Program-Production System Consisting of Multiple NMOS-Compliant Systems

With the development of standards such as the SMPTE ST 2110 suite for transmitting signals and Advanced Media Workflow Association Networked Media Open Specifications (AMWA NMOS) for controlling systems, there is a move toward replacing broadcasters’ infrastructure with Internet Protocol (IP)-based program-production systems. This movement often starts with smaller components such as outside broadcasting (OB) vans and a few studios. Since the advantage of an IP network is connectivity, it is preferable for each of these independently introduced components to be connected and operated as one large program production system that can be shared among many program productions. An NMOS-compliant program-production system has a registration and discovery system (RDS) with information on all equipment in the production system. The challenge is how to configure and operate RDSs when connecting multiple NMOS-compliant systems. To share resources in the system among multiple program productions, it is also imperative that the equipment in operation be protected from accidental operations. To achieve this, a function to manage the operational schedule of each piece of equipment and a mechanism to issue authorizations on the basis of the schedules are needed. The NMOS IS-10 specification defines an authorization method, but there has been no study on issuing authorization on the basis of a schedule managed by a resource administrator. In this presentation, we propose a method for managing multiple RDSs and issuing authorizations on the basis of operational schedules to construct a large program-production system consisting of multiple NMOS-compliant systems. The equipment already in place can be used with the proposed method because the application programming interfaces (APIs) for registration and authorization are the same as those of a standard NMOS-compliant system.