SMPTE Releases First Standards for Media over Managed IP Networks

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Fri, 12/08/2017 - 11:22 -- Nick Dager

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers today announced the publication of the first standards within SMPTE ST 2110, Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks.

SMPTE ST 2110 is a new standards suite that specifies the carriage, synchronization, and description of separate elementary essence streams over professional internet protocol networks in real-time for the purposes of live production, play-out, and other professional media applications. The following documents are now available in the SMPTE digital library:

SMPTE ST 2110-10/-20/-30 — addressing system concerns and uncompressed video and audio streams

SMPTE ST 2110-21 — specifying traffic shaping and delivery timing of uncompressed video

"Professional media is a uniquely challenging field because of its real-time nature and high quality-of-service requirements, both of which consumers may take for granted," said SMPTE president Matthew Goldman, senior vice president of technology, TV and media at Ericsson. "The standardization of SMPTE ST 2110 documents provides broadcasters, producers, and media technology suppliers with the tools they need to meet these requirements while working in the IP realm."

With SMPTE ST 2110 standards, intra-facility traffic now can be all-IP, which means that organizations can rely on one common data center infrastructure rather than two separate facilities for SDI and IP switching/routing. The foundation for the first SMPTE ST 2110 standards came from the Video Services Forum Technical Recommendation for Transport of Uncompressed Elementary Stream Media Over IP (TR-03), which VSF agreed to make available to SMPTE as a contribution toward the new suite of standards.

SMPTE ST 2110 standards make it possible to separately route and break away the essence streams — audio, video, and ancillary data. This advance simplifies, for example, the addition of captions, subtitles, and teletext, as well as tasks such as the processing of multiple audio languages and types. Each essence flow may be routed separately and brought together again at the endpoint. Each of the component flows — audio, video, and ancillary data (there may be multiple streams of each type) — is synchronized, so the essence streams are co-timed to one another while remaining independent.

SMPTE is currently developing a dedicated course on ST 2110 for its Virtual Classroom, which will be offered beginning in February 2018.