Located in Shanghai, the economic center of China, Shanghai Media Group (SMG) is a market leading media and entertainment organization. Critical to continuous operations and expansion is the in-house capability to provide mission critical network services.

Following the commercial and technical maturation of “all IP” media networking using industry standard IP switches, SMG made several conclusions. First, video and audio equipment and application vendors have now broadly standardized on IP, bringing with it a competitive solution landscape. Second, the availability of cost-effective IP switches have removed a key barrier to deploying a high capacity IP network. Third, the availability of SDN service operations systems and compliant equipment could stitch together all the atomic elements in any new all-IP media network. Despite these key breakthroughs SMG’s evaluation concluded that there remained one key obstacle. How would it be possible to avoid the expensive operational complexity barrier and complete the migration of mission critical services into a reference standard IP media network?

With pressure to support the media organizations growing multi-disciplinary needs, SMG was searching for a media network solution that could provide lossless processing, protection and transport of all media services at ten times the capacity of existing solution. There could neither be any limitation in adopting future IP media standards nor access to cloud services and technology. Critical to achieving all of this would be a cost-effective solution to securely manage, automate, and assure all media services.

The solutions

The Future Ready Solution

SMG is the owner and operator of extensive optical infrastructure in Shanghai and needed to fully leverage this asset to expand its managed services offering to leading domestic and international service providers. Upgrading the legacy optical transceiver network to Net Insight’s virtualized IP media network dramatically increased the reliability and utilization of SMG’s fiber resources. To support SMG’s market leadership and future growth in distributed media services, the complete Net Insight ecosystem was called into play. This state-of-the-art Nimbra-based solution unifies dedicated IP networks, internet and cloud while seamlessly scaling from low bandwidth transport streams and data services up to uncompressed UHD-4K and 100 GbE workflows.

SMG Hyperscale Media Network

As SMG’s business grows and new market opportunities emerge, the Nimbra media network is ready to adapt and scale. The new media network offers forwards-compatibility and support for new formats, such as UHD-4K and UHD-8K as well as a seamless transition from SDI to IP, ST2110, PTP and NMOS control. Strong support for existing and future video encoding standards are also assured, namely AVC, HEVC, JPEG 2000 and JPEG-XS. In particular, ultra-low latency JPEG-XS offers a zero-compromise approach to latency and quality compared to working with uncompressed video. Lastly, as Net Insight offers its own Cloud-based routing technology, SMG stand ready to leverage hyperscale compute and media processing for the next generation of cloud-based production.

The results

Building Trust in Shanghai, China.

After three months of extensive evaluation with a focus on security, quality-of-service, reliability, simple operations and ease-of-use, SMG selected Net Insight. The new 100 GbE IP media network is a landmark evolution with the full support and confidence of the SMG Technology Center leadership. Looking toward the future SMG plans to expand the new network to include Cloud-based production and workflow connectivity, thereby fully utilizing the integrated “distributed SDN” capabilities.

“SMG selected Net Insight’s solution after careful consideration. As a professional manufacturer of media transmission equipment, Net Insight has a highly regarded reputation in China and we hope to expand our cooperation with Net Insight for Cloud-based transmission applications.”

Rocky Yang, Deputy Director of Engineering at the SMG Technology Center