We have been dedicated to the development and deployment of control, management, monitoring and automation systems in the broadcasting industry for over a decade, accumulating extensive product and project experience. Our products are highly adaptable and widely applied to system management and control in studios, playout, transmission, Master Control Room (MCR), earth stations, OB Vans (outside broadcast vans), satellite uplink vehicles / DSNG vehicles, flyaway stations, equipment rooms / machine rooms, and more. We also provide comprehensive solutions for building large-scale broadcast command & dispatch centers.
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Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia)
I. Company Introduction
Our company is a well-known professional system integrator and service provider in China's broadcasting and telecommunications industry, engaged in system design, consulting, product representation, system integration, and operational services in the broadcasting field, with long-term roots in domestic Chinese television stations and network operators. Our business scope is mainly concentrated in the areas of program sources, production, relay, playout, transmission, new media, IPTV, smart terminals, and other fields, providing users with comprehensive services from signal sources to digital content distribution. Headquarters is located in Hong Kong, with the operation center in Beijing. The company has more than 200 employees. We have established offices in 13 provinces and municipalities nationwide, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Chengdu, forming a complete service network that serves users across the country, gradually becoming a full-service solution provider for the broadcasting and telecommunications industry. The company has established professional audio-video and broadcasting division, digital media and network division, wireless and satellite communication division, R&D center, system integration distribution department, and comprehensive management center.
II. Product Technical Solution Introduction
The Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia) includes 4 subsystems: a monitoring system, a matrix and signal scheduling system, a reservation and task management system, and an automated Task Execution System. It also integrates multiple service modules such as post-event data processing services, real-time data processing services, and link modeling services. Based on microservice architecture, it builds a layered end-to-end intelligent control platform.
The platform addresses the trends and challenges of broadcasting IP-based and virtualized environments, using cloud technology and Internet technology as tools to provide television stations and Internet audio-video media companies with an end-to-end, fully automated intelligent platform. At the same time, it uses big data analysis and other technical means to aggregate, store, process in real time, analyze trends, and provide recommendations for multi-source data, improving the operational quality of broadcasting institutions and broadcasting facilities.
The platform adopts a hierarchical structure; the upper layer is the reservation and transmission system, the middle layer is the task execution and resource scheduling allocation module; meanwhile, modules related to task execution such as system working status monitoring are also in this layer; the bottom layer is the monitoring system, Matrix Control System, and others. The specifics are shown in the diagram below:
Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia)
1. The Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia) realizes control and management of overall task reservation management, routing, scheduling, resource scheduling, automated workflow management, monitoring, and surveillance;
2. The Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia) contains four logical architecture layers: UI layer, service layer, adaptation layer, and basic equipment layer; it provides multi-level user management interface with separated rights and domains;
3. The service layer provides core business application control service functions, mainly including: task reservation, task scheduling services, resource management and scheduling services, user management, monitoring and surveillance, data collection and analysis services, implementing core service functions such as overall user authentication, business acceptance, resource scheduling, and signal routing workflow formulation;
4. The adaptation layer completes basic equipment and signal routing interface management and control, signal routing management and control functions;
The platform can provide the following core functions: reservation and scheduling, automatic task scheduling and execution, monitoring and surveillance, audio-video signal scheduling, workflow automation; in addition, there are many value-added and derivative services, covering multiple aspects of the daily operation of broadcasting institutions.
III. Domestic and International Awards Received by the Product
This software, together with CCTV's mobile field IP audio system, won the second prize of the 2018 Broadcasting and Television Science and Technology Innovation Award
IV. Product Advantages
1. Multi-platform Monitoring
For the control needs of the broadcasting industry:
(1) Adapt to devices with different interfaces and protocols;
(2) Although devices and signals differ, they should be integrated into a complete business flow;
(3) Complex signal scheduling, including different signal formats;
This product provides extensive device adaptation, can adapt to mainstream device protocols in the market, achieving unified monitoring and control of complex device clusters.
Currently supported are not only traditional broadcasting devices, but also devices from other fields, such as cloud facilities, environmental monitoring, IT machine rooms, and various interface media devices/software/services and sensors, all with excellent support; not only standard SNMP and HTTP, RESTful interface devices and services, but also other interface forms are well supported, such as serial port, GPIO, USB, GPIB, etc.;
The system can be deployed on various mainstream operating systems, such as MS Windows, Linux, Unix, etc.; it supports various terminals, including PCs, mobile phones, tablets, etc.
2. Full Workflow Automation
A complete task automation workflow execution solution reduces the scope of manual operations and lowers error rates; workflow automation and intelligence are reflected in intelligent link allocation based on resource pooling, resource capability classification, resource weighting, and other foundations, reasonably allocating the time occupancy of each resource and eliminating conflicts.
Provides event response mechanisms, enabling automated modes such as linkage and follow-up.
3. Scalability
Supports secondary proxy, device inspection proxy, clustering, etc.; by adding more proxy instances with horizontal expansion, it can support greater system loads.
4. Provides diverse clients represented by browsers, tightly integrated with smart mobile terminals, supporting anytime, anywhere system access, promoting human collaboration and cooperation
Provides multiple methods including mobile H5 pages, SMS push, email push, and WeChat terminals, including enterprise WeChat groups, improving collaboration among personnel in different regions, different companies, and different departments.
Mobile H5 page
5. Provides enterprise-level post-event data analysis and processing platform
(1) Suitable for collection, aggregation, storage, and online query processing of massive data from different sources;
(2) Comprehensive use of Redis, MongoDB, and other NoSQL databases, providing excellent performance and availability;
(3) Supports clustering and horizontal expansion, supports parallel processing;
(4) Online report generation;
(5) B/S architecture, supports multi-user concurrent access;
(6) Simple, easy to maintain, easy to deploy;
(7) Supports high-speed batch processing of data;
(8) Provides GUI interface, supports interactive data export;
(9) Supports export of multiple file formats such as XML, JSON, MS Excel, CSV;
(10) Supports aggregation of multi-source data, generating unified views and reports;
6. Provides powerful real-time data processing platform
The data processing platform can collect and store massive data, generate data storage files, and also perform alarm analysis based on real-time parameters, such as setting unexpected changes, pattern mismatches, threshold exceeding alarms, target disappearance alarms, sudden target appearance alarms, etc., and can also perform multi-parameter joint analysis, specifying constraints and correlations between parameters in the form of rule formulas, performing logical reasoning and trend analysis.
7. Adopts microservice architecture design
Each module adopts microservice fine-grained design and production, loosely coupled connections between modules, facilitating iterative updates, improving R&D and maintenance efficiency, simplifying maintenance operations and improving system reliability; at the same time, some functional modules (such as monitoring and surveillance, big data analysis, etc.) microservices, as well as some third-party microservice modules, can all be incorporated into the resource pool for the upper-layer resource scheduling module to call as resources
8. Adopts BS architecture design, convenient for user operation, providing a simple, easy-to-use, flexible operation interface, simplifying and reducing operation difficulty
9. Cloud-friendly, cloud-native
Can be deployed in servers or in cloud platforms, convenient and flexible, a cloud-ready solution.
10. Provides event push and data publishing interfaces; the goal is to provide linkage and information exchange between various subsystems based on close personnel collaboration; provides unified standard API interfaces, based on which workflow automation systems can be built, and can also interface with customers' other business systems to achieve interconnection and interoperability goals
V. Application Cases
1. CCTV EFP, CCTV E16 Studio, CCTV 800 Square Meter Studio
Our company applied the Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia) in China Central Television's mobile field, 4K/HD studio, and other projects. Specifically, including two sets of EFP systems, one set of E16 studio, one set of 800 square meter studio, and one set of audio truck. Among them, the system configured for China Central Television's mobile field achieved the following functions:
(1) Intuitive and vivid real-time display of system status in IP environment;
(2) Detection of IP-based audio streams;
(3) Adjustment, scheduling, and distribution of audio signals;
(4) Intelligent discovery of devices in IP environment;
(5) Complete device monitoring capability;
(6) Complete signal detection capability;
(7) Complete network monitoring capability;
(8) Data collection and data analysis capabilities, including aggregation, storage, modeling, processing, and operational recommendations;
The system completed its own commissioning and testing from mid-2017 to the end of the year, and was delivered for use together with the mobile field IP audio system in 2018, and has been running stably ever since. During 2018, together with the mobile field IP audio system, it participated in major program production and broadcasting activities such as the Winter Olympics live production, Asian Games, and World Cup. Its powerful detection and monitoring capabilities, intelligent user experience, intuitive interface display, comprehensive data collection, analysis and processing capabilities, comprehensive report output, etc., have received praise from many parties, especially from program production teams and equipment manufacturers from other countries and peer experts. This product, as one of the most important auxiliary systems, safeguards the safe and high-quality broadcasting of CCTV's mobile field IP audio system. This software, together with the mobile field IP audio system, won the second prize of the 2018 Broadcasting and Television Science and Technology Innovation Award.
In recent years, China Unicom Group's management has proposed "implementing a focus strategy, innovating cooperative development", positioning TV video business as a strategic basic business of China Unicom. According to this strategic planning requirement, China Unicom decided to build a multimedia transmission platform. The first phase will first cover key cities in China and some overseas POP points, deploying multimedia transmission platform equipment as well as media gateways, codecs, and other equipment, using dedicated lines or public networks to solve high-quality real-time video and voice transmission, aggregation, and distribution between overseas POP points and China, as well as between key cities in China, serving important customers such as broadcasting and online video providers. The second phase will expand to key areas overseas, achieving low-latency, highly reliable real-time audio-video transmission between China and abroad. The video media network takes Beijing as the media center, connecting domestic and international POP points to form China Unicom's video media network, covering domestic and international media customers, providing global media content transmission services.
Transmission Platform Node Architecture
Based on the Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia), our company provided an automated reservation and signal transmission operation platform for China Unicom International's multimedia transmission platform.
In this case, the platform provides comprehensive monitoring, automation, linkage, agility; supports big data-based statistics and prediction; pattern extraction, trend refinement; report generation; operational optimization, recommendations; adopts B/S architecture, convenient for fast browser access.
For the characteristics of devices, facilities, and users in this case being cross-regional, dispersed in different departments and different subsidiaries, separated rights and domains are provided to support larger-scale organizations.
In order to better support operations and continuously optimize operations, an enterprise version of the data processing and analysis platform is provided, which can realize: post-event big data analysis, real-time data processing and analysis.
For the challenges of the large scale and distributed deployment of the system in this project, various facilities such as secondary proxy, device inspection proxy, and clustering are provided; by adding more proxy instances with horizontal expansion, greater system loads can be supported.
The platform completed its own commissioning and testing from mid-2017 to the end of the year, and was delivered for use in the first half of 2018, and has been running stably ever since. During this period, together with the multimedia transmission platform, it participated in major program production and broadcasting activities such as the Winter Olympics live production, Asian Games, and World Cup. Its powerful detection and monitoring capabilities, intelligent user experience, intuitive interface display, comprehensive data collection, analysis and processing capabilities, diverse report output, etc., have received customer recognition.
During this time, the system underwent second-phase expansion, adding 4 overseas nodes in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles on top of the previous domestic cities. In 2019, a third-phase expansion was conducted, adding domestic nodes including Changsha station, Zhejiang station, Urumqi station, satellite station, CCTV station, and mobile station.
This product, as one of the most important auxiliary systems, safeguards the safe and high-quality broadcasting of China Unicom International's multimedia transmission platform.
At Tencent, with the development of the broadcasting center in departments such as Tencent Video and the increase in business volume, standardized, process-oriented, and automated solutions are needed to handle daily work needs and improve work efficiency. Previously, the broadcasting center had the following problems:
(1) The current reservation path for studios is: employees directly contact broadcasting center employees to apply for studio reservations. There is no unified website platform for employees, and requirements cannot be fully understood, bringing inconvenience to subsequent studio arrangements and other work, and also creating work pressure for broadcasting center employees. Therefore, a unified reservation system is needed to realize requirement collection and aggregation, and to transmit the collected information to the control system for identification;
(2) On the same day or throughout a month, there are many competitions and events, requiring manual entry and modification of device parameters one by one, and these parameters are relatively fixed. However, since there is currently no control platform system, employees need to manually adjust the matrix for operation every day. Therefore, it is necessary to generate XML files or other forms based on the reservation scheduling system for the control system to read, and automatically select corresponding devices according to pre-written templates to achieve automation;
(3) Currently, monitoring of all devices inside the broadcasting center is relatively passive. It may only be discovered when a device is to be used and found unusable, or when there is a problem with the monitor's signal, that the device or link has a problem. Therefore, a real-time monitoring system is needed. When any problem is found, an alarm is immediately issued, and the system can also provide certain troubleshooting ideas and solutions based on fault phenomena;
(4) The broadcasting center has many asset devices, with many devices borrowed daily, such as earphones, and because of business needs, devices are often lent out. In order to uniformly manage these devices, a unified Asset Management System is needed to manage borrowed devices, prevent device damage, loss, and other phenomena, and transform from offline paper to online approval processes;
(5) Currently, the broadcasting center lacks promotional efforts for external visitors. In order to increase influence and provide a good experience for foreign guests and visitors, an information publishing system is needed to meet actual needs. For example, there are displays at the entrance of each studio where information about the studio's hosts and guests can be viewed at any time. To facilitate events and advertising promotions, advertisements can be embedded on various screens, and even some touch screen functions are needed to interact with users;
(6) Information cannot be synchronized in a timely manner. Some faults that occur and are resolved cannot be made known to everyone else. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a knowledge base, and the system can also provide some simple troubleshooting reminders based on faults encountered before;
In response to the above pain points, the Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia) was deployed, mainly for control and management of all devices in the studio production domain (including but not limited to baseband and non-baseband, IP, SDI over IP). Including parameter modification, signal scheduling, device resource scheduling (including cards, etc.), big data analysis and device control protocol tool development, meter reading system to facilitate subsequent data analysis and full utilization of resources, generating executable tasks from the scheduling system data, allowing the control system to automatically execute. Set up reasonable human intervention mechanisms. Can provide templates or snapshot functions, which can reproduce faults based on snapshots for troubleshooting, provide reasonable control logic (provide hardware operated and controlled by this platform, such as hardware panels). With this platform, the time occupancy of each device can be reasonably allocated, unnecessary emergency problems can be prevented, expensive resources are not abused, similar resources are not idle, maximizing the utilization rate of various resources. Project composition:
Tencent New Building Intelligent Platform System Composition and Workflow
Reservation System, related functions include reservation and scheduling, both of which are means of pre-planning and application for resource use. Among them, scheduling corresponds to columns such as variety shows and sports events, which are a form of resource pre-allocation with strong regularity; while reservation has a strong sudden color and greater uncertainty. Generally, scheduling may correspond to longer-term planning, such as the time for the dragon boat race to use the studio, etc. Scheduling, due to its regularity, tends to be imported in batches, and only needs to set time windows in advance; while reservation is more flexible and casual, a short-term form of resource application.
Task Execution System, receives and displays task execution information scheduled from the reservation system in real time, issues reminders in advance, and duty personnel execute tasks according to the scheduled time, opening up signal transmission routes and cooperating with equipment and signal detection systems to monitor the working status of all equipment on the task route at any time to ensure correct signal transmission. When equipment fails or the matrix status is incorrect, it can issue sound and light alarms to remind staff to resolve faults. At the same time, it provides means to allow operators to manually adjust task routes according to actual conditions to ensure smooth signal paths.
The Unified Control Platform (iSwiftMedia) comprehensive solution includes comprehensive detection means for the diverse equipment and signals of television stations. The collected information is intelligently processed through knowledge bases and processing rules, with comprehensive alarm detection, achieving precise positioning and targeted action, laying a solid foundation for the goal of establishing safe and high-quality broadcasting. Real-time status presentation, diverse event notifications, and multiple collaboration methods provided are conducive to team collaboration and cooperation. Regardless of whether relevant personnel are at the station or on-site, under this platform, they have the experience, mechanisms, and means to solve problems. Through seamless information acquisition, they can obtain the event situation at the first time, which is conducive to collaboration and pooling wisdom, early fault detection, fault localization, and fault resolution, conducive to high-quality broadcasting and safe broadcasting.
2. Platformized, intelligent systems and facilities will improve processes and efficiency, reducing broadcasting institutions' labor cost expenditures
In the context of the big background and trend of station-network convergence, the importance of safe and high-quality broadcasting of television station production and broadcasting systems is increasingly rising, and how to do it well will soon become a difficult problem. Obviously, detection and monitoring, manual monitoring is time-consuming and laborious, with high false alarm and missed alarm rates, and large time delays, making it impossible to meet the requirements of massive-scale monitoring and quantitative detection of high-quality broadcasting. Relying on the development of IT technology and network technology, using mature means of information technology such as network data collection and intelligent data processing, automatic detection and intelligent processing goals can be achieved; this will inevitably reduce labor expenditures and improve the efficiency of broadcasting departments.
3. Optimize operations and maintenance; relying on big data, cloud platforms, etc., through data analysis and mining, improve the quality and level of system operations and maintenance
In addition to collecting data and events from devices and signals, processing them in real time, issuing real-time warnings, and assisting operators in fault handling, the monitoring system will also store this related data for future analysis and processing. In addition, data is analyzed from different angles and at deep levels to predict system operation trends. These will all improve the operational quality of broadcasting institutions and facilities, and promote continuous improvement of operational levels
4. End-to-end full workflow automation, based on intelligent resource scheduling and allocation, will improve the operational quality of broadcasting institutions
(1) The platform covers reservation-automatic execution-summary statistics, a complete automated workflow;
(2) Simplifies operations, eliminates the previous tedious device setup process before the program starts, now can quickly deploy, ready with one key;
(3) A complete task automation workflow execution solution reduces the frequency of manual operations and lowers error rates; the platform's full workflow automation covers but is not limited to the following links: reservation scheduling, task orchestration, snapshot freezing, macro one-key application, task execution, post-event analysis and statistics, scheduling plan-duty log, whiteboard collaboration, asset management, etc., a complete automated business process connecting external customers, program departments, operations and maintenance departments, management personnel, suppliers, system builders, and other links;
(4) Software intelligence, through resource pooling, resource capability classification, resource weighting, intelligently recommends optimal links, reasonably allocates the time occupancy of each device, prevents unnecessary emergency problems, ensures expensive resources are not abused, similar resources are not idle, maximizing the utilization rate of various resources;
(5) Efficient collaboration between the system and personnel, and between personnel; in addition to the system's automatic email push, SMS push, and WeChat push, the system also provides H5 format mobile pages with multiple pages updated in real time, involving task orchestration, studio-device deactivation-activation update information, preset values for device parameters in tasks, convenient for duty personnel in various places to view, especially maintenance personnel entering the machine room for inspection and in transit;
Screenshots on this page show the Chinese user interface. English materials are available on request.
