During the height of Covid, broadcasters were faced with a host of unprecedented challenges. Audiences stuck at home were demanding more original content, but broadcast crews could not gather together to create the content.
The industry had been discussing the prospects of remote production for a while where you’d send a skeleton crew and minimal equipment to site but do most of the production work in real time, back at base, or even at home. Now, it was really urgent to make this happen.
At SipRadius, we worked with one of the major broadcasters in the US to create a solution that was practical, preserved quality, and would work from day one. RIST was at the heart of it, because it is open and accessible, and designed for interoperability.
The architecture we built allows for the broadcaster to plug in whatever capture resources they have, using whatever technical standards they prefer. At the high end, the source could be SMPTE ST2110, a high-performance codec like JPEG XS, or a consumer stream like VLC or OBS. The RIST network collects all of the content sources and makes them available to whoever needs them.
Importantly, the remote production hub is not a proprietary server, instead it runs in the AWS cloud. That means anyone with the right credentials can log in from wherever they are. Directors can call the shots from their homes; editors can pick up raw content and craft finished programs; executives can supervise from an iPad when they want to check in. There is no need for specialist hardware, simply any device capable of decoding a RIST stream is connected right away.
In the last few years, this platform has been used on dozens of productions, from red carpet interviews to complex reality series. Thousands of hours of high-profile television has been delivered to grateful audiences.
The same broadcaster realized that the RIST architecture could be used as a distribution platform. Live content and a media library are available to its staff around the world and to interested parties, such as other broadcasters looking to buy the content for their own services.
We used rist2rist, the utility which takes in a RIST stream and distributes it to multiple clients. In our implementation, each rist2rist node can serve up to 100 simultaneous connections without compromising packet loss protection. Nodes can be cascaded, and we use rist2rist to create a dynamic, constantly flexible, virtual CDN. It delivers very high quality at very low latencies – less than a second glass to glass anywhere in the world. End-to-end security is preserved because rist2rist nodes do not decrypt the stream, so there is no risk.
Major broadcasters around the world rely on these applications every single day, to make sure our favorite programs reach our screen. RIST is what makes it possible: it is technically robust, agile by design, and most importantly, it is standards-based and designed for open interoperability.
By incorporating RIST into our workflow at SipRadius, and also simultaneously introducing it to other broadcasters, we have been able to step up the efficiency and production of our delivery methods substantially. In an industry that is constantly changing, especially with the rise of hybrid and remote working, ensuring flexibility and interoperability in our content delivery workflows is a vital consideration. More unprecedented changes and shifts in the way we accomplish our content goals are appearing every single day, and with RIST, this is thankfully less of a challenge and rather an opportunity to deliver bigger, better and more efficiently at a consistent rate.