Media Without Limitscapability supports a variety of applications for IP content delivery
Media Links, a Technology and Engineering Emmy® Award winner and market leader in media over IP transport solutions, has announced it will demonstrate the transport of 10Gb/s Hitless Data at NAB 2017, booth SU5021. Of particular interest to sports producers and broadcasters across the globe, this new feature for the company’s flagship MD8000 Media over IP transport platform will enable users to take full advantage of the increasing bandwidth available at stadiums and remote venues, providing enhanced data carriage capabilities with the same level of resiliency and robustness as currently experienced with broadcast video and audio services.
“Over the years, we have provided hitless transport of multiple video and audio channels in higher and higher resolution from sports venues back to broadcast and production facilities,” explains Tom Canavan, President of Media Links, Inc. “However, feedback from our clients and also panel discussions with senior sports executives at the Sports Video Group’s annual TranSPORT conference held in New York at the end of 2016, highlighted the growing need for “data, data and yet more data!”
“During live sports, production teams now want up-to-the-minute supplemental content and information to accompany the live transmission of events,” continues Canavan. “This has resulted in a significant demand for the transport of data back and forth between venues and production facilities. Emails, phone, graphic/computer file data transfers are only a small part of the story. Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP) streaming and the need to move massive archived media content has also dramatically increased the demand for robust data connectivity.”
“This necessity is precisely what our new 10Gb/s Hitless Data feature for the MD8000 transport platform now addresses,” confirms Canavan. “It is an exciting and significant industry development, designed as a result of listening and directly responding to the practical requirements of our valued global client base.”
10Gb/s Hitless Data capability provides uninterrupted data transport across long distance networks and is realized by Media Links’ new 8 Port/4 Port x 1GbE line cards operating in conjunction with 10GbE trunk modules on the MD8000 platform. Based on the sequence number and timestamp of individual data packets, any network disturbance is immediately detected, resulting in a seamless switchover to a redundant stream with uninterrupted (Hitless) data transport.
Also being demonstrated at NAB, is the NetGazer® Network Management System, a scalable, graphically oriented software platform that monitors and manages network environments to optimize multi-media service performance. Intuitive interfaces expose service, event and status information, allowing immediate and efficient management of complex, high bandwidth networks. Support and performance for thousands of services, platform independent GUI, non-service affecting software upgrades, and media-optimized ELK stack (for indexing, searching, analyzing and visualizing complex network data) are several of NetGazer’s unique features. All for the purposes of simplifying network operations while quickly isolating, identifying, and remedying network problems. Several NetGazer® editions are available that scale from single studio environments to large enterprise and global networks.
Another display at NAB will showcase a wide area IP Media networking demonstration, highlighting the convergence and seamless transport of the complete suite of broadcast media signals (video, audio and data) onto a comprehensive, distributed IP switch fabric. Media Links’ high-density MDX 4090 IP router will be featured, accommodating up to 96 x 10GbE ports with rapid switching through its MRF (Media Rapid Flow) protocol along with PTP (Precision Timing Protocol) capabilities, all managed through touch panel control software.
Concludes Canavan; “all Media Links solutions deliver on our vision of providing Media Without Limits capability for those applications where quality, performance and reliability are paramount. We continue to leverage our 20+ years of media-over-IP experience to enable workflow as well as cost and bandwidth efficiencies across seamless broadcast IP networks, both globally and locally.”
For further information please see: www.medialinks.com and http://medialinks-events.com/nab2017/
