Controlling a high definition broadcast television studio using distributed software objects

Under an Advanced Technology Program (ATP) from the National Institute for Science and Technology (NIST), a joint venture of nine companies involving: Advanced Modular Systems, Comark, David Sarnoff Research Center, IBM, MCL, NBC, Phillips, Sun Microsystems and Thompson Consumer Electronics will develop technology to allow economical commercialization of HDTV broadcast equipment, enabling the creation of a new high definition broadcast television (HDBT) industry. A key artefact of this new technology is that we will change the view of the broadcast studio from being a web of directly connected mechanical devices to a community of computers and peripherals that are linked together by a high speed wide area network. Within this network, the job of managing all studio operations becomes one of simply controlling these networked resources. This concept leads naturally to the creation of a "virtual" studio where individuals can control the entire broadcast process from geographically independent locations. In this paper we provide a methodology for how studio components can be controlled remotely, and the benefits that are realized from this process.