To IP and beyond: Cloudbass outlines the vision behind its new OB9 truck By Will Strauss, Editor
Monday, January 27, 2020 - 09:00
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At the end of 2019, the UK-based OB firm Cloudbass launched OB9, its first new outside broadcast unit to be built on an IP core. To find out what they did and why they did it, SVG Europe went along to the company's HQ in the East Midlands to meet company directors Mike Beaumont (pictured, above) and James Wilson.
OB9 is an IP-based Ultra HD OB vehicle based on the SMPTE ST2110 standard. A 20-camera truck that was built from the ground up with help from systems integrator ES Broadcast, it brings together products from many different manufacturers including Arista, Evertz, Grass Valley, Ross, Calrec, Reidel and Sony. It uses Axon technology, including its Neuron product, to integrate these systems into a flexible workflow suited to live sports coverage which forms the bulk of Cloudbass' business.
SVG Europe: Why did you decide to go IP with OB9 and why was 2019 the right time do it?
Technical director Mike Beaumont (MB): We'd been watching IP technology quite carefully but had strategically paused on new builds over the last three years. Realistically, if this industry technology change wasn't happening, we probably would have built another baseband truck two to three years ago. But at the time the question was: do we really want to build a massive baseband truck or do we wait for this IP technology to work? For various reasons, we decided to hold on and keep the existing fleet going. It was the Axon Neuron product that made us realise that IP was ready and convinced us to make the jump
We were shown Neuron about two years ago as a white paper. It wasn't a real product then. When we saw it, we suddenly thought that makes total sense'. All the other solutions that we had looked at didn't quite make sense totally; They were all really bitty or didn't quite work for OBs.
We can't approach OB builds with the Field of Dreams' mentality of If you build it. They will come.' What we have done very carefully over the years is to build a diverse and flexible fleet with a price-conscious, but also future-proof, philosophy.
We did the OB8 project a year ago. At that time, we had a sudden need to build a UHD truck. BT Sport came to us and said: you're currently doing speedway in HD. We really need to migrate delivery to UHD, is this possible in the timescale? We had a three-month window for the transition, and with an already busy OB schedule with the strands truck, we realistically had a six-week window for the physical install.
At that point, I'd already been investigating lots of different IP avenues and it just so happened that the Axon Neuron product was just about ready for when we needed it. When I say, just about', we had the first shipment! I started designing the truck on that principle.
SVG Europe: So, the OB8 project very much lay the groundwork for OB9?
MB: We used OB8 as a proof-of-concept. In an ideal world, I would have liked to have spent six months lab testing.
We learned an awful lot of lessons from the way that we did that project. As it was a retrofit, we only needed to add a small IP layer onto the top of it. We didn't have to redo sound or the majority of the truck monitoring. We could just do the little bits that we needed to do in order to do a proof-of-concept. Was that proof-of-concept smooth? It was a learning curve building it. Within four weeks, however, it pretty much worked.
SVG Europe: I understand that building OB9 coincided with the award of a Sky Boxing contract?
Commercial director James Wilson (JW): We can't approach OB builds with the Field of Dreams' mentality of If you build it. They will come.' What we have done very carefully over the years is to build a diverse and flexible fleet with a price-conscious, but also future-proof, philosophy. At no stage have we wanted to go bleeding edge on the first generation of a technology.
Within 18 months to two years, the pioneering and cutting-edge technology rushed into service for blue-ribbon platinum events becomes outdated more quickly than the second wave of hardware that follows. At that point, the customers that were the early adopters of the emergent tech want to migrate to the much better second-generation technology quite quickly.
We saw that happen with the SD to HD migration especially with mixing, routing and cameras, so we made a conscious decision between three and four years ago that we wouldn't join the immediate arms race and, instead, we would sacrifice some existing work that needed the migration, to take a step back, and wait for the technology to stabilise and mature.
History has taught us all valuable lessons. With a third-generation HD truck with hybrid routers, you can do pretty much anything. You can turn a truck around from one job to another in a day, for example. We needed the topology of the UHD solutions to get to that point too, where the deployment of solutions had become more practical commercially.
SVG Europe: Was there a game-changing moment for you?
JW: We felt that 2018 Q4 we had reached the tipping point where a more critical mass of traditional HD work was starting to move into UHD too. Once UHD was getting to tier 2 sporting contracts, we had to move.
That ability to turnaround from one format to another quickly and seamlessly was super important to us. By upgrading to this level of technology now, at a point where levels of flexibility in IP UHD have pretty much caught up with HD-SDI, we can set a very good blueprint for the future.
SVG Europe: How important is the versatility of IP to the success of OB9?
JW: By going IP, we're not investing in massive enterprise-level routers. We are embracing scenario
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To IP and beyond: Cloudbass outlines the vision behind its new OB9 truck By Will Strauss, Editor 
