Technology Spotlight: Appear X – the building blocks of satellite-to-IP migration

Satellite, which has long played a central role in the primary distribution of video services, is on the way out. A universal shift to internet-based delivery will not happen overnight, but secular factors are driving a transition that requires new solutions to enhance media organisations’ efficiency as they navigate it.

Chief among these is that satellites that deliver video to remote facilities are in many cases approaching their end of life, and investing in new capacity would be a major long-term commitment that media organisations are unwilling to undertake. Further accelerating this shift is the competing demand for spectrum for mobile applications. At the same time, expertise in satellite technology is diminishing while IP skills are becoming more prevalent among the cohort of tech-literate graduates emerging from universities.

How then to efficiently deliver primary distribution feeds over the web securely, efficiently and without loss of quality? For technology company Appear, which has led an NAB award-winning satellite-to-IP migration project for NBCUniversal, a key part of the answer is to tap its expertise in hardware acceleration of the now widely-used Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) protocol combined with highly dense demodulation capability.

In the case of the NBCUniversal satellite-to-IP migration, Appear delivered a system that provided satellite demodulation, IP transport and an encoder/decoder platform spanning multiple sites within NBCUniversal’s satellite downlink ecosystem. The deployment leveraged Appear’s X Platform to enable high-density demodulation and secure IP video transport over WAN, while integrating seamlessly with both legacy SDI and ST-2110 environments.

The key differentiators for Appear’s solution are its SRT gateways and dense demodulator. Petter Jørgensen, a Co-Founder of Appear and Product Owner of its flagship X platform, points to the appeal of SRT as an open protocol that gives broadcasters greater control, avoiding vendor lock-in. It is also widely adopted and supported, delivering ease of interoperability.

According to Jørgensen, Appear’s advantage stems from its decision to implement hardware acceleration of SRT using FPGA – programmable integrated circuits that enable flexible, low-latency processing – to handle much of the protocol and data, leaving more static protocol management functions to the CPU.

“We move a lot of the protocol and data handling into FPGA and left more static management protocol functions in the CPU, allowing us to deliver 6Gbps of throughput,” says Jørgensen.

Appear developed its own implementation of the SRT protocol to deliver these ultra-fast speeds rather than rely on the standard SRT library. The current generation of the X platform allows users to insert these high-capacity SRT cards on their existing chassis.

The hardware-accelerated architecture delivers significant reductions in power consumption and compute requirements compared to software-based alternatives.

“The compression technology that you use is dependent on the kind of infrastructure that you have. We support AVC and HEVC as well as JPEG 2000. But for people who need low latency, it’s JPEG XS,” he says. “You still need to deliver it over IP, so we are enabling new workflows over SRT that haven’t been possible before. We do see growth in uptake of the JPEG XS codec, driven by more high-bandwidth links available from venues. That enables lighter compression technologies, combined with a desire by people to reduce latency.”

Efficient IP distribution not only means using the most efficient transport protocol and codec. It also means managing the complexity of ingesting and transmitting content across a large network of sites. For its NBCUniversal deployment, Appear teamed up with Skyline Dataminer.

“NBCUniversal needed to have a way to manage all of this and maintain control. This was a challenge that we solved together with Skyline – we worked together to complete the system,” says Jørgensen.

In the case of NBCUniversal, Appear’s expertise in SRT was complemented by expertise in demodulation and decoding at either end of the chain. At the ingest stage Appear provides a highly dense QAM demodulator that can take feeds from up to 32 satellite transponders on a single X Platform card to ingest into the system. The demodulator enables the extraction of multiple vertical and horizontal-polarised signals without the need for any external splitters or RF switches. This contributes to significant improvements in density and streamlined infrastructure footprint at edge locations.

At the edge, the X Platform enables consolidation of legacy hardware into a more compact and scalable architecture, reducing complexity and supporting both SDI and ST-2110 workflows.

While a use case such as NBCUniversal’s transition to IP for distribution of its feeds to affiliates has some specific characteristics, Jørgensen believes that the trend to migrate primary distribution to IP across the globe means that many of the technical aspects of one migration project will be common to others.

“Our SRT capability in the X Platform has a rich function set that we will continue to invest in based on customer feedback. I’ve talked to customers who have previously used private networks but say that sometimes using the internet is better,” he says. “When things fail, there are just so many tools for analysis that make it easier to figure out what went wrong. We’ve been running intercontinental SRT links over the public internet and there have been no issues with that. It’s very flexible.”

Beyond affiliate distribution, Jørgensen sees a proliferation of big SRT-based projects, for example to connect remote sites around the world with high-bandwidth links. “We see SRT as an enabler for a new kind of remote production. You simply turn up at a venue, connect to your SRT link and you’re away. The X Platform gives our customers the highest performance and cost-benefits possible.”

This Technology Spotlight is published in partnership with Appear.