So far this year, broadcasters and media companies have been delighting viewers with a summer of sport, putting their carefully constructed workflows into action to deliver coverage to sports fans globally. Cloud is increasingly being used for the distribution of live feeds, so there is a lot more content being transported over the Internet than in the past. This content needs to be transported from where it is produced, to distribution centres around the globe, and it needs to be protected by a transport protocol during the journey.
RIST (Reliable Internet Stream Transport) is one such protocol being used to deliver sports coverage this year. Developed to transport high quality broadcast grade video over unmanaged IP networks such as the Internet, RIST is an open-source specification designed for reliable and secure low-latency media delivery. It’s an interoperable and technically robust specification already implemented across products from multiple vendors covering each part of the contribution and distribution workflow.
We recently spoke to Net Insight, leading provider of high performing, video transport and media cloud technology, to find out a bit more about how its RIST enabled solutions, encoder Nimbra 414 and cloud transport platform Nimbra Edge, are being used to transport content for live sports coverage.
How Net Insight solutions are used to deliver valuable sports content
Net Insight’s RIST enabled products are used to transport live sports coverage captured during multiple events. Nimbra 414 encoders are capable of handling multiple feeds. They act as gateways that subsequently transport the content to multiple cloud gateways, or video regions as they are known on Nimbra Edge, leveraging RIST to create redundancy. The feeds are transported to a headend, from where they can be distributed to multiple different takers in different protocols, once again with redundant paths. In this workflow, Nimbra Edge is using RIST for internal transportation only.
During some sporting events, live content needs to be transported closer to where it will be consumed. Here, Net Insight use a Nimbra 414 encoder where the event is happening to push MPTS (Multi Program Transport Streams) with aggregated bandwidth (600 Mbps) to a receiving N414 in another region. When the feeds leave the region where the event is taking place, they’ll go through RIST tunnels to a video region and then down to a Nimbra N414 in the region where the content will be watched. This workflow leverages RIST and the cloud for high bitrate transport, to bring the content closer to where it will be consumed.
Why has Net Insight chosen RIST?
RIST (main profile) is the backbone for cloud transport in Nimbra Edge and has been since it launched around five years ago. Although there are many reasons why Net Insight has chosen to use RIST in its solutions, one of the primary reasons is that it is an open-source specification, not owned by a particular company. This matters to Net Insight because it firmly believes that open-source specifications benefit not just individual companies but also the industry as a whole. Not only can everyone benefit from and use open-source specifications, but because RIST only sets out minimum requirements for interoperability, vendors are also free to innovate within their own implementations.
Another reason behind Net Insight’s use of RIST is its rich feature set, which brings many benefits. RIST offers a higher bitrate than some other transport protocols and is extremely robust, which makes it very useful for contributing live sports feeds for Tier 1 events. As an Adaptive Repeat reQuest (ARQ) enabled protocol, it brings valuable protection and reliability when transporting feeds over the Internet. Using ARQ technology, RIST can selectively retransmit lost packets to recover any information that is lost during transport.
RIST also features tunnelling capability that enables multiple streams to travel in any direction, as well as seamless switching, bonding and link adaption for scenarios where a single link cannot provide a solution. Along with these features, it provides advanced authentication and encryption for the highest security protection, as well as support for enhanced delivery of any content and protocol that needs to run alongside with the content.
RIST ticks all the boxes
With Tier 1 sporting events, live coverage must be transmitted in its full glory. The stakes are high and there’s no room for mistakes or second chances; flawless execution and high redundancy are crucial. When transporting content using an unmanaged network such as the Internet, it’s critical that the selected transport protocol can deliver on all fronts, from security, quality and interoperability, through to low latency.
To find out more about how RIST can be used to reliably and securely transport valuable sports content, or to find out how to implement RIST in your products, get in touch.