Imagine Communications Helps North Point Ministries Connect Campuses, Partner Churches With SMPTE ST 2110

North Point Ministries has linked three of its seven church campuses across metropolitan Atlanta using high-speed IP connectivity to provide shared, immersive experiences. Central to the collaborative network is a high-speed Cisco data network, designed by technology solution provider World Wide Technology (WWT), with five Imagine Communications Selenio Network Processors (SNP) providing video and audio processing and an interface between SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 standards-based IP.

Houses of worship increasingly rely on sophisticated, connected content systems to build engagement with both their own communities and the wider world. Leveraging standardized, readily available COTS hardware, SMPTE ST 2110 systems provide a cost-effective yet extremely powerful route to integrated technology and thus to bringing communities together across linked campuses — enabling large numbers of worshippers to share common experiences.

This sharing and collaboration is at the heart of North Point Ministries’ mission. Three of its seven campuses are now connected via 40 gigabit IP links, with Cisco 100 gigabit switches installed to allow for future bandwidth expansion. In addition, North Point has a global network of more than 90 partner churches and an online ministry. Its style of worship features vibrant stage designs and immersive production techniques to engage and galvanize audiences.

“The SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards has allowed us to move away from a traditional TDM-based, SDI-over-fiber transport between our facilities to a purely IP-based workflow,” said Jeremy Lommori, senior engineer, NPM Productions, North Point Ministries. “Utilizing the same dark fiber connection, we have more than doubled our capacity and can provide a significantly higher level of flexibility in transporting signals between multiple campuses.”

The SNPs provide timing synchronization, as well as SDI/IP interfaces, connecting Imagine Platinum routers at each location and the multi-campus SMPTE ST 2110 IP network. Each of the Platinum routers incorporates integrated multiviewer functionality, and the whole installation operates as a single network under the control of Imagine’s Magellan SDN Orchestrator, a field-proven software control layer. The result is that North Point Ministries’ operators can route any signal from any location, to any location.

“World Wide Technology has a long history as a solution provider in the IT industry and over the years has helped customers transition their business to IP technology,” said Steve Schubert, a consulting systems engineer, World Wide Technology. “As Cisco’s first certified-IP Fabric for Media Solution partner, WWT leveraged this solution built for broadcast customers moving from SDI switching to an IP network. We based the network design on those solution best practices and from there customized the network needed to accommodate North Point Ministries’ unique requirements.”

A compact 1RU device, SNP is widely recognized as the most flexible and efficient standards-based IP media processing platform. It enables system designers, like those at North Point Ministries, to simplify operations and reduce costs, supporting both SDI and IP networks. It supports uncompressed HD and Ultra HD based on the SMPTE ST 2110 family of IP standards, including PTP timing, and the ST 2022-6 redundancy model, enabling free interoperability. A single SNP can support up to eight channels of Ultra HD, 32 channels of HD, or a combination of the two in one unit.

“The North Point Ministries environment is an ideal application for the new model of software-defined processing and IP connectivity,” said Cassidy Phillips, solutions architect, Imagine Communications. “Using SNPs, the network can synchronize and process up to 32 uncompressed signals, bidirectionally, over as few as two single-mode fiber links. This provides immediate improvements in fiber utilization to the North Point system, along with new ST 2110, HDR and UHD capabilities, ensuring that all the immediacy of the worship productions is seamlessly shared between the other church campuses, and relayed to partner churches and online.”