Video Service Forum (VSF) Meeting, May 11-12, 2016
This week, the Video Service Forum (VSF) held one of its three annual meetings in the French town of Rennes. This is the first time ever that the VSF has convened outside of North America, and presumably this is a symbol of the growing international influence of this organization that was originally founded (in 1998) to support uniform delivery of video services across the separate RBOCs (Regional Bell operating companies, ie. the U.S. regional telephone companies).
Nevion has been an active participant in the work of the VSF for over 15 years and was of course in attendance, represented at the meeting by Janne T Morstøl, our Chief Strategy Officer, and Jan Helgesen, the product manager for Nevion’s management solutions (including of course VideoIPath).
The VSF is an important body in the broadcast industry as it brings together broadcasters, service providers, users and manufacturers to develop technical recommendation that can evolve into standards and work on the interoperability of equipment. As the industry moves rapidly towards IP in the facilities, the work of the VSF has taken an ever greater dimension and added urgency. The VSF technical recommendations TR-04 and TR-03 are the proposed way forward for most of the industry, as reflected by their adoption in the AIMS organization‘s roadmap.
At this week’s meeting, the focus was very much on IP, with discussions that included Software Defined Networks (SDN), networking for media production, and Precision Time Protocol (PTP), as well a showcase for the VRT’s and EBU’s LiveIP project – for which Nevion provided the software defined network.
Nevion’s Jan Helgesen presented on the first day on the subject of “Software Defined Networks and the Road Towards Virtualized Media Production” – a subject that is very much at the heart of Nevion’s strategy.
The full agenda can be found at:
As IP media production becomes a reality, it is great to see different organizations and groups (AIMS, AMVA, EBU, JT-NM project and SMPTE) working together to develop and promote the best recommendations, standards and frameworks for this new era in media production. The VSF meetings are a great opportunity to get an update on technical topics related to our industry and also an overview of what is happening in the different groups and organizations.
In short, this was another excellent VSF meeting, and we look forward to the next one in October, which will be back in North America (Broomfield, Colorado, USA)!
