Media Gateways in Hybrid Wired and Wireless Media Production

Professional media production will in the future require more flexibility over where and how its operations are provided, so “effective use” includes operation where there are multiple networks, which could include 5G, wired, cloud-based and home networks. The broadcast industry's adoption of live networked media systems is still relatively immature, and there is not yet a consistent and complete approach to describing architectures and the interfaces required for interoperability. In this paper, the AMWA Network Media Systems Template has been used to build a set of media orchestration and control functions for a professional media production using both 5G and wired (ST 2110 based) media network. In particular, the scenario under consideration comes from the EU Horizon IC-41 Project called 5G-RECORDS (https://www.5g-records.eu/) and is about a multi-camera 5G-enabled broadcast studio. The MOCG (Media Operational Control Gateway) is the component that the partners are developing to control the setup of media resources; it sits on top of the 5G network, to automate and simplify the operational control of broadcast equipment deployed in various locations. In production, this is done through AMWA NMOS APIs. In the 5G network, the use of these APIs needs to be adapted through the introduction of several middleware components decoupling the remote operations from the studio and replicating/emulating NMOS control functions within a 5G environment. This paper gives a detailed description of the wireless studio use-case, the MOCG and the Media Gateway responsible for anchoring the media components within the 5G network and the production studio.