Across media, IP-based workflows are becoming more prevalent as the primary mechanism for transporting audiovisual content between devices. The adoption of systems that are built upon SMPTE’s ST 2110 standards have grown significantly over the past few years and show little sign of slowing down as manufacturers increase their capabilities to support the requirements of this ecosystem. 

A challenge inherent in this approach is the high bandwidth requirements for the transmission of high-quality data. Supporting multiple 4K and 8K video feeds necessitates the implementation of high capacity networking equipment, which can have demonstrable impacts on a production’s budget and add additional complexity to the creation of systems that maintain impressive visual fidelity. Leveraging compressed workflows for this purpose would allow for the maintenance of visual quality while significantly cutting down on the bandwidth required. Fortunately, the ST 2110-22 standard exists that lays out requirements for compressed IP transmission within an ST 2110 environment. The ST 2110-22 standard is codec-agnostic, permitting the use of any codec that can be carried in an RTP payload. Despite this, the range of codecs that can be integrated into IP ecosystems remains limited. Broadening our understanding of compression algorithms that fit the overall requirements would allow for flexibility in system design and facilitate diverse approaches to tackling this problem.

Through our history of work in Live Entertainment and Broadcast, Disguise has become familiar with ST 2110 ecosystems and their inherent challenges, most prominently demonstrated in our contributions to Eurovision. Within collaboration with Trinity College Dublin on the Horizon Europe EMERALD Initiative, we’ve been investigating new ways to tackle the problem of high bandwidth streaming and are confident that answers can be found with the AV1 codec. AV1 is an open-source, modern codec that has already been deployed by companies such as Google and Meta for their web-based video streaming solutions. At present, there has been little published literature on its potential for ST 2110-22 compliance. We believe that it has vast potential to meet the needs of the media industry in this space and will show our findings to the NAB audience in this presentation. Early work resulting from this shared project has demonstrated that AV1 is capable of delivering high rates of compression without sacrificing visual fidelity in VP environments. Our presentation would aim to bring these findings and work we have done to bring these benefits to ST 2110 workflows to a relevant audience, sparking a discussion about the wider range of compression options available in this field.