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This summer season, we witnessed the way forward for broadcasting, and it wasn’t the primary time the Olympics have been concerned. When the Video games have been first held in Tokyo in 1964, it made historical past for being the primary stay televised broadcast. Fifty-seven years later, with the assistance of 6,700 items of Cisco gear, NBC Olympics was capable of ship greater than 7,000 hours of protection throughout a number of platforms. The ingenuity behind the scenes was Cisco serving to energy the primary all-IP manufacturing within the host metropolis for NBC Olympics’ protection of the Video games.
IP networking is a confirmed and sturdy know-how, as evidenced by the IP-based enterprise networks that assist so many companies and organizations. The large good thing about IP is that it permits new workflows that merely aren’t doable with legacy video know-how. These new workflows allow broadcasters to essentially rework how they create and ship content material whereas decreasing their working bills. And so they can do that with out negatively impacting the reliability or real-time supply of content material.
Bettering Capabilities & Visibility
Take into account a workflow like distributed manufacturing (see Determine 1). Historically, all members in a stay broadcast, from these being filmed to these doing the filming, needed to be in the identical location. With distributed manufacturing, every group might be in its personal location. A host or commentator may very well be on one continent whereas athletes are on one other, and the manufacturing staff is but once more elsewhere. This permits for a lighter onsite crew and for manufacturing groups to work of their house manufacturing studios with full entry to all of their common instruments and gear.
Determine 1: A distributed manufacturing workflow permits manufacturing, members, and commentators to be positioned anyplace on the planet.
This was more true than ever for NBC Olympics due to COVID-19. Manufacturing was cut up between crews in Tokyo and workers again at NBC Olympics’ studios in Stamford, New York, Englewood Cliffs, Miami, and Sky Sports activities within the UK. There was elevated significance on having the ability to ship content material again to the video staff for modifying and post-production earlier than being distributed. Reliability, at all times necessary, was much more very important as a result of scale of those Video games.
Delivering Stay Manufacturing
To ship stay manufacturing, the IP community on the IBC needed to assure dependable transport of uncompressed video (SMPTE 2110). Cisco’s Nexus 9000 switches, deployed in a hybrid spine-leaf community, made this doable working with Cisco’s revolutionary Non-Blocking Multicast (NBM) know-how. NBM gives end-to-end bandwidth ensures for all multicast flows with out counting on the normal “equal price, multipath-based” load balancing of move. The pliability of IP ensured that every one flows inside the IBC have been dependable whereas assembly the capability calls for. Together with NBM, the Nexus 9000 switches distributed timing at scale utilizing Precision Time Protocol (PTP). This ensured all endpoints have been at all times in sync with nanosecond precision.
As well as, Cisco Nexus 9000 switches powered by Cisco’s Cloud scale ASICs, supplied granular visibility into vital points of the community, together with monitoring the bitrate of each multicast move and following move paths as alerts travelled by means of the community and streaming all of this info real-time utilizing software program and {hardware} telemetry to Nexus Dashboard Cloth Controller (see Determine 2).
Determine 2: Move analytics monitor the bitrate of each single move within the community.
Simplification and automation have been vital given the stay nature of the Olympics. There wasn’t time for a tech to log right into a change and scan a session log to determine a problem. Utilizing the Nexus Dashboard and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Cloth Controller (NDFC) gave NBC Olympics a single pane of glass method to community administration. Mixed with the granular visibility of Cisco Nexus 9000 switches (see Figures 3 and 4), NDFC supplied real-time insights into community efficiency, all the best way to the applying stage. This allows NBC Olympics to determine and resolve points earlier than they turned issues that may impression the standard of broadcasting.
Determine 3: The Cisco Nexus Dashboard gives move info.
Determine 4: Monitoring precision time protocol efficiency on Cisco Nexus 9000 switches.
Along with rising reliability and simplifying administration, NBC Olympics additionally acknowledged substantial operational financial savings with an all-IP distributed manufacturing method. Whereas COVID-19 necessitated a diminished crew on the bottom in Tokyo, the know-how enabled groups in several international locations or areas to do their work from their house base.
The pliability of all-IP manufacturing additionally permits community and manufacturing funding for use in several occasions all over the world. This reduces the general carbon footprint of all the business and create long-term operational financial savings whereas optimizing workflows.
“The know-how itself, the community, the connectivity, the bandwidth—all of it labored flawlessly. It was not one thing we needed to troubleshoot. We have been capable of concentrate on the product. In Video games previous, there’s often been some sort of anomaly or one thing that’s impacted us, that’s hampered our skill to concentrate on different points of the manufacturing. Our Cisco applied sciences, companies and assist labored flawlessly in these Video games.” — Dan Robertson, VP NBC Olympics IT
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