Tech Focus: Intercoms, Part 1 - Moving Deeper Into Wireless, IP, Virtual Territory Spurred by the pandemic, comms changes in remote production are likely permanent By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Wednesday, February 23, 2022 - 7:00 am
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With remote production entering entirely new levels during the COVID pandemic, intercoms have been front and center like never before. It's a position they're not going to relinquish anytime soon. The need for production-team members to communicate from a wide variety of locations and positions gave new and literal meaning to the phrase at-home production.
At the same time, wireless and IP-based intercoms - the former moving to new parts of the post-FCC-auction RF spectrum, the latter leveraging audio's migration to networked infrastructure - continued to make steady inroads in the workflow. But any technology sector that moves that quickly is bound to experience some growing pains.
The Pandemic Effect The pandemic's Delta and Omicron waves have made AoIP platforms even more necessary for intercoms, says Michael Marston, director, sales, Unity Intercom.
Unity was used especially heavily in November and December for major sporting events as remote production became an immediate mandate once again, he says, noting increased use for NFL and college-basketball broadcasts. In many productions last month, I heard reports of a surge in team members' testing positive, sending key positions of production workflow back to working from home. Unity is usually used as a way to extend onsite audio frames and IFBs to mobile, on cellphones, laptops, and even tablets - all sending and receiving audio as if they were onsite. In many cases, an onsite producer on a keypanel, for example, wouldn't even know that the comms audio he's hearing is from a team member located a thousand miles away or more on their iPhone.
He adds that Unity systems are increasingly being integrated with RTS and Clear-Com systems, as well as with production audio consoles, as a way to extend audio wirelessly for use by remote-production-team members during, say, NBA and NFL broadcast productions.
Says Marston, Comms using Unity Connect and audio transport over IP have clearly found permanent implementation in the production ecosystem.
Virtualization As AoIP/VoIP has become more integrated into pro audio in general and intercoms in particular, virtualization is another significant trend. In the past year, Telos committed itself to that with the introduction of its VIP (Virtual Intercom Platform), which the company describes as the first fully featured cloud-based intercom system. According to Telos VP, Business Development, Martin Dyster, it's an approach that moves further from matrix-based intercom designs by basing the system on a cloud-based server that can manifest as a virtual comms panel anywhere on any browser.
Telos' Martin Dyster: Virtualization is something that intercoms and other audio systems were headed towards in the long run.
The pandemic definitely drove that development more quickly than it might have gone otherwise, he points out, but virtualization is something that intercoms and other audio systems were headed towards in the long run.
Telos essentially redeployed the DSP of its Infinity IP intercom platform, which is also matrixless, in a cloud environment using Docker, a set of platform-as-a-service products that apply OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers.
When VIP is initialized in the cloud, the administrator deploys a container per panel to build a comms system of the size required, Dyster explains. Each container then establishes a connection to a macvlan [Docker's own network infrastructure] on the server, which supports AES67 multicast communication between the virtual devices, enabling voice traffic between intercoms in exactly the same way it would with hardware panels connected on an AoIP LAN.
A beta version of the VIP platform hit a nerve, says Dyster, driving interest. VIP has also been released on AMPP, Grass Valley's Agile Media Processing Platform intended for cloud-based live production. VIP on AMPP supports essential intercom functionality: partylines, IFBs, groups, peer-to-peer communication.
That arrangement underscores how intercom's move deeper into AoIP and cloud-based environments and the intercompatibility that accompanies it are changing the nature of the industry.
There's still plenty of business out there for the big, $100,000 central-matrix model of intercoms, but virtualization is a shift that customers are asking about, says Dyster, noting that audio consoles - including Telos's own radio desks - are among the platforms that have already moved to productize that trend and that esports has embraced alternative intercom platforms. It's not going to happen overnight, and it likely will change the business model, but the writing is on the wall. We feel we're on the precipice of that, and it's exciting.
The Shadow of 5G Gary Rosen, VP, sales, Pliant Technologies, whose flagship CrewCom wireless system is widely used on sports fields as well as for other production applications, notes that the next round of RF-spectrum constraint is being propelled by the imminent arrival of 5G applications.
Pliant Technologies' Gary Rosen: [With] pressure on tighter spectrum [and] so many more RF devices being deployed, the solution for wireless-systems makers is to focus on how to increase density.
The pressure on tighter spectrum continues on an almost daily basis, he says. At the same time, there are so many more RF devices being deployed: intercoms, talent microphones, IFB, in-ears, wireless parabolics, even the RFID tags on uniforms and equipment. So the solution for wire
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Tech Focus: Intercoms, Part 1 - Moving Deeper Into Wireless, IP, Virtual Territory Spurred by the pandemic, comms changes in remote production are likely permanent By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
