Switzerland’s tpc Selects Nevion VideoIPath, SDN for New Media House

Nevion announced that Swiss broadcast service provider, Technology and Production Center Switzerland AG (tpc), has selected its VideoIPath orchestration and SDN control solution for a new IP-based facility for Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF), the largest electronic media house of German-speaking Switzerland.

tpc is responsible for the production and technology of television, radio and multimedia for SRF. Together, tpc and SRF are in the process of creating a new News-, Sports- and Technology Center, with the objective of going on-air in November 2019. The new building offers the unique opportunity for SRF to fundamentally renew its technical infrastructure for signal management, broadcast operation, and diverse production systems, and to rethink and optimize its workflows from ingest to playout.

At the core of the new infrastructure is the full SMPTE ST 2110 IP media network built around high-performance Arista Spine-Leaf data center network. This is a Software Defined Network (SDN) that is controlled by Nevion’s VideoIPath software, which also acts as orchestrator for the media flows between broadcast sources and destinations. For this purpose, VideoIPath is integrating with a variety of equipment provided by Imagine Communications, Rohde & Schwarz, Tektronix, Stage Tec, Riedel Communications, Pebble Beach Systems, Vizrt, Embrionix, amongst others. The project is a leading example of multi-vendor integration using open standards, most notably NMOS IS 04/05.

VideoIPath also integrates with BFE’s KSC Core, the user interface used by the production teams. With this set-up, operators can plan events in the KSC Core system in different production areas, and let VideoIPath automatically orchestrate, schedule, reserve resources, and provide connectivity by provisioning network and broadcast equipment to execute the events.

“The new facility has the potential to revolutionize how our employees work, as well as how all products in the SRF portfolio are created, and Nevion VideoIPath will play a big role in this,” comments Andreas Lattmann, CTO, tpc. “Furthermore, full IP migration of the system will allow SRF to gradually start broadcasting in UHD/HDR, while the new system will also allow upcoming business areas, especially in the online section, to be adopted more easily than before.”

“Once again, Nevion VideoIPath is at the heart of the orchestration and control of the IP media network, connecting familiar consoles to the network and broadcast equipment, and managing the media flows,” says Hans Hasselbach, Chief Commercial Officer, Nevion. “This project has been both exciting and challenging, not least because of the number of different pieces of equipment that VideoIPath is connecting with. It’s also an excellent showcase for the collaboration between Nevion and Arista which we first announced almost a year ago.”