Covid and Beyond

DISTRIBUTED STUDIO OPERATIONS DURING COVID AND BEYOND

Last year, radio broadcasters faced challenging times with the Covid-19 lockups and restrictions. Studio facilities were closed or moved and station personnel have been working from home ever since, whenever possible. This seems to be the new normal that still continues in 2021.

RADIOMAN IN REMOTE USE

Jutel introduced next generation radio production platform just in time to cope with the new, rapidly increased distributed programming challenges. RadioMan products have typically been used by major national broadcasters. However, the new RadioMan® platform is easy to deploy also on networked or individual radio stations.

With RadioMan® digital content can be created, scheduled, organized, archived and distributed to one or multiple media channels and locations. The physical playout can be located in the cloud, in server rooms or on local computers. Anywhere.

The On-Air facilities can be anything from a browser-based laptop computer to a modern touch-screen based IP-based fixed installation. The RadioMan Live contribution allows audio contribution even directly from the laptop without external codecs and devices.

Distributed operation needs

RadioMan® platform utilizes modern generic web-based architecture with browser-based user interfaces and modern API-based back-end. This offers various use cases for distributed and remote operation needs, such as for planning and content creation when reporters need to work from remote places and homes for programming, scheduling, content creation and playlist editing.

RadioMan can also be utilized in playout operations in studio installations, since RadioMan Live user interface, playout back-end and playout media nodes are separated from each other. For remote purposes, a laptop with USB audio device can be enough, since usability is similar to large studios as the user interface is the same in both use cases.

For remote operations separate audio codecs are not needed as the actual playout is done by the media nodes situated in the station premises or in the cloud. The reporter audio from the laptop is streamed internally with RadioMan Live to the media nodes.

RadioMan® allows multi-site operations so that multiple sites can simultaneously control and contribute the same live programme. In addition to RadioMan Live contribution from remote On-Air sites the media node can also take in external RTP or SRT streams from other sources like master station feeds, sports arenas, news casts etc. All of this can be controlled from browser-based RadioMan Live user interface.

RadioMan Live configuration can be used also for creating light regional studio units with minimal audio cabling and studio installations. This allows flexible office spaces to be used for regional or local operations.

RadioMan customer case

Early 2020, a RadioMan customer had to evacuate the studio and server facilities and start operating remotely. Part of the challenge was that no-one was even allowed to access the technical facilities of the station.

A decision was made to build up a RadioMan site in cloud and arrange data and media replication between the corporate in-house servers and the cloud system. The cloud system could be used from home facilities so that the on-air operations were handled from the browser-based laptops. Audio contribution of the operator is with WebRTC to the media node in cloud. The program from the media node is streamed to the satellite corporation that handles the ads insertion and distribution.

One benefit of the configuration was that the audio material in the in-house system could be used transparently with the system in cloud. The corporation has also connectivity to other sites that can still produce and access the in-house system. All the installations and system management were done remotely. The system enables location independent content creation, edit & playout, adaptive workflows and the possibility to optimise role-based workflows and maximise productivity.

After initial success with Covid-19 evacuations and remote operation an additional radio service with another satellite operator with ads insertion and playout was introduced with RadioMan building blocks in the cloud, in continued use.

This use case demonstrated how RadioMan® can provide a quick return on investment with a cloud-native architecture. With a cloud or virtualized system architecture there is less need for dedicated studio and user hardware, making it easy to deploy, fast to upgrade and efficient to maintain, that are all important deciding factors also in post-Covid era.