SISAT

University of Wollongong

ISIT925_2016 Major Project

(This activity is worth 20% of your final mark)

This is a group project that requires participation from all members of the group.

Individual marks may be adjusted to reflect your contribution relative to others. Channel4

Channel4 is an Australian free-to-air television broadcaster that delivers 4 digital channels of

video content into the Sydney and Melbourne metro markets. With the massive changes in

the media landscape in the past five years, Channel 4’s management realizes that it must

move to make their operations more cost-effective so as that more money can be spent

making quality content that will increase ratings and thus advertising revenue streams.

Consultancy company, Bradley, Sturgiss and Wright (BSW), was commissioned to undertake

a review into Channel4’s operations in a bid to increase their profitability. One of the key

findings was that:

“Significant savings could be made by removing duplicated networks and

moving to a converged IP environment, based on commodity hardware and

skills”.

Your role is to analyse the current network and business requirements to propose a new

reference architecture using the methodology learned in ISIT925. The level of detail in the

reference architecture should be sufficient for inclusion in a tendering document that

companies can use to submit competitive bids to under take final design and installation. Background

Since the mid-2000’s the profitability of broadcast television has dropped dramatically. This is

due, in part, to ‘new media’ and the four-fold increase in free-to-air television channels, which

have fragmented audiences. In addition, the rise of peer-to-peer sharing (such as bit-torrent)

has changed audience viewing habits as viewers now expect to watch content as soon as it

premieres overseas or alternately in bulk at times that suit them.

With approximately two thirds of all Channel4’s content is sourced from the US and other

overseas content produces, piracy is having an increasing impact on their ratings. However,

another key finding of the BSW report was that

“Local and ‘Australian Made’ content premiering in Australia during prime-time

is relatively immune to piracy. This is especially true of Channel4’s target

demographics and an increase in quality content of this type will increase

profitability”

Thus Channel4 is looking to spend savings gained from operational efficiencies on local coproductions between Channel4 and independent producers. 1 Channel4 operates four free-to-air television channels (Channel4, C4forKids, WOW and

QTV). However Channel4 outsources all its playout capabilities to MediaHub and all its

Terrestrial DVB Transmission to BroadcastAustralia which has regularized and reduced their

day-to-day operating costs.

Finally, BWS also recommended that all SAP, Scheduling, Records Management be moved

to a Cloud provider which will reduce the cost of these systems, as well as increase

redundancy and uptime. While the logistics of this migration are beyond the scope of this

project, Management have requested that ongoing data-requirements of this should be

factored into your design.

Summary of Requirements

The broad requirement delivered to you by Channel4 management is to analysis the network

and design a network specification that can then be validated by BSW who will then provide

management with recommendations about whether this design will increase operational

efficiency and overall profitability based on their return on investment (ROE) calculations. If

so, your reference architecture will become the basis of a tender specification by which the

private sector will propose a final design specification

In addition Management wishes the following requirements to be taken into consideration in

your design;

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•

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• 1 2 Decommission broadcast routers and the SDI and ASI Networks.

3

Replace decommissioned broadcast routers with SDI over IP

Securely isolate broadcast IP Traffic from Internet and corporate traffic.

Provide QoS plan to ensure SLA’s are meet.

Provide SLA’s that meet broadcast requirements.

Include capacity in the network for cloud-based applications.

Include capacity to monitor the network performance against SLAs

Remove signal points of failure for critical systems.

Reduce ongoing costs wherever possible. Physical Environment

Channel4 runs two studios;

The Melbourne studio is the company’s head office, and contains the majority of staff and

main production studios. The staff in the main office are distributed across five floors.

Department No. of Staff Management 50 Human Resources 20 Legal 4 Melbourne Advertising Production 20 Melbourne Advertising Sales 20 Melbourne News 50 Technology (Engineering and Support) 30 Television Production 150 Television Scheduling and Digital Media Centre

Total Melbourne Staff 30

374 Table 1:Melbourne Staff Distribution

1 Serial Digital Interface – SMPTE 259M

Asynchronous Serial Interface

3

Serial Digital Interface over Internet Protocol

2 2 Sydney, by comparison, has a local news bureau and advertisement production and is much

smaller. In Sydney, the staff are distributed across two floors.

Department No. of Staff Sydney News 50 Advertising Sales Sydney 30 Advertising Production Sydney 30 Technology (Engineering and Support) 15 Total Sydney Staff 125 Table 2: Sydney Staff Distribution Current Broadcast Environment

In order to understand the network requirement it’s essential to understand the broadcast

workflow of Channel4. A diagram of the workflow described below is included as Figure 1. It

should be noted that this flow is duplicated in both sites.

There are three types of video content that Channel4 uses; ExProd Content (Externally

produced programs and advertisements), InProd Content (Internally produced programs and

advertisements) and Live Content (Such as News and Sporting Events). Each of these types

of content enters the broadcast network in different ways.

InProd Content is edited by Channel4 and the finished product is sent as SDI streams to be

stored in the Digital Media Centre, via the Studio Router.

ExProd Content is provided to Channel4 on solid-state media as a digitized video file. These

files are stored in the Digital Media Centre until required.

Both InProd and ExProd content is stored by the Digital Media Centre as files ready to played

out as required over an SDI link to the studio router.

The studio router, takes SDI or ASI inputs and allows them to be assigned to many outputs

simultaneously. This could an MPEG Encoder, Video Output, Satellite Uplink or Digital Video

Network (DVN) line to Media Hub.

Channel4 runs three DVN lines to MediaHub which transmit MPEG encoded Video over an

ASI stream. Generally, this is MPEG-encoded video either from the Digital Media Centre or

live video from a News Studio. The link between Channel4 and the Media Hub is leased from

the telecommunications carrier, Telstra.

With the exception of live video (which is played out immediately), MediaHub records the

video sent via the DVN or Satellite backup to it server’s onsite, to be played out as per the

schedule send to it by Channel4 for play-out. 3 Figure 1: Current Broadcast Network Proposed Broadcast Flow

In order to reduce network duplication, it has been proposed that the SDI/ASI network and the

Studio Routers be removed. The proposal is that all video streams should travel over the IP

Network. Figure 2: Conceptual Diagram of Converged Network The proposed broadcast network utilizes the File Transport Protocol to send all “non-live”

video to the MediaHub as files to be played out (see Table 1 for details) 4 File Type No. Per Day Average File Size 30 Sec Advertisement 30 9.5MB 45 Minute Program 50 1.2GB 90 Minute Movie 5 2.4GB Table 3: Average MPEG-2 File Sizes All live video would be sent as SDI over IP, using multicast-groups to reduce network traffic,

while allowing multiple outputs to simultaneously receive the same video output. Channel 4

would like to be able to use up to twenty-five simultaneous SDI streams within the two

Broadcast Centers and send three, between sites and out to MediaHub. This will remove

Channel4’s reliance on SDI and ASI Networks, and save significant cost in Broadcast routers.

This requirement should be reflected in the design of your multicast address space, security

policies, SLA’s and bandwidth planning.

Network Property SDI Requirement Bandwidth 270Mbps Latency < 100ms Jitter < 30ms Loss None Table 4: SDI over IP Network Requirements Existing Corporate Network

The existing corporate network was put in 10 years ago and all the existing hardware is out of

support. While money had already been budgeted by management they now want to leverage

this expenditure to replace their broadcast network as well.

As can be seen in Figure 3: Current Network Diagram, the network layout is currently quite

simple. A modular “user access” switch is located on each floor and connected to the

Distribution/Core switches with a 1Gbps uplink. Each of the two Distribution switches are

connected to each other and to the site router by additional 1Gbps interlinks.

Cisco VoIP communications is provided in this arrangement and is anticipated to be reinstalled or updated in future network upgrades to include video for video-conferencing..

At each site the router, connects to the other site by a 1Mbps leased line and all Internet

traffic exits Channel4 through the Internet connection in Melbourne. 5 Figure 3: Current Network Diagram Corporate Network Applications

In addition general office traffic, the following applications have specific bandwidth, jitter,

delay and loss requirements. Table 5, provides an insight into the bandwidth requirements of

these applications. Currently these services are housed on servers in the server rooms at

each site, but will be moved to the cloud in the future. For the purposes of this project, all

calculations should include the future bandwidth requirements for planned cloud based

services. The follow indicative information has been provided to us in these calculations.

As part of this upgrade the existing VoIP communications systems requires upgrade to

include video conferencing capability.

The converged IP environment opens the way for monitoring of pre-production, production

and broadcast content from the desktop. Explicit bandwidth must be factored into your design

to ensure that latency of general and specialist corporate functions is not compromised

through this new capability. File Type File Sizes Average Time SAP (ERP) 160KB ~15 sec HP TRIM (Document Mngt) 1-30MB ~ 1min Scheduler 10KB ~ 2 sec iNews 50KB ~ 5 sec Table 5: Average data requirements for corporate applications As 6 Users

Management,

Advertising Sales,

Television Production,

HR

All Staff – Except News

Management and

Scheduling

News Monitoring

Network monitoring is essential as the new converged network will be underlying

infrastructure critical to both corporate and broadcast business goals. Channel4 currently

uses the Zabbix platform for the monitoring of its network and SNMP compatible broadcast

equipment. This platform has been found to be effective in monitoring critical infrastructure

and upper management have requested that it continue to be used.

Upper management has also requested that Zabbix be setup to measure the performance of

the network against agreed SLA’s. As part of this project you have been requested to propose

a set of Network SLA’s along with early warning alert thresholds.

Specifically SLA’s should be created to measure the following critical services:

• Media Hub to Channel4 Link

• Sydney to Melbourne Channel4 Link

• Latency of corporate systems (see Table 5)

• Latency of Live Video Feed Other Information

Channel 4 NAT all their traffic.

Internal Range: 10.0.0.0/8

External Range: 203.2.225.0/24 Revision

History

Revision No.

Draft 1.0 Date

26 August 2014 Final 2 September 2014 1.0 30 September 2014 Change Figure 2 altered - ExProd

Sentence added on p. 3: The link between

Channel4 and the Media Hub is leased from the

telecommunications carrier, Telstra. 7

 

1SISATUniversity of WollongongISIT925_2016Major Project(This activity is worth 20% of your final mark)This is a group project that requires participation from all members of the group.Individual marks may be adjusted to reflect your contribution relative to others.Channel4Channel4 is an Australian free-to-air television broadcaster that delivers 4 digital channels ofvideo content into the Sydney and Melbourne metro markets. With the massive changes inthe media landscape in the past five years, Channel 4’s management realizes that it mustmove to make their operations more cost-effective so as that more money can be spentmaking quality content that will increase ratings and thus advertising revenue streams.Consultancy company, Bradley, Sturgiss and Wright (BSW), was commissioned to undertakea review into Channel4’s operations in a bid to increase their profitability. One of the keyfindings was that:“Significant savings could be made by removing duplicated networks andmoving to a converged IP environment, based on commodity hardware andskills”.Your role is to analyse the current network and business requirements to propose a newreference architecture using the methodology learned in ISIT925. The level of detail in thereference architecture should be sufficient for inclusion in a tendering document thatcompanies can use to submit competitive bids to under take final design and installation.BackgroundSince the mid-2000’s the profitability of broadcast television has dropped dramatically. This isdue, in part, to ‘new media’ and the four-fold increase in free-to-air television channels, whichhave fragmented audiences. In addition, the rise of peer-to-peer sharing (such as bit-torrent)has changed audience viewing habits as viewers now expect to watch content as soon as itpremieres overseas or alternately in bulk at times that suit them.With approximately two thirds of all Channel4’s content is sourced from the US and otheroverseas content produces, piracy is having an increasing impact on their ratings. However,another key finding of the BSW report was that“Local and ‘Australian Made’ content premiering in Australia during prime-timeis relatively immune to piracy. This is especially true of Channel4’s targetdemographics and an increase in quality content of this type will increaseprofitability”Thus Channel4 is looking to spend savings gained from operational efficiencies on local co-productions between Channel4 and independent producers.