An Emmy for NMOS

We are delighted to see that another area of our foundational standards work is being recognised by the Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Awards: the BBC, together with the Advanced Media Workflow Association, Sony, and Streampunk Media Ltd., has been presented with an Emmy for Exceptional Achievement in Broadcast Technology for our work on NMOS Discovery, Registration, and Connection. In this article, we’ll take a brief look back at how these specifications came about.

The early days: IP Studio 

At a time when broadcasters relied upon fixed-function hardware and interconnects for live broadcasting, BBC R&D’s IP Studio project explored how things might look if we started from scratch, with a focus on software built upon commodity off-the-shelf servers and IP networks. Thankfully, given decades of work from organisations like the IETF and W3C, this wasn’t a blank slate, even if a number of challenges remained.

After a few years of data modelling and software development, the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow provided an opportunity to showcase what an end-to-end IP-connected broadcast system might look like. Alongside the ability to shift high data rate live UHD video over IP networks, we demonstrated how the senders and receivers of this media could be dynamically discovered on the network. This reduced the need for manual configuration and allowed us to orchestrate where media flowed using simple web browser-based control panels.

These early implementations had their flaws and went on to be refined, but the core concept of dynamic discovery sits at the heart of NMOS today.

Industry engagement and building a community

Following the Commonwealth Games showcase, we demonstrated the IP Studio to vendors and industry contacts, highlighting the core concepts and opportunities, while engaging fully in industry groups as part of the Joint Taskforce on Networked Media (JT-NM), which was outlining what a future networked media ecosystem might mean. Our focus was on a strong underlying data model to represent the media itself, and interoperability between the media devices using that model.

Around the same time, the industry was coming together to develop standards for the carriage, synchronisation, and description of professional media streams over RTP. This led to the AES67 and SMPTE ST 2110 suites of standards. To complement this, BBC R&D led an industry conversation on ‘control plane’ challenges such as discovery of networked media devices and their stream senders and receivers. This happened in the Advanced Media Workflow Association, through a new initiative called the Networked Media Incubator, announced at IBC 2015, and providing a cooperative way for companies to gain hands-on experience using our work and the JT-NM reference architecture as a starting point.

Over the next year, helped by a series of workshops in the UK and Germany, the Incubator team developed version 1.0 of the IS-04 specification onNMOS Registration and Discovery, showcased at IBC 2016. This attracted increased engagement at future workshops across Europe and North America, leading to the development of further NMOS specifications and open-source implementations from the BBC, Sony, and Streampunk Media.

One of the main reasons for discovering devices is to connect media streams between their senders and receivers; IS-04 included a lightweight means to initiate RTP streams between devices, but this had its limitations. The team tackled these in the IS-05 Connection Management API, again led by BBC R&D. This addressed configuration of both sending and receiving devices, alongside handling for broadcast technologies like SMPTE ST 2022-7 resilient streaming and media streaming technologies beyond RTP.

Industry adoption

As adoption of SMPTE ST 2110 for media transport was growing, the JT-NM and EBU were keen for the industry to aim beyond just transport plane compatibility. The development of technical recommendation TR-1001, and the EBU’s technology pyramid set out further interoperability targets, with the aim of simplifying IP deployments for end users. AMWA’s IS-04 and IS-05 formed a key aspect of this.

In order to go beyond simple marketing claims of support for these technologies, this approach was paired with ‘JT-NM Tested’ interoperability events, which let vendors check their implementations for conformance against standards and specifications. BBC R&D supported the control plane testing, and through our development of an automated testing tool for the IS-04 and IS-05 specifications, we ensured that testing could be conducted at scale, with the final event covering over 70 devices and over 150 individual tests.

In the years that have followed, adoption within the industry has accelerated, with NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 support now appearing routinely in devices supporting the SMPTE ST 2110 suite. Alongside this, technology refreshes in broadcast facilities, and new builds (such as the BBC’s own Cardiff Central Square) have benefitted from these technologies and the baseline for day one interoperability that they provide.

NMOS beyond IS-04 and IS-05

The AMWA has continued to develop the NMOS suite of specifications, with many different companies taking the lead in activities to tackle shared problems which require an interoperable solution. This now extends beyond ST 2110 facilities into the ‘Pro-AV’ market, with IS-04 and IS-05 now recommended in the IPMX (IP Media eXperience) suite of specifications. Today, there are 11 specifications and 19 best practice documents covering a wealth of networked media interoperability topics. Of particular interest is recent work on Minimum Status Reporting, providing an effective way of pinpointing problems in live IP facilities and the subject of a popular demonstration at this year’s IBC.

As the industry transitions from dedicated appliances to software-based media functions provisioned on generic compute - as per the EBU’s Dynamic Media Facility vision - the modelling concepts that underpin NMOS are seeing new relevance. For example, BCP-007-03 ‘NMOS Support for MXL’ extends NMOS connection concepts to Media eXchange Layer shared memory environments, while the control model that underpins NMOS Minimum Status Reporting may inform future Dynamic Media Facility architecture.

Summary

As the Emmy award committee noted: “Today, NMOS and SMPTE ST 2110 are widely adopted and have been used in thousands of television productions worldwide, fundamentally advancing the way broadcast media is transported and connected.” Without the interoperability that IS-04 and IS-05 bring, the industry’s transition to networked media facilities would have been significantly held back, and so BBC R&D’s early work on the IP Studio, and leadership of the NMOS initiative have proved invaluable. We are proud to be recognised in this award, which highlights BBC R&D’s ongoing contributions to the industry, aligned to our Royal Charter commitment to share our work with the world.