Asia-Pacific Broadcasting (APB) ConneXxion Forum 2016 Special Report | Page 3

Empowering Broadcasters to Embrace IP

BROADCASTERS URGED TO
ADOPT HYBRID APPROACH TO IP
Any technology transition can be unsettling, particularly for the broadcast industry.
Do legacy systems have to be replaced, and at what cost? Do staff need to be
trained or re-trained, and perhaps most importantly, how can the transition allow
broadcasters to better connect with their audiences?
At this year’s APB ConneXxion Forum, broadcasters, led by a panel of experts,
attempted to answer some of the burning questions relating to the IP transition, and
to chart the most effective road to embrace IP.

A panel consisting of, from left, the ABU’s Dr Amal Punchihewa,
SAM’s Tim Felstead, Nagra’s Stéphane Le Dreau and IABM’s Stan
Moote shared their views and expert opinions on how the broadcast
industry can make a successful transition to IP.

T

he transition to broadcast IP is inevitable, and for
all intents and purposes, is already under way. This
development, however, is unlikely to push SDI into
obsolescence; on the contrary, SDI still has a key role to play
in today’s broadcast infrastructures.
This was the general consensus agreed upon by
speakers and attendees after a number of thoughtprovoking and insightful discussions at the APB ConneXxion
Forum 2016 on the theme of “Empowering Broadcasters to
Embrace IP”.
Driven by an increasingly connected world that is
expected to consist of 50 billion Internet devices by 2020,
the concepts of networked function virtualisation (NFV) and
software-defined networking (SDN) have begun to ingrain
themselves onto the consciousness of broadcasters and
operators, suggested Mock Pak Lum, CTO of Singapore’s
StarHub.
Presenting the forum’s keynote address at the Suntec
Convention & Exhibition Centre, Singapore, on May 30, he
said: “Today, we are seeing a data explosion where everyone
is downloading data all the time, and not just pictures, but
also videos. Everything is also moving towards the cloud.
“Moving forward, many broadcast/network functions will

www.apb-news.com

be virtualised and SDNs are likely to be the norm.”
For StarHub, the journey to IP has taken on an
accelerated path, as the telecom and pay-TV operator
continues to re-locate its cable-TV headend to STT
MediaHub, a software-defined centre located in Singapore’s
Mediapolis technology hub.
This will progressively take place from Q3 this year and
the wider strategy, revealed Mock, is to migrate StarHub’s
TV network into a virtualised playout and video-over-IP
environment by 2020.
Despite StarHub’s desire to “push IP across as quickly as
possible”, he concurred with Stan Moote, CTO of the IABM,
who maintained that SDI has yet to run its course.
Mock added: “In the planning process, I asked: Can we
go all-IP? I wanted to save money, I didn’t want so many
copper wires, and I wanted to simplify the processes. But no,
we cannot go all-IP, at least not yet, because this will be very
costly, and many factors are not in place yet.”
For instance, while a StarHub test found a hardwarebased encoder and virtualised encoder offering the same
latency, it takes too long to switch over from a virtualised
box to another, said Mock. “By 2020, we can plausibly go
all-IP, but we will still need to live with a hybrid of SDI and IP
for a number of years to come.
“From a broadcast standpoint, we cannot take the risk of
going all-IP now.
“While IP can potentially reduce Capex and Opex in the
long term, in many parts of the world, including Asia, SDI still
has a role to play because of the investments that have been
made, and of course, the resiliency of the technology, which
has been stable for many, many years.”
Take advantage of the certainties offered by SDI, and
push ahead with the hybrid approach, but carefully plan a
transition path, advised Tim Felstead, head of marketing,
Snell Advanced Media (SAM). “The trick is to seek out a
solution that allows you to get from points A to B while
avoiding the technical and financial risks.
“If you invest in an SDI infrastructure, are you going

“The TV industry has faced continuous
disruptions over the past decade, as new
ways of consuming content emerge,
including consumers accessing content
through apps.”
1