Remote Professional Media Production: Evaluation of Network Configuration That Satisfies Delay Requirements

With the shift to the Internet Protocol (IP) in professional media production, the demand for a remote professional media production system (hereinafter “remote production”) is increasing. In remote production, a venue is connected with a broadcasting station by an IP network, and live programs are produced not on the venue side but on the broadcasting station side. In recent years, flexible remote production systems that use cloud computing over the IP network have been considered. In this work, to achieve remote production using a low-latency cloud, we examined the roundtrip-delay requirement for remote production and investigated which network configurations satisfied this requirement by testing network models from Japan, Europe, the USA, and China, which included metropolitan area networks. Two different program production equipment configurations were examined: a diverse path configuration with seamless switching (DPC) and a single path configuration with forward error correction processing (SPC). The results showed that the roundtrip-delay requirement was 33.4 ms (one-way transmission-delay: 16.7 ms) and that the server processing latency in the cloud should be kept in the range of 2–6 ms to satisfy the transmission-delay requirement for achieving a coverage rate of approximately 50% when using DPC and SPC for program production equipment configurations. We also found that, in all network models, SPC was better able to improve the coverage rate while satisfying the transmission-delay requirement than DPC. These findings should be useful for helping broadcasters design remote production systems using a low-latency cloud network.