached sufficient maturity to support our needs. Obviously Nevion’s wealth of IP experience gained in contribution combined with their leading role in shaping IP standards and architectures for the facilities were key in our decision to opt for Nevion’s products and services.”

Johnny Dolvik, Nevion’s Chief Product and Development Officer, concludes: “What TV 2 is doing is cutting-edge, and the industry should look at this as a blue-print of how a standards-based IP can transform broadcast production. We are obviously extremely proud to be part of this exciting project.”

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