Sports, Media, and Entertainment

Committing to seamless live broadcasts

Live video broadcasting takes an incredible amount of bandwidth and an extremely reliable connection. "We can't have a single frame drop," stated Marc Segar, Senior Vice President of Technology for NEP Group, Inc. "Our clients are big broadcasters around the globe in 25 countries … There's no margin for error."

NEP provides outsourced broadcast services in over 100 countries for events that range from small regional productions to major international events like the Oscars® and the Super Bowl®. In the era of high-resolution streaming, consistently executing the broadcasts of huge events like these requires skilled staff and an agile network infrastructure. NEP's staff includes over 5000 employees, the majority of whom are highly trained technical engineers and who subscribe to the company's aim to continuously innovate.

NEP operates its own robust and fully redundant backbone WAN that is made up of 30+ points of presence (POPs) and data centers, 200+ mobile broadcast trucks, 70+ studios, 59 venues, and 20 production hubs. The hubs are key to NEP's business model as they enable the company to fully control and orchestrate many of its productions remotely. Certain resources need to be on-site, such as cameras and the staff to operate them, but having a fleet of large, mobile production trailers outside stadiums is no longer a requirement for anything but the highest-marquee events.

Transitioning to IP broadcasting

It wasn't always this way. Before high-definition (HD) video broadcasts became ubiquitous, NEP's live transmissions were typically conducted via serial digital interface (SDI) baseband routers, with nearly the entire production—including the transmission—originating on-site. This type of setup was complicated, time-consuming, and costly. But as HD came into greater prominence, the bandwidth capability of existing broadcast infrastructure started to approach its limit, placing even greater constraints on live transmissions.

To respond to these evolving challenges, NEP recognized it needed to update its network infrastructure. This included adopting the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)'s suite of ST 2110 standards, which facilitate video/audio broadcasts over standard IP networks. This would allow NEP to transition from a specialized SDI-based infrastructure to commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS) network switches. As a result, NEP would experience greater scalability and adaptability and enable cloud and data center integration, as well as leverage the new infrastructure to control live broadcasts remotely.

Achieving this major paradigm shift, however, meant NEP's broadcasts would be completely reliant on the capabilities of its network infrastructure. "But you can't do that unless you can manage the network and you have control of that network," explained Segar. "You need the right tools to be able to do that well."

Thus, NEP started a project called Total Facility Control (TFC), "because there were gaping holes in control in terms of not just broadcast control, but in terms of network control and orchestration of the network," said Segar. This included creating a lab where NEP could test potential IP-based broadcast solutions. The TFC focused on areas such as streamlined automation, dynamic endpoint configuration, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) implementation, automated WAN control, and robust monitoring.

A conversation with Marc Segar, Senior Vice President of Technology, NEP Group, Inc.

Revolutionizing broadcasting with Cisco IP Fabric for Media

One of the solutions NEP tested was Cisco IP Fabric for Media, which is based on Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. NEP was impressed with the solution's efficient load balancing, autonomous bandwidth management, SDN compatibility, and external flow-control API abilities, and started integrating the solution into its network infrastructure.

This helped establish the foundation upon which NEP based its new broadcasting business model. "We now have control of the network, the orchestration tools around the network, and all the provisioning of bandwidth—and all that sort of stuff is now automated under TFC control," explained Segar. "We have SDN active within that so we can manage bandwidth, monitor bandwidth, and move the bandwidth if we need to."

The Cisco solution allowed NEP to streamline the configuration process and significantly reduce the risk of errors. It also enhanced NEP's ability to manage its large-scale network by helping overcome network configuration complexity and security challenges due to IP decentralization.

The multicast streams all come into centralized production facilities where the broadcasts are controlled and where NEP can provide additional integrated services. This centralized production model helps NEP conduct a larger share of its broadcast productions remotely, which in turn allowed the company to pare down its on-site production staff, as well as scale down its fleet of production vehicles.

The new network infrastructure gave NEP the scalability to reallocate network resources as needed for individual and concurrent projects, as well as ensure it could meet the demands of future projects. "You can scale anywhere once you've got your data centers connected together … We can use the hardware wherever it happens to be," said Segar. 

"We have basically infinite scalability the way things are built at the moment,” explained Segar. This level of scalability enabled NEP to grow its business and the size of broadcast projects it could support. Since the new infrastructure was implemented, the size of NEP's network has more than quadrupled in size.

Harnessing scalable networking for future demands

By leveraging a scalable, flexible, and distributed computing environment, NEP was able to not only solve current challenges, but also equip the company to meet future demand and overcome complexity. "We're on a trajectory ... When I say we can live and die by the bandwidth and where it is, that's exactly what's going to happen," Segar stated. "We're literally going to be able to offer services in places that other people can't, and that's a point of difference for us because we're in a competitive marketplace."