Broadcasters Travel Down Different Paths To IP Migration – TV News Check

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Tech leaders from Fox, Hearst and ABC shared the different approaches their groups are taking to a SMPTE 2110 migration — and the dynamics underwriting those diverging paths — in a TVNewsCheck webinar last week.
IP routing technology based on the SMPTE 2110 standard has matured significantly in the last few years, with a wider range of available networking equipment and better interoperability between different vendors’ products. Major networks and mobile truck vendors have already adopted 2110 as a way to move video and audio across IP networks. But local stations have remained cautious about investing in 2110 to replace aging HD-SDI infrastructure, with the exception of a few greenfield sites, as they wrestle with both tight finances and limited expertise in working with the technology.
Last week top engineers from the local broadcast world gathered for the TVNewsCheck webinar IP Networking and ROI in 2025, moderated by this reporter, to discuss their stations’ different approaches to the 2110 migration. The consensus was that 2110 technology is definitely ready to handle all of a broadcaster’s routing needs, but that a station’s decision to invest in it is strongly predicated on its finances as well as the age and condition of existing HD-SDI infrastructure. And for some stations, the wisest move might be to stick with HD-SDI.
WTTG-WDCA, the Fox owned-and-operated duopoly in Washington, D.C., is one of the handful of stations to go all-in on 2110. The station’s lease was expiring in 2021, and WTTG decided to move to a brand-new building instead of trying to upgrade in place, which would have required replacing 60-year-old electric, plumbing and HVAC systems, explained Jim Beahn, the stations’ VP of engineering and operations.
The real estate decision was made several years before, and the WTTG engineering team went to NAB Show 2019 to speak with vendors and figure out whether it was going to stick with HD-SDI or adopt 2110 in the new plant.
“In 2019 we realized, hey, we’re right on the cusp, but we can do it,” Beahn recalled. “We can get enough 2110 equipment to make it work.”
At that time many vendors were talking about 2110, but the equipment wasn’t available yet, or if it was, it was at a much smaller scale than existing SDI products. But WTTG was able to find at least one vendor for each of the major systems required to get the station on-air in 2110. It also hired a systems integrator, Diversified, to manage the two-year process of designing the plant, identifying and ordering equipment and then installing and integrating it.
“We’re a Fox owned-and-operated station, but we’re still a single TV station,” Beahn said. “So, this wasn’t going to work, it was not something that we could do ourselves. I might take a much smaller scale if we were going to upgrade in place, to migrate to 2110, I might try to do that myself. Maybe put in a router with a whole bunch of gateways and stuff. But it was a brand-new station, so we hired a systems integrator.”
The COVID pandemic presented some challenges to the project, with hours of Zoom calls replacing large in-person meetings along with some shipment delays. But working with its systems integrator, WTTG managed to “push it over the finish line” and began broadcasting from the new plant on July 24, 2021.
A few vendors that promised 2110 systems couldn’t deliver in time, and WTTG ended up having to put some SDI gateways in. But for the most part the infrastructure is 2110, and there isn’t any SDI routing in the plant. And after overcoming some initial issues with NMOS IS-04 (device discovery and registration) and IS-05 (connection management), the technology has performed well, Beahn said.
There hasn’t been a big change with 2110 from an operator standpoint. WTTG stuck with the same brand switchers, so the control room interfaces are consistent, and the same goes for equipment in the studio. But there are changes behind the scenes, as the orchestration in the 2110 router and control system allows WTTG to quickly reconfigure equipment behind the signal flow. For example, WTTG can quickly move operations between its two production control rooms, with all video and audio flows being switched from one to the other with the press of two buttons.
“Overall, three and a half years later, I have got to say that 2110 works,” Beahn said. “I know personally I am very glad we made the decision. Not just because of the new technology, but from a personal standpoint, if we had built this place with copper coax on SDI, I’d be looking to figure out now how to rip all that out in two or three years and replace it with 2110 as the industry moves forward. I’m glad that we don’t have to do that.”
Brad Plant was involved with several early greenfield IP builds during his time at NBCUniversal but is dealing with a much different animal in his current role as executive director of technology for ABC owned-and-operated WLS-TV Chicago. He has been gradually employing 2110 technology at the station, in the form of a trunking system that provides better video and audio connectivity through the 13-story, 100-year-old-plus building that WLS owns and resides in.
“I won’t say building a greenfield 2110 facility is easy or simple, but when you’re now looking at an in-place upgrade, there is a whole new bag of challenges that we’re still just learning and navigating through,” Plant said. “We’re starting small.”
The big driver for 2110 is the “vertically challenged” layout in which WLS operates, he said. With equipment rooms and studios spanning from the ground floor to the 13th floor, getting video around is a problem. WLS has employed numerous distribution amplifiers (DAs) throughout the building in places that are often tough to access. In past years the station had run fiber to provide new connectivity along with buying expensive wavelength-division multiplexing gear. But that approach was cost-prohibitive, so Plant has turned to IP networking as an alternative.
“We first sort of cut our teeth here by building a 2110 trunking system between our equipment rooms,” Plant said. “We put some Cisco switches built on IPFM [IP Fabric for Media], and we’ve got 200-gig links between all of our rack rooms headed for a spine switch. And now that allows us to just throw down some gateways, and you can get some pretty high-density gateways these days. And we’re future proof.”
As the station grows, it can easily add more gateways, or ideally, native IP equipment, Plant said. As it looks to replace gear, WLS is seeking products that can do both 2110 and SDI, allowing it to hook up the SDI for today and then connect 2110 in the future. Plant said that not much dual-capability gear is currently available, though he is open to buying products that can be upgraded by swapping out an I/O card.
After WLS’s first step into 2110 with the trunking system, phase two will be trunking into its SDI router as its starts bring more 2110 products online. The final phase will be adopting some sort of control system, with an IP controller working alongside a broadcast controller to manage operations.
“There’s definitely a lot more to worry about when you’re doing the in-place [upgrade],” Plant said. “The beauty of the greenfield is you have this laboratory environment that you can play with and grow and learn. We’re in a working facility that we’ve got to keep on the air. And for the user, they don’t care if it’s IP or SDI, it’s got to work. That’s the challenge that we’re navigating through today.”
Also upgrading in place is Hearst Television, which first tackled 2110 by creating an in-house lab to identify low-impact use cases for the technology in order to learn about it. The station group then went on to do proofs of concept (POCs) at two stations by installing 2110 backbones to feed sources to monitor walls.
“Our approach has been measured,” said Joe Addalia, VP broadcast technology for Hearst Television. “Our first foray was really a lab.”
Hearst identified two stations whose monitors wall badly needed upgrades. It installed IP switches in a spine-leaf architecture along with the required gateways to interface with legacy SDI sources in order to bring those signals into the IP fabric. Once in the fabric, those signals went high-speed into a processor to create the monitor mux and feed the monitor wall.
“This turned out to be a pretty interesting exercise,” Addalia said. “Because what we learned was that yes, we’re building a monitor mux, and that was the use case. But really what we did was we started replacing the router.
“If you look at the amount of sources that are on a production control monitor or even a master control monitor mux, there are a lot of sources that are needed throughout the plant,” he continued. “You’ve brought all of these into the fabric already, so you’ve created some duplication in what’s in 2110 and what’s in SDI. And that was kind of an interesting way for us to sit back and look at, how do we migrate from SDI to 2110?”
The challenge, of course, is cost. After putting in a spine-leaf infrastructure, the next question was whether the stations needed the redundancy afforded by SMPTE 2200-7, which is seamless protection switching with redundant IP paths. Addalia noted that it is fair to question whether this was necessary, as none of the Hearst stations have ever had redundant HD-SDI routers.
He thinks for a monitor wall one could probably accept a bit more risk than when replacing the routing for a full facility and perhaps get away with only installing a single fabric. But that wasn’t what Hearst wound up doing at its first two 2110 sites.
“The two stations that we did this in were medium-sized markets, so we really didn’t want to see significant risk there,” Addalia said. “We did do red/blue [redundant IP fabrics]. And now we fast-forward a couple of years, and we sit with these two fabrics that are really poised to actually be the full fabric for the station, so we can sunset the SDI infrastructure.”
When that time comes Hearst plans to make the shift gradually, operating the two infrastructures, 2110 and HD-SDI, in a “side by side” mode for a while before shutting down the legacy HD-SDI gear. Addalia would like to eventually employ a similar migration model at other medium- and large-market stations.
“You walk in, as opposed to do a flash cut and run in,” Addalia said. “Taking the smaller use case of a monitor wall, and actually our second use case was a second monitor wall in a second control room. We said, this worked great for the first control room, so we’ll do it in the second. Then you look at the sources that we added for the second one, and you can do a gap analysis between what’s left in the SDI router [and what’s on 2110]. You add those to the fabric, and then you can slowly walk your destinations over to the IP side.”
But the 2110 calculus is different for a small-market station and its tighter margins. The first thing Hearst would consider is if the existing cabling up to the patch bay is sound. If it is, then that starts leaning toward an SDI replacement. The other piece to look at is the systemization, the pieces around the router such as DAs and other ancillary equipment. If they’re “up to speed” and can support 3-gigabit-per-second signals (the requirement for 1080p), Addalia said, then Hearst would just do a swap in place with a new HD-SDI router and leave everything else as is.
“In a smaller market we’re just going to put another router right where it was, because we have to look at the total cost of ownership of this,” he said. “If we’re going to go in and do an entire facility rebuild, that’s a pretty big hit to their bottom line in depreciation. We’re a private company, so we keep a close eye on things like this. And that’s something that I don’t know would make good dollars and cents for us.”
Glen Dickson has over 25 years of experience working in the media industry, most of it spent writing about the technology behind broadcast and cable television. He is currently a contributing editor to TVNewsCheck and a freelance writer for several publications. He previously served as senior editor of the Broadcasting & Cable, where he led its technology coverage as well as related podcasts, seminars and conferences. Dickson has served as a speaker at major industry conventions including the Consumer Electronics Show and NAB Show and also worked as an investor relations consultant to media and technology companies. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Follow him on X: @GlenDickson
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