It won’t make your facility cheaper. It will not be easier to understand. And you may end up changing your workflows to create benefits. So why should broadcasters move to an IP-based infrastructure? That was the core question posed during the first day of the EBU Network Technology Seminar (NTS) 2015.
Flexibility & efficiency
Fortunately the answer was given as well: because IP-based infrastructures will provide you with a level of flexibility that current broadcast facilities cannot offer. And that will pay off in the long-run. It promises to reduce the costs of the content produced by allowing more material to be created by the same staff for cross-media exploitation. And not only that, IP-based production also has the power to take away current production constraints and enable what Christian Adell (Catalan broadcasting) called "Creative Innovation" in programme making.
Adding complexity to make things simpler?
This projected flexibility in workflows and the other added value IP infrastructures promise will require an increase in complexity. As several presenters at NTS remarked that complexity can be hidden from end-users such as programme makers, but not from broadcast engineers. They will have to acquire the necessary skills to make sure their company invests in the right IP products and manages them optimally. According to John Ellerton (BT) broadcasters therefore probably best "upscale" their staff to become software engineers.
EBU members can find more in-depth observations and explanations in the NTS 2015 presentations.