tpc Switzerland builds agile studio center around IP infrastructure

Swiss production and broadcast company tpc is building a news, sport, and technology center in Zurich. This all-IP center, built around the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards, will use the Selenio Network Processor (SNP) from Imagine Communications to provide advanced IP-to-IP video and audio processing, as well as conversion between legacy SDI feeds and equipment and the newly built IP infrastructure.

tpc has embarked on a bold project in order to gain a higher degree of agility and multiformat compatibility — a level which can only be achieved with an all-IP and software-defined approach. This brand-new production and delivery facility, primarily used for news and sport, needs to be able to produce and finish programming in any resolution up to ultra HD HDR, and to deliver, in multiple languages, to multiple platforms including broadcast, mobile and online services.

Following on from tpc’s recently introduced outside broadcast truck, UHD1 — also built around Imagine’s IP technology — the Metechno project uses a substantial COTS hardware infrastructure that gives the organization all the performance characteristics and operational look and feel as a traditional SDI system, but with all the benefits of real-time IP connectivity and software flexibility.

Imagine Communications and tpc had collaborated on the large, new UHD1 production truck, where an all-IP architecture was implemented. Based on this highly successful project, tpc selected Imagine’s SNP for the new center. It provides the entire signal processing in the IP domain and acts as a gateway between the internal IP network and SDI sources and destinations. The result is a very flexible architecture, in which any format up to Ultra HD can be specified and exchanged at the individual signal path level and delivered as a single ST 2110 stream with clean switching (including Ultra HD).

The new studio and delivery center in Zurich-Leutschenbach is currently under construction and will be on air in late 2019.

Andreas Lattmann CTO, tpc switzerland ag
“Our future as a business depends on us creating content in the highest possible quality and delivering it to our audiences, wherever they are and on whatever device they choose to watch. The only way to achieve the level of flexibility we need in a practical, operationally secure and cost-effective form is to take advantage of software-defined systems connected over IP. Our new technical and editorial building could only be planned using a greenfield approach. The goal was to achieve a distributed, reliable, best-of-breed, standards-based, real-time backbone infrastructure that is format-agnostic and future-proof.”