market in some respects, but broadcasting still remains a specialist business.
IP Connectivity or “In-the-Box” thinking
Back when broadcasters built playout systems with separate boxes interconnected with coax, it was fairly easy to make multi-vendor solutions, glued together in one way or another, as long as you had a good automation system. As we’ve moved towards purely software-based environments, this has become much more of a challenge. It’s interesting how the market talks about the need for standardization in IP with proposals like 2022-6 and TR-03 in the future, as a way for people to build multi-vendor solutions in an IP environment. However, at Pebble, we ask ourselves “why go out over an IP connection and come back in again just to connect to somebody else’s technology when you could do this all in a pure software environment?” Just look at a PC: the OS may be Microsoft, but how many other companies’ technologies are “plugged in” directly and sharing that same hardware, reading directly from shared memory, to accomplish the task of a given workflow? This is indicative of the relationship we have with Pixel Power. Why go out and carry all the compromises of going through an interface like 2022-6 --which is fundamentally SDI done in packets-- when you could exchange pixels in memory between the various applications. In this scenario, out-of-the-box thinking does not always translate to the best idea. So, while IP connectivity between vendors certainly has its place, by the time you are in a playout environment, a lot of the justification for it as an interconnection method akin to SDI starts to go away, because we’re already beyond that with channel-in-a-box type solutions and broadcasters increasingly want to virtualize certain types of channels.
For Pixel Power, our part of that solution is to provide the platform for their render engine to run directly within our own software-defined channel as a software plugin. We have no intention of selling the creative tools or the very complicated workflows that fit around that. We expect Pixel Power still to do that directly with the customer, to train the operators, and give their expert advice. Pixel Power is respected as one of the market leaders in master control graphics so we’ve chosen a very good partner in that respect. This type of partnership is certainly a direction that we will continue to promote, were
we can enable those specialist companies to get their workflows working purely around a software-based playout environment which we can host in Dolphin and in Orca, either locally or in the cloud.
New Levels of Engagement
As we evolve towards IP and SaaS based solutions in broadcasting, relationships between customers and suppliers will need to change. The graph below shows the level of engagement over time between a broadcast vendor and a customer as things move from being discrete boxes connected via SDI, through to IP, and ultimately into virtualization. It attempts to show how the relationship and the level of engagement in that relationship are going to shift dramatically as we move towards virtualized solutions. The dependency of the customer on the supplier, when the only thing you can do to fix a problem has to be done at the core software level, is very different than being able to simply plug in a new device with some coax. The level of support and the level of future
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