The interconnect of media essence flows and related control data across Wide Area Networks is becoming of increasing importance in the industry with ramp up of remote and distributed production. A cross-industry team has been working in an activity group in the Video Services Forum to define best practice in terms of a new Technical Recommendation for this area. The proposed presentation will present the detail of the final output of the second phase of this work which is due for completion in the fall of 2019.

The Technical Recommendations covers several areas which encompass both the media data plane and control plane.
The first area of work has been focussing on the best practice for the trunking and protection of the media data flows with the aim of, where possible, using existing standards.
The work to-date has defined a GRE over RTP encapsulation which allows the existing toolkit of SMPTE ST 2022 protection mechanisms to be used at the trunking layer as well as at the essence layer. There is a definition of the application of moth SMPTE ST 2022-5 and SMPTE ST 2022-7. The trunking and protection work has also reached out to include protecting the transport of other non-media but media-production-related IP or ethernet data flows.
The second and arguably more challenging area is that of the segregation, proxying and security of the control layer between different facilities. Use cases are currently being defined for this area and differ considerably when considering both inter-company and intra-company connectivity. The differing requirements in this space are brought about by the levels of discoverability and control that is allowable and desirable between locations.

The presentation will consist of an overview of the challenges, followed by a walk through the proposed recommendations and the outstanding areas. This will also go hand in hand with an on-line demonstration of the work so-far.