ABC Blazing Trail To Brave New IP World

If all goes as planned, the ABC Television Network will be distributing its programming to ABC O&Os and affiliates fall 2015 via a hybrid IP-baseband master control and playout system in which traditional gear has been replaced with the virtualized equivalent running in the cloud, says Todd Donovan, senior vice president, ABC Broadcast Operations and Engineering. “The overall relevance of the cloud for us was when you need more capacity, you just turn it on,” he says. “You simply beget more capacity as opposed to the classic approach of every time you need to do one more thing having to add one more piece of equipment sitting in a rack.”

ABC is relying on Imagine for critical hardware and software components. They include the VersioCloud playout in the cloud software application, Magellan Orchestrator command-and-control system for hybrid control networks and UCIP (uncompressed over IP) gateway modules to bridge the baseband and IP worlds. The project grew out of the Disney's work with over-the-top services like Watch ABC and Watch Disney Channel, which give viewers the ability to view shows on their media tablets and smartphones, says Donovan. The platforms also give ABC and the Disney Channel sophisticated control over what users watch, including program and commercial replacement, and support dynamic ad insertion, he says. Rather than adding all of the baseband broadcast servers, encoders and other ancillary hardware needed to deliver multiple different versions of the same content in different formats for OTT viewers, Disney/ABC turned to the data center and cloud model. As a result, master control operators working in New York or Los Angeles will push a button to execute a switch that occurs in a data center hundreds of miles away in the same way they switch video executed in a rack of equipment a few feet away today.