• The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published RFC 741 in 1977.
• SDI, developed in 1989 by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, has been the industry standard for video broadcasting since the early 90s.
• IETF began developing RTP in 1992, and would go on to develop Session Announcement Protocol (SAP), the Session Description Protocol (SDP), and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).
• The Video Services Forum (VSF) created document TR-03 titled "Technical Recommendation for Transport of Uncompressed Elementary Stream Media Over IP" and brought it to SMPTE in an industry effort to create a new suite of IP standards. The document suite grew to cover accurately timed, independent flows of media across managed IP.
• VSF with the IEEE developed Precision Time Protocol (IEEE 1588 PTP) which has resulted in updates within SMPTE and IEEE to improve PTP operation.
• Audio Engineering Society (AES)improved carriage of audio on the networks.
• VSF worked with Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA) has resulted in adoption of the Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS), an open-source set of protocols and associated software for discovery, registration, connection, and management of ST 2110 networks.
• In 1998, the SDP specification was first published by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). A revised version was then available in July, 2006 as a proposed standard called RFC 45664. . This revised standard was selected by the SMPTE Working Group5 for the broadcast market and evolved with SAP and SIP in the early 2000s.
• RTP was developed by the Audio-Video Transport Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and first published in 1996 as RFC 1889 which was then superseded by RFC 3550 in 2003.
• The Advanced Media Workflow Association, Inc. (AMWA) began in January 2000 as the Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) Association, Inc. The organization's name was officially changed in May 2007 to better reflect the direction and scope of the association and its mission statement.
• SMPTE ST 2022-6 - The move from SDI to IP was done step by step, and the first one indeed was ST 2022-6. The concept was pretty simple: taking all of the SDI information, including vertical and horizontal blanking, and packetizing it for the IP network. As simple as that. In ST 2022-6, the audio, video and ancillary share the same flow (unicast or multicast stream). Because ST 2022-6 is only packetizing SDI and encapsulating that entire SDI signal in IP packets, the total bandwidth of the SDI signal is sent over the network, with the addition of ethernet headers which add approximately 3% on top of the total SDI bandwidth. Because all the essences are together, SDI audio embedders and de-embedders are still needed to do audio mixing, shuffling, etc.
While much of the broadcast industry has moved to file-based operation, live facilities have long depended on specialist technologies such as the Serial Digital Interface (SDI), SMPTE Timecode and various incompatible control protocols (including some using RS-232, some of which are still in use). However (as of 2017) there is a significant move towards replacing these with more general IT/IP technologies, allowing the industry to benefit from the high speeds and economies of scale that have enabled the success of the Internet and Web.
These use RTP and include ST 2022-6 for SDI-based payloads, AES-67 for audio-only payloads and the forthcoming ST 2110 for separate video, audio and ancillary data over IP.
However none of these tackle the control or application planes, leaving significant additional work to be done to achieve useful interoperability in professional networked media environments. So a number of industry bodies came together in 2013 on the Joint Task Force on Networked Media (JT-NM) to coordinate how this might happen. This led to the creation of a “reference architecture” for interoperability (JT-NM RA). At its most basic this identifies models and best practices for what may be needed at four layers: operation, application, platform and infrastructure.
