Architecture of the Virtual Broadcast Studio

Abstract

The fusion of digital video technology, high-speed wide-area networks, and digital file servers allows us to view the future of television broadcast studios very differently than we do today. As computer and network technologies have advanced in both sophistication and performance, our understanding about the possibilities that the application of these technologies can provide has also grown. Digital networks are no longer used simply as a mechanism for communication between computers, but are capable of transferring data fast enough to make the real-time distribution of high-quality video data to a wide audience a reality. The ability to store, access, control, and move large volumes of digital data reliably across great distances at very high speed gives us the tools with which we can build the types of services necessary to manage and run a broadcast studio. In addition, through the use of network distributed object software models, we can build studios that are very flexible and easy to change, and highly adaptable to new technologies with a minimum of effort or disruption.