I was watching a South Park special (6 Days to Air) which showed the process of them creating new episodes from scratch in only 6 days (compared to the 4-8 months for other animated shows). They emphasized the use of technology to get it done so quickly.
Then the show ended with them rushing out to some satellite feed room where they inserted a huge tape/disk of the show and transmitted it to Comedy Central (seemingly in real-ish time, given the technicians in the room were watching and laughing). After that, they said they had to do the same thing at 6 other places…
First, is this SOP? Why is it done like this? Why can’t they just send the show via internet (encrypted if they’re worried about leaks, which doesn’t seem like an issue anyway given it airs in a few hours on Comedy Central anyway)? It just seems strange they’d use all this technology just to put the episode on huge, hunking physical media and send it from one satellite to the other when you look at how everyone else transmits media these days…
The satellite system has been in place for decades. They already have the quipment and expertise to use it. The understands its drawbacks and weaknesses and they are prepared to counter them. The costs are already largely incorporated into their processes. Why wouldn’t they keep using it until its drawbacks actually start having a measurable impact and the risks and problems of Internet transmission become more certain?
It just seems like an incredibly bloated, expensive, and complicated way of transmitting media. The internet is not new technology, and I doubt there are major uncertainties or risks in sending the show in that medium. Certainly the satellite feed has more advantages than just its own momentum…?
The probably do send them over the Internet. But the Internet still relies on having some physical means for making the transmission. It may be that the satellite connection is just a convenient trunk line for them.
The internet can be quirky, and slow, and unreliable. A dedicated “big dish” private satellite is exactly the opposite of those. Its faster than the fastest internet service, and its extremely reliable. This comes from decades of top-notch maintenance, in-place back-up systems and regular equipment up-grades. “Going dark” as its called (i.e. having the broadcast interrupted) is absolutely unacceptable. People are fired when that happens.
That South Park show was probably on a digital tape. For that use digital tape is still the most practical. Its uncompressed, high-definition video, so its a freaking ***huge ***file! That wasn’t the actual broadcast those guys were watching/doing either. It was a few hours before 10pm EDT and they were broadcasting it to Comedy Central’s affiliates.
Satellite communications are slower than wires and fiber optics because of the distance a signal has to travel. So wires and fiber are used as much as possible for voice communications and other types where delays are undersirable, and sattelites are used as much as possible for most internet communications. But sattelite has much more bandwidth available than wires and fiber do. Luckily most cell phone communication is local and done by radio, otherwise we wouldn’t have enough wire to handle modern phone traffic.
They can transmit 22 minutes of HD video via satellite in…22 minutes. There is no guarantee that 22 minutes of HD file is going to get there via the net. It’s also much more reliable. There are only three points to worry about - the uplink station, the downlink station and the satellite. You can’t do a damn thing about the last one, but you can move to a different transponder or sat.
An uncompressed 1080i signal is 1.485 Gbit per second. That is one fat pipe, which they would have to pay for 24/7/365, when they can get access to that pipe and pay for only the 22 minutes they actually use once a week in season.
Yes there is. Level 3 has been transporting uncompressed HD over its fiber network for a couple years. Whether or not it improves picture quality is debatable but the point remains that transporting content over IP is not only feasible but has been done for what is the most watched television event of the year
ETA: Transporting over satellite is also not cheaper nor faster. IP does not have to travel tens or hundreds of thousands of miles to reach its destination.
And does Level 3 run this backbone fiber directly to endpoint consumers? If we’re talking about a few facilities that produce huge events day in and day out, then a supplier will supply a huge pipe. But it doesn’t make any sense for the production office of a TV show to have one, because as I said, they’d have to pay for having it all the time. It makes sense if they were the Staples Center, otherwise, no.
Does not matter. Signal goes up, signal comes down.
If I were producing a TV series from my apartment, I could easily shuttle tapes to an uplink facility, or even hire an uplink truck and accomplish it a lot cheaper and faster than I could get a 2 gigabit connection to my apartment.
Satellites are not used for internet communications, except for small numbers of end users in the boondocks (or Antarctica. Which could qualify as a boondock.)
99.999% of IP traffic is entirely terrestrial in nature.
Are we moving the goalposts here? You said content isn’t backhauled over the internet because it’s cheaper and faster to do it via satellite. This is factually incorrect.
Except for your claim that satellite is faster than the internet, which is also factually incorrect. Satellite cannot possibly be faster than the internet, unless you are now suggesting the laws of physics have been changed and satellite TV transmissions can exceed the speed of light.
Great. We’re not talking about producing shows in your apartment. OP is talking about South Park. I was talking about the Super Bowl.
Perhaps blanket generalizations are best avoided in GQ?
And so we’re clear, Level 3 is using the same backbone as it uses for IP transport with the media content prioritized.
I’m talking about the long distance stuff. Like all communications you use the shortest route if possible, and most of communications are local. Also, I said satellites are slower, which is the wrong term, they have delay because of the distance. This is how Cables&Wireless explained it to me, if that’s wrong, sorry.
I don’t know what long distance stuff you’re talking about, because all long distance IP traffic is sent via very big cables under ground and under the sea.
Satellites are not useful for duplex communication, because the delay in traveling up to space and back, so they are a last resort. For broadcast, where it doesn’t matter if it takes the signal three seconds to get to the receiver, they work great.
To define “cheaper” - It costs the producers of South Park far less to hire time at an uplink facility three or four times a month than to maintain a super high speed Internet connection that is capable of transmitting 22 minutes of HD video in 22 minutes.
To define “faster” - Even including the time for an employee to drive to the uplink facility, given the speed of the type of connection that the production offices of a TV show could afford, it is probably faster.
Granted, the offices of South Park could be in a technology incubator office park with hot and cold running SONET, but I doubt it.
Are you claiming that there are no delays in routers, switches or peering points? As I said, uplink -> sat -> downlink has few points to introduce additional latency. And they have an instant quality check as the downlink operator is recording the show.
Literally introducing goalposts, in addition to moving them.
Of the two, South Park is a lot more like my apartment than it is like the Super Bowl. I thought the show made that clear. It is a place with a fairly small number of people with computers, as opposed to a multi-million dollar event that takes a month or more to plan and make happen. The thing about South Park is that I could produce it in my apartment. It is animated on Maya (formerly on Wavefront) on PCs (originally SGI Onyxs). The limiting factor is the bandwidth for transmission, which has not kept up with the improvement in speed of processors and storage.
It makes sense to run fiber to a stadium or arena. Never-the-less, the vast majority of sporting events are NOT sourced via fiber. One of my clients is a sports bar, and I set up and maintain their C/Ku/DVB systems. I’ve also set them up with computers to access ESPN3/ESPN360/WatchESPN/WhatEverWe’reCallingOurselvesTheWeekESPN and other Internet only stuff. Even with redundant connections from two different ISPs, the Internet source is used until we can find the REAL feed on the big dish.
I understand both satellite and IP. And I can make a judgment call when one makes more sense than the other. Remember the old saying “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.”
Figured I’d say it cause somebody will, but Trey Parker specifically said they used to use high-end Sun workstations, but now they all use Macs not PCs…