CCW 2014: SMPTE to Host Sessions on the IP-Based Facility and the AXF Standard

The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), announced its participation in CCW+SATCON, Nov. 12-13, at New York City’s Javits Convention Center, through a panel discussion on the IP-based facility and an in-depth session, co-produced with CCW+SATCON, on SMPTE’s recently released AXF standard.

SMPTE President-Elect Robert Seidel, vice president of engineering and advanced technology at CBS, will moderate the session “The IP-Based Facility: Is It for You? If So, When?” at 9 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 13. Panelists will include Mario Vecchi, chief technology officer at PBS; Steve Fastook, senior vice president of technical and commercial operations at CNBC; and, representing the SMPTE Standards Group, Michael Koetter, senior vice president of media technology and development at Turner. The group will discuss how the core infrastructure at the network is evolving and how the move to full IP infrastructure software-defined networking (SDN) will affect the industry for the next five years or more. Experts will address the impact of SMPTE’s 2022 family of standards (ST-2022-1 through ST-2202-7) for transporting and switching audio and video over IP Networks, as well as how the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) is helping to define the future of the IP-based facility.

“SMPTE is gathering an exciting lineup of experts at CCW+SATCON to discuss some of the most important developments to date, as well as their potential impact on the creation, transport, and storage of all variety of media assets,” said Seidel. “These sessions promise to offer valuable insight into the technologies and standards shaping the media facilities of today and tomorrow.”

“In Support of Interoperability: The New Archive eXchange Format (AXF) Standard,” scheduled for 10:15 a.m. on Nov. 13, will be moderated by S. Merrill Weiss, president of the Merrill Weiss Group LLC and chair of the SMPTE Working Group on AXF. Weiss and colleagues from a variety of stakeholder organizations — from sports and entertainment networks to cultural archives — will discuss how the AFX standard, which codifies interoperability standards among data archive systems, yields benefits with respect to operational storage, transport, and long-term preservation. Supported by panelists James Snyder, senior systems administrator at Library of Congress; Brian Campanotti, chief technology officer at Front Porch Digital; and Peter Symes, director of standards and engineering at SMPTE, Weiss will lead discussions on the practical implementation, as well as the use of AXF to future-proof digital storage so that content remains available despite changing formats and storage technologies. Within this discussion, panelists will also examine how AXF allows content owners to move content from their current archive systems into the AXF domain in a strategic way.