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Media & Broadcast

Broadcast networks that never drop a frame.

We design, deploy and migrate the IP fabrics that broadcasters, post-production houses, sports venues and live-event producers rely on to stay on air. ST 2110, PTP timing, multicast at scale, and the kind of cutover engineering that lets you walk into Monday morning with no one in the control room having noticed a thing.

SDI to IP - the long migration

The cabling cycle is over. The software-defined facility is the new floor.

For thirty years broadcasters built around SDI: fixed-rate, fixed-resolution, point-to-point. Every move to a higher format - SD → HD → 3G → 12G - meant re-cabling the plant and replacing the routing matrix. ST 2110 ends that cycle. One IP fabric carries every format the standards body has shipped, plus the ones they haven't shipped yet. The economic case is straightforward; the engineering case is where most facilities trip.

An IP fabric for broadcast is not a data-centre fabric with media on top. PTP timing must hold sub-microsecond accuracy hop by hop. Multicast has to scale to thousands of essence streams without storming. QoS has to deliver predictable latency for talkback and intercom that engineers will trust during a live event. NMOS has to discover and switch sources fast enough that a director doesn't have to think about it. Get any one of these wrong and the facility goes dark on the worst possible night. We've spent the last decade getting them right.

What we deliver

End-to-end broadcast IT, from RFP to as-built.

Every engagement is custom, but the deliverables we own are consistent.

/ 01

ST 2110 IP fabric design & deployment

Non-blocking Spine-Leaf fabrics sized for your essence count, future format roadmap and disaster scenarios. We design for ST 2110-20 (video), -30 (audio), -40 (ancillary) and ST 2022-7 hitless redundancy out of the gate - not bolted on later.

/ 02

SDI to IP migration & phased cutovers

Hybrid SDI / IP plans that let you keep producing while the fabric goes live underneath. Gateway sizing, control-room-by-control-room cutover sequencing, validation gates, and on-air rollback procedures rehearsed before the first frame moves.

/ 03

PTP (IEEE 1588) precision timing

Redundant grandmasters with GPS / Rubidium discipline, SMPTE ST 2059-2 profiles, boundary clocks at every leaf, and end-to-end offset monitoring. Designed so a grandmaster failure doesn't put a single frame at risk.

/ 04

Multicast routing & PIM at broadcast scale

PIM-SSM design that scales to thousands of essences without storms or RPF surprises. Multicast group allocation, IGMP snooping tuning per leaf, and source-specific subscriptions sized for the real production load - not the lab.

/ 05

NMOS discovery & connection management

NMOS IS-04 (registration / discovery) and IS-05 (connection management) implementations that work across mixed-vendor gear. We've integrated Lawo, Imagine, Grass Valley, Riedel and EVS endpoints with broker-aware routing in production.

/ 06

Converged LAN/WAN for production

QoS-engineered transport for talkback, intercom, file transfer, REMI and remote-production flows over the same physical infrastructure. Real-time and bursty file traffic do not coexist by accident - they coexist by design.

Selected work

A national broadcaster. 25% long-term CapEx reduction. Zero on-air interruption.

One of North America's national broadcasters needed to retire fixed-capacity SDI infrastructure and replace it with a software-defined fabric that could carry HD today and scale to 4K / 8K without another forklift in five years. Two prior integrators had stalled the project. They engaged Aspire IT Systems to architect, build and migrate.

We delivered a non-blocking Arista R-Series Spine-Leaf fabric with ST 2022-7 hitless redundancy on every essence path, PTP timing with diverse grandmasters and CloudVision for fabric-wide telemetry. The transition was phased control-room by control-room with rehearsed rollback at every step. The broadcaster operates continuously; not a single scheduled programme was disrupted by the migration.

The outcomes: 25% reduction in projected ten-year CapEx versus an SDI refresh, REMI-capable workflows enabled on day one, broadcast-grade reliability validated through six months of post-cutover operations, and as-built documentation that the in-house team owns and operates today.

Read the full case study
Technology stack

Vendor-agnostic by design. Certified across the broadcast IT stack.

We recommend the platform that fits your operational team and your facility's scale, not the vendor with the best partner margin this quarter.

IP Fabric

Core
Arista R-Series Arista CloudVision Cisco Nexus 9000 Cisco IPFM (DCNM) Juniper

Standards

Core
ST 2110-10/-20/-21/-22/-30/-40 ST 2022-7 ST 2059-2 (PTP profile) IEEE 1588-2008/-2019 NMOS IS-04 / IS-05 / IS-08

Routing & Control

Specialty
PIM-SSM Multicast IGMP Snooping EVPN-VXLAN BGP Route Reflectors QoS / DSCP Engineering

Broadcast Endpoints

Specialty
Lawo Imagine Communications Grass Valley Riedel EVS Sony

Timing & Reference

Core
Meinberg Grandmasters Tektronix SPG GPS & Rubidium Discipline Boundary Clocks

VoIP & Talkback

Specialty
Riedel Artist RTS ODIN / OMNEO Clear-Com Eclipse AES67
How we work

A broadcast migration is a series of irreversible cutovers. We engineer for the day it goes live, not the day it ships.

/ Phase 01

Discovery & capacity modelling

Essence count, format roadmap, REMI plans, redundancy requirements, operational staffing. The fabric is sized for what you'll actually do - not a generic reference design.

/ Phase 02

Architecture & vendor selection

Spine-Leaf topology, PTP architecture, NMOS broker placement, multicast scheme, monitoring stack. Vendor choice falls out of the operational and scale requirements - not the other way round.

/ Phase 03

Lab build & validation

Full lab buildout with PTP failover testing, multicast load tests, NMOS interop validation across every endpoint vendor in scope. Cutover plans are rehearsed in the lab before they touch the plant.

/ Phase 04

Phased on-air cutover

Control-room-by-control-room migration with rehearsed rollback gates at every step. Hybrid SDI / IP runs in parallel while the new fabric is validated under real production load. Nothing migrates until it has passed live-traffic validation.

/ Phase 05

Handover, documentation & hypercare

Full as-built documentation, runbooks, monitoring dashboards and a 30/60/90-day hypercare engagement with your operations team. You own the fabric end-to-end before we leave the building.

Who we work with

Built for the facilities where downtime makes the news.

National & regional broadcasters

SDI plant refreshes, control-room IP migrations, REMI enablement, multi-site fabric design for distributed production.

Post-production houses

High-throughput essence transport for editorial, colour, finishing and VFX. ST 2110 for review rooms; ST 2022-6 / NDI for collaborative workflows.

Sports venues & OB trucks

Stadium IPTV, in-venue production fabrics, OB truck-to-broadcast-centre connectivity, low-latency multi-site contribution.

Live-event producers

Event-scale IP fabrics, ad-hoc PTP and multicast deployments, NMOS-aware routing for fast source switching, end-of-event teardown plans.

Government & defence media

Secure broadcast and TV-over-IP for legislative chambers, military media operations and emergency-services video distribution.

Houses of worship at scale

Multi-campus broadcast over IP, simulcast-ready fabrics, cost-conscious ST 2110 deployments that don't compromise on PTP or redundancy.

Frequently asked

The questions broadcast engineers actually ask us first.

What is ST 2110, and why are we moving from SDI to IP?

ST 2110 is SMPTE's family of standards (ST 2110-10, -20, -21, -22, -30, -40) for transporting uncompressed video, audio and ancillary data over managed IP networks. Broadcasters migrate from SDI because IP fabrics are software-defined and resolution-agnostic - the same fabric carries HD, 4K and 8K, which removes the per-resolution cabling and matrix replacement cycle. The result is lower long-term CapEx, REMI-capable workflows and a path to cloud production.

How long does an SDI to IP migration typically take?

A facility migration usually runs 6 to 18 months end-to-end depending on facility size, the number of production rooms in scope and whether the migration is greenfield or phased over an active SDI plant. We design phased cutover plans so on-air operations are never interrupted during the transition.

Do we have to replace all our SDI gear at once?

No. Most real-world deployments are hybrid SDI / IP for years. Gateways translate SDI to ST 2110 (and back) so legacy cameras, routers and production switchers continue to operate alongside the new IP fabric. The migration is staged by control room, by show or by facility, on a timeline that fits your contract and equipment lifecycle.

Which IP fabric vendors do you deploy for broadcast?

Primarily Arista (R-Series + CloudVision) for non-blocking fabrics, and Cisco IPFM (Nexus 9000 + DCNM) for Cisco-aligned operations. We're vendor-agnostic - we recommend the platform that fits your operational team's skills, your scale requirements and your existing tooling, not a vendor we have margin on.

Why is PTP timing critical and how do you design for it?

Without sub-microsecond timing accuracy, audio and video streams drift apart and frame edges lose alignment - the IP equivalent of a black flash. We deploy PTP (IEEE 1588-2008 / -2019) with boundary clocks at every leaf, redundant grandmasters with GPS or Rubidium discipline, and SMPTE ST 2059-2 profiles. Monitoring includes hop-by-hop offset and timing failover validation.

Can you rescue a broadcast migration that's gone off the rails?

Yes. About a third of our broadcast engagements start as rescue work - a system integrator's design that isn't passing PTP validation, multicast that storms under load, or an NMOS layer that won't reliably switch sources. We come in, audit, identify root cause and either correct the existing build or re-architect the parts that need it. We've never failed a broadcast engagement.

Talk to a broadcast engineer

Bring us in before the cutover. Or after the wheels come off - either way.

30-minute call with someone who's actually built one of these. Tell us what you're planning or what just broke, and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.