events each year – and there were particular limitations that came with the more traditional satellite way of doing things.” Despite this, he maintains that traditional satellite has definitely still got a place, as it is very reliable and a lot of broadcasters possess that infrastructure already, although there were certain constraints that came with it. “In particular, network contention and overbooking capacity, because these padel events are quite long and last from Monday until Sunday,” explains MacMurray. “If you just follow the centre court, there’s about ten hours of action per day – which is fine during the week, but things can get a little tricky at the weekend, particularly if you want to cover things like secondary court action. You want to facilitate that, and IP and SRT distribution was great for achieving that because you completely avoid that network contention and having to over- provision capacity straight away.” Jonathan Smith, business development director at Net Insight, adds: “The Nimbra Edge platform is quite interesting in that it takes a bit of an enterprise approach to these internet-delivered feeds. One of the things Edge does really well is diversity and delivery, as well as monitoring and gathering metrics across the network. You can have a distributed network, where you can place different points of presence across different infrastructure.” From a technology perspective, Smith acknowledges that the Edge platform is perhaps a little unusual in the industry because it uses a container-based deployment approach. “We use Kubernetes » The shift from a traditional satellite distribution base to an IP distribution model has opened up a huge realm of possibilities and growth for media rightsholders «
that allow us to be able to scale the footprint of the network up and down on demand. It makes it quite easy to deploy and scale and then bring down again, which is important when you’re doing occasional-use events. You don’t just want this monolithic beast that you have to maintain for the weekend alone, or whenever the peak load is.” There is also an operational dimension to it that, according to MacMurray, is essential. “The user interface and the interaction with the user story simply has to work
from an operational point of view,” he explains. “That’s something that’s completely baked into the philosophy of Nimbra Edge and its design. This needs to be integrated in a very simple, clean and effective way into a live master control environment – and that works for us. You can’t be doing 300 clicks and going into multiple screens when you’ve got live match delivery. It has to be very efficient from that point of view and integrate into existing systems. That has worked really well and the guys at Net Insight have been very good
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