Gallery Agnostics: Fast-paced pressures of live-to-air

Another of the eight unique projects part of IBC Accelerator Innovation Programme, Gallery Agnostic Live Media Production has stepped up to the challenge to explore this topical advancement in-depth, considering both on-prem and cloud devices.

The project, a collaboration between Participants Grass Valley, Tinkerlist, Singular.live, Zixi and Techex; and Champions ITN, YLE and BBC, places a core focus on the fast-paced pressures of live-to-air.

This IBC Accelerator challenge aims to explore and showcase how to decide and adapt the toolset needed for any given project at any given time, while keeping the user interface and the editorial producer workflow consistent and centric at all times.

• Read more from the Champions and Participants from Gallery Agnostics

“The agnostic approach to live production, including devices, galleries or hybrid (on prem and in the cloud or a mix between the two), aims to make live content production easy, flexible and adaptable,” said Mark Smith, IBC Accelerator Lead. “This is why this Accelerator caught the attention of world-leading news production and broadcast champions as well as the support of stellar vendor participants, who are all passionate about experimenting with radical new workflows in real world live production use cases.” 

The objective and POC plan

The project’s objectives demonstrate why live production needs to be more gallery and device agnostic focused, and why this will then help broadcasters adapt to budgets, technical possibilities and a variety of circumstances, like a sudden change in venue or location. Other objectives cover:

• Workflow focus
• Device agnostic
• Automatic failover/disaster recovery (DR)
• Go hybrid? Exploring how any show can be made fully remote and/ or in the cloud (5G)
• No physical gallery - demonstrating how there is no need for a physical gallery to run the show and exploring the potential of AR for full control of a studio
• (Gradual) switch on-prem 
• Need for standardised API. 

The study aims to empower producers and editors to control a variety of devices and tech stacks from one common interface, allowing for easy adaption to venue changes, OB truck interface and to help producers adapt to different budgets and types of show.

The POC plan is to run a live event on location, a full automated studio (switching between on-prem and cloud), while applying this workflow to both a fully professional Tier 1 equipped broadcast facility, as well as a lower end podcast/YouTube set-up.

Further examination of whether a standardised and structured approach to API can ensure interoperability and connectivity of devices, with an Open Call to broadcasters and vendors at IBC2023 to help define this, as more and more devices will be software focused.

For more information on this project click here.