SRF is the national broadcaster in Switzerland, a small multilingual country surrounded by far bigger nations with a multiplicity of TV stations vying for our national audience’s attention. It goes without saying that in this environment, SRF needs to continually improve its services to excite and maintain its audience.
With OBA we can kill two birds with one stone towards the SRF's company goals of providing personalizing sound experiences to its audience and optimizing the use of bandwidth.
SRF has already stepped into the future of IP-based workflows in broadcast by developing Europe’s first all-IP UHD OB Van (EBU Technology & Innovation Award 2019) and by building a new Playout and Switching centre completely based on SMPTE ST 2110. One of the lessons learned from this innovation was the need for flexible Metadata-handling in an IP environment.
In this article are highlighted these two main issues and how they got married in a proof of concept in collaboration with Dolby Laboratories Inc. The choices we made in our proof-of-concept were those available to us and with good support from the vendors and manufacturers concerned. Other solutions are evidently possible, but we are describing our PoC here.
Key words: NGA, OBA, SMPTE ST 2110, IP, Descriptive metadata, ADM, S-ADM, Dynamic Metadata, Personalization, Bandwidth efficiency, Open Standards, Compatibility with SDI infrastructure, IP-based workflows.
Published by the European Broadcasting Union, Geneva, Switzerland. ISSN: 1609-1469. Editor-in-Chief: Patrick Wauthier. Responsibility for views expressed in this article rests solely with the author(s).
