IP Everywhere
Part 1: Focus on Sports Venues

It’s no longer a question of whether IP is the path forward or if it’s only suitable for tier-1 broadcasters or large projects. The panelists all agreed that IP is the future — and it’s well on the way to achieving true democratization.

With IT networks delivering amazing speeds and a wide range of switches available — whether three 200Gb ports are needed or 32 400Gb ports — ST 2110 has found a home in a wide range of applications of varying sizes, including sports stadiums.

John Mailhot described the industry’s current perspective on IP this way: “It’s really moved from ‘This only works for big projects,” to ‘This really works out for almost every project.’ It’s great to see that story arc to where IP is now a mainstream technology.”

In the media industry, nothing is really day-to-day anymore — producers shake things up on a regular basis. For engineering departments still working in baseband, that often means explaining that the router is full and that a new request can’t be fulfilled.

With IP, there are no such constraints. You can deploy your network, change your network, increase the capacity, decommission endpoints — all with a click of a few buttons.

Aron Kennedy provided great color commentary on IP in action. He said that while the setup at State Farm Stadium is fairly consistent for each Arizona Cardinals game, when the stadium hosts other events — which can vary dramatically in size — the system must be able to pivot between their different needs very quickly. IP provides that flexibility.

Case in point: For the Men’s Final Four NCAA Tournament, which took place at State Farm Stadium this year, Ian Cobb and the Alpha team were able to easily add 64 channels to the stadium’s system in 20 minutes by simply utilizing a few more 100Gb ports on an existing switch.

The panelists agreed that in even the smallest of projects, it simply makes economic sense to use IP — especially as the industry moves to UHD. In addition, the cost of switches will only continue to drop, while their capacity will continue to double every 18 to 24 months.

Redundancy was also a critical consideration among these panelists, who are all well experienced in the business of live production. As Aron Kennedy put it, “You can’t fail in these events. You just can’t fail.” Here too, IP is the right economic choice.

Today, redundancy is built into almost every ST 2110 device, and you simply stack switches to achieve full end-to-end redundancy. Ian Cobb drove the IP economics point home, saying, “In the baseband world, it would require a lot more heavy metal to pull that off.”