france·tv group, moving to ST 2110 video delivery, purchased IP-based Kaleido KIP-X240 IP multiviewers with NVIDIA Mellanox 2110 cards to enable ST 2110 UHD/3G video monitoring.
French national public TV broadcaster France Télévisions, now known as france·tv group, comprises five national, 24 regional and nine overseas channels, is in the process of an enterprise wide transition from SDI to SMPTE ST 2110 content delivery.
Yannick Olivier is Solution Architect 2110 for france·tv, and notes that the French broadcast TV market is moving rapidly to the ST 2110 standard, aiming to achieve the video quality and operational efficiency it can afford. He said, “Our ST 2110 transition is intended to lay the groundwork for higher quality live UHD-HDR and 3GHD production, particularly for premiere sporting events such as the major international competitions this summer.”
Laying the Groundwork for Live Production
The change in delivery standard has called for purchasing new equipment. Because france·tv group has been using Grass Valley Kaleido-X and Kaleido-MX SDI multiviewers across the company, they have chosen twelve IP-based Kaleido KIP-X240 IP multiviewers. The purchase is part of a three-year contract that Grass Valley won in response to an RFP.
Since two of its channels – France 2 and France 3 – are already broadcasting in UHD, france tv anticipates acquiring more units over the course of the contract to eventually replace their Kaleido-X and Kaleido-MX multiviewers. The new KIP-X240 IP Multiviewers will be configured with NVIDIA Mellanox 2110 cards that enable ST 2110 UHD and HD/3G video monitoring.
“We know that the KIP-X240s will integrate directly within our control rooms, while preserving the X-Edit functionality we are accustomed to with our SDI-based Kaleidos,” said Yannick. XEdit is the software layout editor that operators run on a remote computer and use to layout and configure the live video images onto a single large-format display. It is also used to define and configure the multiviewing system components, like external devices, create logical sources, layouts and RCP user definitions, to operate the multiviewer successfully.
Once the layouts and configurations are complete, all this information is stored in a database, which XEdit can export to a multiviewer. Conversely, it also imports the current layouts and configurations from a multiviewer into the local workspace on a PC.
Efficient High Density Monitoring
As an open standards-based platform that is also NMOS-compliant, the KIP-X240 can monitor a very high number of video and audio signals simultaneously in a 1-RU frame. Its support for a wide range of I/O formats includes up to four simultaneous IP streaming outputs in a mix of compressed and uncompressed signals, so that france tv can monitor almost any IP source.
“In making our choice, we factored in the KIP-X240’s ease of integration and configuration within our existing workflow. We are happy to continue deploying the new generation of the Kaleido family – our trust in Grass Valley and the Kaleido’s reputation is also meaningful as we proceed with our transition project,” Yannick said.
All video streams can be displayed multiple times, at different resolutions and sizes up to full screen, on the multiviewer outputs, with the option to set up remote control and monitoring through a web browser.
The KIP-X240’s detection and alarms on video and audio faults include freeze, black and silence. It has features for monitoring closed captioning, teletext subtitles and DVB subtitling, and for XDS metadata extraction (complying with the US Extended Data Services standard for metadata delivery) and alarming.
“We are very pleased to support France Télévisions as they continue to update their broadcast capabilities,” said Mark Gardner, VP of Sales for EMEA at Grass Valley. “The integration of our KIP-X240 multiviewers into their SMPTE-2110 workflow is critical choice for dynamic, real-time video monitoring and we are proud to be part of this visionary project.” www.grassvalley.com
