Challenges of NDI for REMI Production
Blizzard Director, Live Operations, Global Broadcast Corey Smith discusses some of the roadblocks Blizzard has encountered when using NDI in cloud and remote workflows for gaming and esports in this clip from a panel at Streaming Media West 2021.
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Learn more about REMI production at Streaming Media East 2022.
Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Corey Smith: We run NDI as part of all of the core transport protocol for our cloud production environment. So we built on-ramps, off-ramps to all of our different connective components, whether it's graphics, replay, primary switcher, mass control, HTML5 graphics we have with Cingular, whether it's our Treo gear, it's all interconnected with NDI. One of the blockers that we've seen over time is, 1) NDI is pretty heavy on the wire from a compression point of view. It's not supposed to be necessarily highly compressed video. So we can't really run it at somebody's house. The contribution coming from the field is a little bit restrictive as well to run NDI.
Plus the fact that you can't route NDI over WAN until NDI 5 fully supports the remote proxy workflow, so you can actually build a more or less multi-WAN cloud type of infrastructure where you have NDI that crosses those WAN barriers. Sienna has a pretty good product that allows you to run or route NDI over public cloud infrastructure. But I think the technology is still evolving, and until it gets there from an IP collaborative point of view where you can actually do multiple sites and do it NDI native, the bandwidth is going to have to increase for a lot of these transmissions to actually work.
And then the actual routing protocols will have to be much more robust in terms of the software development, because what we've seen is, we can run NDI all day long in our cloud, but you can't run NDI all day long in a low-latency connection back to the venue.
It's a great protocol, but again, in the in the fight with RIST iand SRT and JPEG-XS, now you have to fight the low-latency aspect of it as well. So it's got to evolve a little bit more.
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