Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to this broadcast to post episode of the next phase of SMPTE ST2110. I'm your host Michael Kammes. Now we're hosting this episode because KeyCode Media works closely with broadcasters, sports organizations and media production teams and as a systems integrator, helping to design and deploy flexible IP based production environments across control rooms, studios, routing, networking and hybrid SDI and 2110 workflows. We're proud to have supported recent 2110 transitions for Denver7, AZPM and others and hopefully your organization in the future.
We're kicking things off with a short explainer called ST2110 is getting cheaper Looking at why the cost and complexity of moving to IP may finally be starting to come down, we'll then move to our keynote roundtable with Jamie Higginbotham, Principal Architect, Advanced Systems at blackmagic Design, and Steve Dupay, Senior Director of Broadcast innovation here at KeyCode Media to tackle the big question, is SMPTE ST2110 becoming more affordable and accessible for smaller production teams in 2026? We'll also look at what's changing around cost, hybrid SDI and IP workflows, and the barriers that have traditionally kept 2110 limited to larger broadcast environments.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: Let's get into it.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: For years when we Talked about SMPTE ST2110, we were usually talking about major enterprise broadcasters, sports networks, production trucks and large facilities with big IP networks and equally big budgets. And that made sense. ST2110 gives us the flexibility of IP, but it also asks us to deal with PTP timing, multicast nmos, high bandwidth switching, monitoring redundancy, and a different engineering skill set than traditional SDI. But something important is changing. 21.110 itself isn't suddenly cheap. What's changing is that you can now build a practical 2110 system at a much smaller scale and at a much lower cost. And that's starting to make 2110 relevant to mid to small broadcasters, universities, corporate government houses of worship, sports and general Pro av Number one, the network switch is now more affordable. Historically, building an ST2110 network often meant investing in enterprise class switching from manufacturers like Arista, where a switch for a professional media network could easily cost $30,000 or more. And that's starting to change. AV focused switches from manufacturers like Netgear are bringing the networking capabilities needed for smaller 2110 systems into a much lower price range. For example, several models in the Netgear M4250 line cost under $2,000, creating a much more practical entry point for a six camera corporate studio, university house of worship or a smaller production facility. We're seeing AV oriented managed switches with multicast QoS and PTP capabilities. And we're also seeing system designs where one 10 or 25 gig endpoints can be selected based on the actual signal load. Now that doesn't mean a 2000 netgear switch replaces a $30,000 plus Arista in a large broadcast plant, but it does mean smaller productions may may no longer need the giant switch in the first place.
Number two compressed ST2110 is making bandwidth manageable.
The second change is compression. ST2110 20 is our uncompressed video path. It gives us excellent quality and very low latency, but it uses a ton of bandwidth.
ST2110 22 gives us a standardized transport for constant bitrate compressed video.
JPEG XS is one of the most important codecs being used in that environment.
It's designed around very low latency and visually lossless production quality rather than the heavy compression we normally associate with delivery codecs like H264 or HEVC.
And that matters because reducing bandwidth can mean smaller switches, fewer high speed ports, fewer expensive optics, and more places where copper Ethernet becomes practical.
The key distinction is that 211022 is the compressed transport and JPEG XS is the codec that we can use with it. They're not the same thing. Number three IPMX brings the model into Pro AV.
This is also where IPMX or Internet Protocol media experience gets interesting. IPMX builds on the professional media over IP ecosystem including 2110 and NMOS, but targets requirements that matter, such as specifically in Pro AV that includes compressed and uncompressed operation, easier discovery and connection management, security and operation over more conventional commercial ethernet networks. With JPEG XS class compression, high quality 4K signals can move at data rates that fit into much smaller networks than uncompressed uhd.
That makes standards based IP much more realistic for a university studio, council chamber, corporate production room, performing arts center or houses of worship. So I wouldn't describe IPMX as a competitor to 2110. I describe it as one of the ways that 2110 and NMOS ecosystem is expanding into the larger AV market.
Control now has multiple levels. The next cost area is control.
In a large facility you still need serious orchestration.
Evs, Cerebrum, Everts Magnum, Grass Valley Orbit, lavohohohman VSM Nevian Video IP Path and imagine Magellan can hide network complexity and give operators familiar source to destination workflows. Cerebrum and Magellan are especially useful examples because they can sit across hybrid SDI and IP environments. That's important for facilities that aren't replacing everything on day one. But a six camera production room may not need enterprise orchestration at that level. Tools such as BitFocus Companion and a Stream deck can handle operator macros, camera presets, recorder starts, graphics triggers and basic routing control for very little money. Those products are certainly not substitutes for Cerebrum, Magellan, Magnum or Orbit. They're a different control tier, and that's really the theme here. We're getting more choices so we can match the control system to the actual job number 5 switchers now have real 2110 price tiers production switching may be the clearest example of the market changing at the enterprise end. Platforms such as the Grass Valley K Frame RAW Security and Sony XVS series continue to serve demanding broadcast applications where processing scale redundancy, sophisticated control services integration and 247 support justify systems that can reach well into six figures, such as the Grass Valley Carrera K Frame 2 ME system. With a price tag of about $150,000, the Panasonic Kairos Core 200 ATK C200 creates a flexible middle tier with a published msrp of approximately $69,000 for the core. Its software defined architecture and native 2110 capabilities make Kairos particularly attract regional broadcast sports, universities, corporate production fly packs and multi room facilities.
And blackmagic has significantly lowered the entry point with the ATEM IV ME Constellation IP at 8795 providing native 2110, 32 inputs and 32 outputs and 100 gig connectivity. Now these aren't equivalent switchers, and that's the point. 2110Production switching now spans value flexible mid tier and enterprise platforms, allowing the technology to be matched to the production requirement and budget rather than being an almost exclusively premium broadcast decision. Okay, now that's our top five. And really, while we broke it down into five areas, the main reason 2110 is becoming more accessible to other markets is pretty simple. It's gotten cheaper and easier to deploy.
Either way, we hope this helps.
How did we do? Did we miss anything? Would you add anything? Would you add another vendor that's driving the price down? Feel free to let us know in the comments. And if you're looking to build out a TV studio control room, AV system or a production system, the nationwide systems integration experts at Keycode Media are ready to help. Contact us for more information.
All right, we're now moving into our guest interview, part of the podcast for context. For years, ST2110 has largely been associated with major broadcasters and large enterprise facilities. But is that starting to change? Is 2110 becoming more affordable and accessible for smaller production teams? And can organizations start making the transition of without having to completely rebuild their existing facility?
To help us answer those questions, we're joined by Jamie Higginbotham, Principal Architect, Advanced Systems at blackmagic Design, and our very own Steve Dupe, our Senior Director of broadcast innovation at KeyCode Media.
All right, let's get into the big
[00:09:53] Speaker A: topic we're trying to address.
[00:09:54] Speaker B: Is ST2110 becoming more accessible to smaller production teams? And let's start with you, Jamie. What's your thought on that?
[00:10:01] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean part of it comes down to if you can't afford the technology, you can't buy the technology, right? So as the price of 2110 starts to come down, it becomes available to more and more groups that want to utilize the next gen technology.
I liken this a lot to the transition between analog to Digital in the mid-90s. Right. It started off with really, really big broadcasters. At first you had Digibeta, it was, it was very hard to approach. It was millions and millions of dollars. And then over many years that price came down and now arguably SDI is the standard that, you know, prosumers consumer, not consumers, but prosumers and broadcasters use. And we're going to start seeing that exact same transition inside of 2110. We're actually starting to see it now. You know, keep in mind, 2110 has been around for nearly a decade now. So we're starting to see these prices come down into a price point that's achievable by mere mortals.
[00:10:55] Speaker D: That's exactly right. And in fact, one of the interesting things with this is that the original goals of moving to an IP based or IT based type of production element or technology for the infrastructure is that the convenience of simpler plug and play operation, the use of IT centric cabling fiber, that type of thing, COTS based servers, all those things are really coming to the fore now and driving those costs down and making it far more convenient.
One of the biggest factors is you don't have to have as many cables to hook the thing up to be able to accomplish the task. And for integration work, whether it's in a fixed facility or in a fly pack system that's going to be used on the road that offers a lot of reduction in integration costs, manual labor costs, all those kinds of things. So it's becoming much more affordable on that side as well as just the equipment.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: With so many different organizations and verticals
[00:11:58] Speaker A: integrating video into what they do, there's gotta be some kind of footprint or something that you look for that says this is a great use case for 2110.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: So Steve, what types of organizations or
[00:12:09] Speaker A: production environments are starting to seriously consider it that may not have done so even a few years ago?
[00:12:15] Speaker D: So it's primarily centered around the routing infrastructure. And that's because that's where all the Gazindas and Gazadas come from. And if you can reduce the cable count and reduce the cost of scaling up, scaling down, adjusting the system, that's a big deal. We no longer are faced with a 2110 system with kind of those cross point limitations where you have to go to a much larger frame or multiple frames in order to expand the system so you can actually start out small. We're doing an integration right now of a core routing system with everything else saying sdi, but by changing it, these guys are going to be able to scale from a 128 square system up to whatever they need it to be in the future without having to replace their core infrastructure. They've just got to add switch fabric.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: So I hate to reduce everything to
[00:13:02] Speaker A: cost, but obviously that's a big factor in doing any kind of upgrades or changes to your facility. So aside from cost, which blackmagic obviously is being very aggressive with, Jamie, what else is part of Blackmagic's strategy on getting 2110 into the hands of more folks?
[00:13:19] Speaker C: It's gotta be simple too, right?
A lot of people think of 2110 as being very expensive and very complicated. You know, you gotta think about your PTP clocks and like how all of your topology is gonna work and like a really network centric and IT approach, which is partly true. But how do we remove those barriers to entry? How do we make it so that it's much more like a traditional SDI workflow where you just plug it in and, and video starts to flow? I think that's one of the keys, is that every box has a PTP grandmaster clock on it. So doesn't matter if you're doing point to point, doesn't matter if you're in a larger switch fabric, doesn't matter how you're doing it. You're always in a situation where you can get video to flow from point A to point B. Simply and easily just like a traditional baseband SDI workflow. I think that's one of the key elements right now is that, and really it is price, right? Bringing those prices down and making it very, very simple.
[00:14:14] Speaker D: Yeah, I love the simple operation part of it because that's what really makes it easy to access to the broadest range of the market. And there's a lot of efforts going on to accomplish that.
The new standards on ipmx within 2110 is targeted at doing some of that for the AV world.
It's simpler to set up the PTP Master and operate the system kind of standalone from a traditional large scale type of system. And that that ease of use is really going to drive it forward. And there's lots of competition that's helping to drive that as well. The way DANTE works, the way NDI works, all those things are driving this, this 2110 adoption towards that, that type of operational capability.
[00:15:03] Speaker B: If we talk a little bit more
[00:15:04] Speaker A: about the cost, because there's always the kind of the hidden cost that you don't see when you first go into these kind.
[00:15:11] Speaker B: So Steve, what are some of the
[00:15:11] Speaker A: other costs that customers sometimes don't anticipate? You already mentioned P2P and master clocks, but what are some other things that folks just aren't thinking about?
[00:15:21] Speaker D: So one of the things that kind of bites you is the cost of getting just a handful of things into the system.
In the transition from analog to digital and from SD to hd, we ended up with all these little converter boxes and converter systems and modular pieces that made it possible to do that, but that really drove the cost up. One of the key advantages of an IP centric platform is that if you can aggregate audio and video signals together onto a common transport media, for example, a 25 gig fiber pair, then you can keep the cost down and still get the inputs and outputs that you need. And people like blackmagic and others are starting to really address that. That kind of mid, middle, middle of the road type of approach where you've got just a handful of things that you need to get in or get out and aggregate them onto a single connection point so that now you're running a single fiber connection out to an endpoint to get the camera signals in or the remote production things in that you need.
That's where the biggest cost is. The other thing is a change in the infrastructure because now we're talking about high speed data transfers and traditional Cat 6 copper, Cat 7 copper isn't going to cut it, particularly on some of These long, you know, really long runs. So understanding how to manage fiber, how to, how to terminate it, how to fix it when it, when it breaks, that's another hidden cost. You got to kind of be prepared to do that. But there again, the IT world is driving those costs down. You can now get inexpensive fusion kits or repair kits for under $100 so that it's easy to fix the fiber. It's easy to make the fiber more easy than it's been in a very long time. Plus the armored cable is now much more affordable and available.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: A common topic we've had here over the past year has been the notion of upskilling. Right. Is that making sure that we're taking care of our engineers who need to upskill to be in this new world. And so Jamie, I was kind of
[00:17:32] Speaker B: curious because blackmagic has done such a
[00:17:35] Speaker A: job with free seminars and webinars on things like Resolve, what is kind of the company ethos on helping folks to upskill, moving from baseband to 2110. And that also plays into the cost discussion because there's always a cost of upskilling as well.
[00:17:51] Speaker C: It depends on how you're looking at it. Right. So one of the advantages of 2110 is you can use existing IT teams to kind of help bring you into this IT centric workflow for everything.
That's assuming you need to even need to do that. Right. So if you're keeping it as a self contained 2110 infrastructure, it is kind of plug and play. So if you understand how baseband SDI works, you'll generally understand how 2110 works with a little bit of knowledge updates and you can grab that like from our forums or from many different places on the Internet to like get that slight additional information tweak necessary for, you know, we'll call it mid and small market 2110 installs. Now once you start getting into larger installs, yeah, you're going to, you're going to need a little bit more of an IT centric approach. And that's where you can just lean on existing IT teams to help bring that kind of network topology portion up.
[00:18:44] Speaker D: That's that. That's exactly it. And one of the cool things about blackmagic is they do have a lot of video content out there to help you understand how things work. And they're direct. And I, I don't, I don't want to use the word simple as a negative. It's actually really good because it, it keeps it to the basics. You can kind of get the basic information that you need and get the job done.
There's some times when I go look at their content to get a better approach to help explain some of it to some of the concepts and technologies to people that maybe aren't up to speed on it. And here's where some of the magic happens is if you find a guy that or gal that just loves to do gaming stuff, put their computers together, kind of has a little bit of a flair for audio and video.
They're the right kinds of people to kind of pick up on this kind of stuff. And it's amazing how quickly they configure all this stuff out and make it work.
So this next generation of very computer savvy technical people that are involved in live production or in gaming, those kinds of things, they're already highly skilled in making things work together and kind of figuring it out. So there's a new cadre of people coming up that are going to be really sharp and capable of doing this going forward.
[00:20:04] Speaker C: Sorry. I would argue it's current generation actually because you look at like comm systems and audio systems, they've been IP for quite a while. So if you're an engineer in charge on a production, you've already been doing this with pretty much everything but video. All we're doing is adding the video. When I say we, the industry is adding video into that using ST2110.
[00:20:25] Speaker D: You're right. And I'm kind of giving my age away there a little bit. It is the current generation.
[00:20:32] Speaker A: A common misconception around 21.110 is that adopting it means you have to kind of rip out your existing SDI infrastructure. Right. It's either one or the other. So Jamie, I'm curious how blackmagic is kind of approaching that and saying no, they can coexist and you can incorporate 21.11 10 into an existing BAS facility.
[00:20:51] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean they're going to have to live together for quite some time. You don't just jump from one technology stack to another technology stack overnight. You've got large investments in existing baseband sdi. It does not make sense to throw that away now. If you're building a brand new facility, you would want to look at 2110 out of the gate. I think price points make sense now. Technology stacks make sense now. It's simple now. But if you most people aren't building a brand new facility, they're trying to keep up with the technology and kind of add it in bit by bit and that's where you, you kind of start again analog to digital. It's the similar transition where we're just going from digital to ip. So you're going to start with little adapters and you're going to bring them in maybe eight by eight at a time. So you've got ST2110 that's coming in through a converter that's doing eight channels into your router and eight channels back out of your router that goes into a 2110 fabric and then that fabric can extend out to wherever you want. So now you've combined your 2110 and your baseband into your existing facility. And so you can be a little bit of both. What you'll find I think, is that at that point 2110 won't be as hard or as complex or as cost prohibitive as you think it is, at least as it traditionally has been. And you'd be like, oh, this is actually kind of cool. This is very powerful. I can do a lot more with this. There are a lot of technology legs to go here, so let's start adding more boxes. And you'll find that your 2110 infrastructure starts to grow more and more and more. And eventually the 2110 infrastructure will be larger than the baseband infrastructure and they'll flip around and you'll be feeding baseband and will get smaller and smaller and smaller. And then eventually it'll just be hanging out in Iraq. Like, can we still. Do we still have one of those old SDI routers somewhere? Right? And that will take several years, but you start with a simple, you know, eight by eight and then you move up from there and you just grow as your needs grow.
[00:22:46] Speaker D: That's a, that's a really good summation of where to look at it.
Generally the breakpoints that, that I use when I'm doing design and we kind of do this throughout. Key code is if, if you're going to have a fixed system that's never going to grow much beyond 32 or 64 square in terms of your, your, your inputs on video, you probably are going to save a lot more money for the next 10 years staying with SDI. If you have a large number of cameras or sources that are currently SDI and you're not looking to change those anytime soon, it's probably better to stay in sdi. If, however, you are a new enterprise or you're a live production house or a corporate user, educate high end educational user, you're going to want to change out the gear faster you have a shorter refresh cycle. Those are the times when you kind of want to take a, a very close look at it. Little contained systems for, for government, that kind of thing. They can stay SDI for, for quite a while.
If you're going to scale up though at all and you go beyond that 32, 64 square range, that's an absolute breakover point where 2110 really gives starts to give you an advantage.
[00:24:03] Speaker A: I love that, that kind of rule of thumb, that break point. Because I think that's what a lot of folks who are thinking about 2110 are looking for. Those kind of lines in the sand to say if this, then do that. So let's kind of keep on that a little bit.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: Let's keep this a little bit more practical.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: What does a mid sized Blackmagic 2110 facility actually look like?
[00:24:23] Speaker B: We don't need part numbers, but I'd be curious to know what kind of
[00:24:26] Speaker A: parts and pieces from a kind of a block would you be recommending clients look into?
[00:24:32] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean at this point we can kind of go glass to glass inside of a 2110 setup. So you're going to start, I'll kind of compare it to existing baseband SDI so you kind of have a parallel to what the new version in 2110 would be. So in a baseband world, in an SDI world you would be working with a video router. Right. We'll call it a 32 squared SDI router. In 2110 that's just your network switch. So for us we've got a 100 gig network switch. You would buy one of those, it's one rack unit and that network switch is eight 100 gig ports. So that would be actually a 64 squared system. You could look at it that way in UHD 59. Then you're going to want some cameras. So those are pretty simple. You just drop some 2110 cameras directly on your fabric. You probably want to be able to record that. So you're going to want a 2110 hyperdeck recorder. So you just drop that into your switch and each one of these is just 100 gig port. Or in the case of the cameras, those are 10 gigs. So you need to convert from, from 100 gigs to 10 gigs. And so we've got expanders for that that let you studio bridges for that that let you go from 100 gig networks to 810 gig networks with power. So that's your camera, that's your router, that's your recorder. And Then your last step for live at least would likely be your video switcher. So we've got an ATEM Constellation IP and that would let you do also all of your video switching, your compositing overlays and things like that. And that is a very well. And then you're going to want to get to your monitor. Let's not forget monitoring. Right? Because in that ecosystem we didn't get it up to a monitor. So then you've got your little 2110 to HDMI media converters and we also have 2110 to SDI media converters in and out. So that gets you up to your screens, that gets computers into the system, that gets cameras into the system, into the fabric, gets you 64 squared pretty easily out of the gate. You don't have to really worry about PTP clocks or anything like that. That's all included. So you're all set and you're pretty much good to go. And the nice thing about this is a lot fewer rack units to get started with something like this because your routers can be smaller to your earlier point. We don't have nearly as much cabling.
Everything gets smaller, everything is less heat, it's front to back airflow. So it's just a much sleeker configuration inside of your engineering or IDF room.
[00:26:54] Speaker D: That's exactly it. The reduction in the amount of gear that's needed to accomplish the task, the number of interconnections that are needed is radically reduced.
If you look at what you can put on a single 100 gig pipe.
And you have to keep in mind, it's funny, I did this the other day with an engineer here. It's both directions. So that 100 gig pipe is your inputs and your outputs.
It's a huge reduction in the amount of cabling infrastructure that you need. This is why for fly pack kinds of systems or systems that you may need to move every now and then, it's really becoming an ideal solution. And I just love what blackmagic has done to bring this to the fore with the kind of setup that was just described. It's really an advantage if you've got a studio that you got to move around or if you're doing live production work.
It's wonderful to be able to do that quickly and easily.
[00:27:50] Speaker A: I want to go back a little bit to we talked about kind of upskilling earlier and how there's the current generation of engineers who already have a decent amount of experience with IP based technology and then upskilling for perhaps more seasoned Engineers who come from the baseband world. But there's gotta be a path for folks who are interested in getting into this line of work, not just taking the, let's say, information they've gleaned from gaming, as you brought up, Steve. But there's got to be some way of educating on this technology. So where would you recommend that people go or things they should look into to kind of get a leg up on the competition if they're looking for a career in this field with the emergence of 2110, so there's a number
[00:28:37] Speaker D: of paths that you can take. There are lots of classes that are available from smpte.
They tend to be fairly technical and you kind of really get down into the nuts and bolts of it.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: SMPTE's technical.
I want to make sure this is,
[00:28:50] Speaker A: we all understand this is breaking news here.
[00:28:52] Speaker D: Yeah, they're technical, they're pretty involved because they're coming from a more traditional engineering standpoint. What I found is really helpful is the training classes provided by vendors such as blackmagic where they give you enough of the technical stuff that you understand what's going on, but they also give you the real world application portions of it that maybe sometimes get missed in the more direct technical sympathy training. So there's a blend of things that are available out there to do that. There's also educational services like what Key Code Media has, where we can kind of bring you along and get you the information that you need without being overwhelmed with certification, level of training and that type of thing.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: And for folks who haven't looked into
[00:29:39] Speaker A: kind of the SMPTE documentation, you may have heard that earlier this year SMPTE announced that they were going to make a majority, if not all of their standards, public.
So you no longer need a subscription to read up on those technical documents. So I recommend checking that out.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Jamie and Steve, if you were to
[00:29:57] Speaker A: take a poll of prospective clients looking into 2110, obviously there's going to be some verticals that are going to be more, shall we say, an easier lift to go to 2110.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: So is it house of worship? Is it broadcast? Is it corporate?
[00:30:14] Speaker D: What.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: What kind of vertical are you seeing
[00:30:16] Speaker A: that may be more amiable to moving to 2110?
[00:30:21] Speaker C: Well, I'll start us off and say I think Large Broadcast has already been on 2110 for quite some time.
Large Broadcast got to the point where SDI routers just could not scale to the size that they needed and they had no choice. So we've seen large broadcasting 2110 forever. And I think that's a lot of where people look at 2110 and they go, oh, that's just for large broadcasters. That's for those, you know, multi, multimillion dollar facilities. It's for huge NEP trucks is for all of this really, really big stuff. And it is, it is for that. But now it is coming down into other markets at this exact moment in time. It's going to be, I mean, you kind of hit the nail on the head. Is like House of Worship is a great use case. I think conferences is another great use case. One thing we haven't Talked about in 2110 that it offers that baseband SDI does not offer is redundancy. So you can have red blue fiber lines going either side of the stage. So if you have a fiber break or if you have a line break or someone drives a vehicle over one of your lines, you're still online. And that's something that never happens, ever. Ten minutes prior to going live, ever. No one's ever experienced that. So it's a really nice advantage of 2110 is you can have a full red blue architecture. So you've got a primary and a backup and it's a seamless cut over from one to the other. So you get a fiber break. Nope. As long as your fibers don't have your fiber in parallel paths down the same conduit, break it apart, go up either sides of the stage. Makes tons of sense for corporate events.
All of these things that's starting to actually start to make sense for over time. Over the next five to 10 years, I think it's going to be pretty much anything that's SDI today will transition over to 2110 where it will make way more sense to be on 2110 than it is SDI. Just like today, it makes more sense to be on SDI than it does like a component analog signal. Because you gotta like, you're like, oh man, where am I gonna find that adapter? I don't even know anymore, right? You're gonna have a similar problem in five to 10 years. Where do I, oh man, where do I find that SDI adapter? Who's making something like that anymore? It's going to trans the whole marketplace. All of the verticals are going to Transition over to 2110.
[00:32:33] Speaker D: That's exactly right. And it's, it's, it's because again, folks like blackmagic that are making simple solutions that have all this aggregation built into them that enable you to use cabling infrastructure that is much lighter, more condensed and I keep using that term, aggregation, disaggregation, all that built into fewer cables. It's the same thing that the audio world experienced years ago as they went IP centric. The digital snake replaced these heavy cables that you had to drag around. I now have people I work with that they pull one reel of maybe three or four pairs of fiber in an armored jacket.
It's 4, 500 meters long and they're hooking up everything up, their video, their audio, their lighting control, their, their KVM stuff, everything is over that. Those, those, those fiber links into a common switch that they vlan the, the amount of reduction in gear that they physically have to drag around is, has, has, it's, it's, it's amazing how much smaller and more compact it is, how much faster they are, how much more adaptable they are to customer needs on the fly. They can just add stuff as long as they have it with them in a whole lot easier way. And again, this new toolkit that Blackmagic has with Atem, with all the other products that are now 2110 centric, it's going to bring all of those capabilities to the fore.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: One topic we haven't discussed has been orchestration. And we've had a very robust orchestration with traditional analog and baseband workflows.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: But let's talk a little bit about
[00:34:07] Speaker A: orchestration as it applies to 2110.
[00:34:10] Speaker D: Biggest bugaboo that we found with 2110 is that it's not just ST2110, you also have to have the orchestration layer. And the NWOS portion has been slow to develop the user interfaces again because it's an open standard and everybody's going to try and do their own thing.
And those orchestration layers have been developed by big companies like EVS, Everts, Lavo, etc.
I got, I got to mention, imagine there they were, they were focused on the high end portion of it, right?
And so NMOS spent lots of time making those guys happy. And Dante did the opposite. They were trying to make the broadest spectrum of people happy with their user interfaces.
So everybody loves Dante for audio primarily because of its ease of use. It's pretty straightforward. You can see everything, right?
NMOS is behind the game in doing that, but it's starting to get there and as things move forward, that's where part of this is going to come to the fore. Blackmagic has some very straightforward UIs that they've deployed. That makes it easier to do that. That's why you don't have to have a big complex orchestration layer to operate it. It's more plug and play as that comes to the as that improves and IPMX is going to help drive that. We're going to see real competition between NDI, Dante and ST2110 at this lower level and it's going to be people like blackmagic that are going to help to drive that. There are others out there that are part of that ecosystem and just natural maturity of that part of the system. But that's, that's supposed to be the biggest hope and the biggest curse of, of, of the symptom based approach right now.
[00:36:03] Speaker C: Well, tacking on to that, I'm going to say a bad word. I'm going to say AI can help you here a little bit because NMOS is so amla's NMOS does allow you to like. It's a kind of a standard that you can program against. So if you've got a very specific need in your control room for automation or control or something that's beyond the basic routing XY cross point sort of thing, you can ask AI, ask Claude or whomever you're using, be like, hey, build me an NMOS controller that will do A, B, C and D in my environment and within a few minutes you can get a custom built controller spit out for you in your 2110 environment that does your specific thing. So that's actually a pretty cool and powerful thing inside of, you know, 2110 because it is, it's an IP centric system. So it works with IP centric tools like AI.
[00:36:56] Speaker D: Yeah, that's an excellent point. And some of the prompts that I built to help do some of that include identifying limitations. I name the manufacturer, I name the product that I'm using and then say any known limitations on their session description protocol file that I should be aware of.
This is one of the quirky things when you get into this layer of all this is that the format and order in which things are displayed or are contained in these SDP files, which are how.
That's the communication descriptor for the system of how to talk to and get information from your, your endpoint, your device. And it's a little bit of the wild west right now. It's getting better. But there are some hidden things like where you've got to define all of your audio channels or somebody's gear. A few manufacturers specific pieces of gear won't work. AI can track some of that kind of stuff. Go ferret it out from presentations or facts, FAQs and other information that's out there and warn you about that. So asking the question what are the known issues with this product in an NMOS environment so that you're aware of that and then you can make decisions on how to configure your system before you run into the problem. Have to change everything.
[00:38:19] Speaker C: But if NMOS scares you, you can go back and you can go look, I don't want to deal with any of this. And then like on like as an example. But it doesn't have to be this. On our 360p switches we've got a front panel that's just an XY cross point. That's actually an NMOS router. So it's speaking NMOS on board. It's taking care of all of that for you. If you just want to do an XY cross point just like you did in an SDI world, done and done. Super simple. But the power is like if you want to expand past that and you want to start doing some really custom things now, you can. And that's pretty cool.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: Thanks so much to both of you for being here. We're now going to jump right into
[00:38:56] Speaker A: live Q and A. Thanks for watching Broadcast to post. Don't forget to follow KIE Code media on social media and contact us about your projects at keycodemedia. Com.
