Sport Production Summit 2024: NEP Europe CTO to discuss IP and OpEx ambitions during ‘Buying Power’ session

John Guntenaar, the CTO of NEP Europe, will use his speaker appearance at SVG Europe’s Sport Production Summit (12 September, 2024) to outline his vision for the company’s technical future, including how it is furthering the use of SMPTE ST 2110 and continuing to transition to operating expenditure rather than capital spending.

Guntenaar will appear alongside Matt McDonald, Warner Bros. Discovery group SVP of EMEA Broadcast Services, and Tom Giles, IMG director of engineering, in a panel session called ‘Buying Power: Where to spend your tech budget (and why)’ which will focus on the technology, financial and operational challenges facing the sports broadcasting industry, and how this will be reflected at IBC2024.

Speaking with SVG Europe ahead of Sport Production Summit 2024, Guntenaar previewing the discussion said: “One of the main points, which is in line with the future strategic technical vision of NEP, and driven by our technical steering committee, is the shift from hardware to software and the more flexible licensing models that are attached with that. This shift is giving our clients more options to consider as they build out their production plans, and more flexibility to spin up resources just when they’re needed.

“It is a more ‘event-based licensing model’ and moving towards easier and faster software deployment with more updates and shorter development cycles.”

“In the old days, you had manufacturers that would have factories, and they would build custom enclosures with lots of boards and SDI connectors and other connectors that are not native to a computer. And they would have assembly lines, quality assurance, electrical engineering, mechanical design and more. But when the world moved towards IP and ST 2110 you saw that instead of having 32 SDI connectors, you would have one fibre link or an SFP slot with a fibre optic connection on it and you would have 32 signals back and forth.

“You would have a large board in a large mixer frame which has fewer components than before, because of things like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) so there’s a lot of empty space there just for the purpose of making sure that it would fit into that enclosure. Because of that, we can start shifting from bespoke enclosures with custom hardware for manufacturers to standard servers where you would have a fibre optic card and an FPGA acceleration card or CPU and GPU or a combination of those things. This changes the form factor but, in the end, you can run the exact same software.”

In the summer of 2024 in Paris, NEP Europe was involved in the deployment of a virtualised OB van – a software-defined outside broadcast unit using purely COTS hardware.

“This is part of our future vision, and we see that the manufacturers are picking that up. We are moving towards a standard processing plane, where we can run various types of software-based processing mixers, multi-viewers, audio processing etc.

“The licensing models attached to this are also changing as a result,” he continued. “If you’re not creating the enclosures anymore, and you just have a standard server, then many traditional broadcast companies are now software suppliers. With the increased cost of capital, there is a greater desire to look at other financial models. Many companies are moving towards subscription, licensing and service level agreement which appears to become the new standard..

“It is a more ‘event-based licensing model’ and moving towards easier and faster software deployment with more updates and shorter development cycles.”

Alongside the above, plus his hopes for IBC2024, Guntenaar will also use the session to refer to the benefits of Total Facility Control (TFC), NEP’s proprietary software platform for solving the issues of adopting IP infrastructure. TFC provides a single touchpoint to configure, provision, monitor and control systems, networks and facilities.

‘Buying Power: Where to spend your tech budget (and why)’ will form part of Sport Production Summit 2024, SVG Europe’s flagship conference and networking event. This year’s event takes place on 12 September at the De Hallen Studio’s in Amsterdam. For more information go to: https://www.svgeurope.org/sport-production-summit-2024/programme/