Lawo sees AIMS open-standards vision as an extension of its own mission

When the Alliance for IP Media Solutions (AIMS) was founded a year ago by Grass Valley, Imagine Communications and Lawo, it seemed to be a bold endeavor to oblige manufacturers to supply products providing overall interoperability, based on open standards for seamless integration into media workflow environments.

Other wide-spread proprietary standards had already been established – Evertz’ ASPEN or Sony’s NMI to name two. The success of AIMS’s aim to unite all players in broadcast was by no means a certainty. However, within a relatively short period of time, all key players in the market committed themselves to the AIMS roadmap, amongst them Lawo, who has always supported solutions based on open standards.

A time to be proud

After one year, the AIMS members, both manufacturers and broadcasters, can be proud – their efforts in actively promoting the adoption, standardisation, development and refinement of open protocols for media over IP, have turned out as a historic and unique success with manufacturers observing the AIMS roadmap for implementing open standards in their products and solutions and with broadcasters and production companies accepting this paradigm shift, all pulling together.

In an industry of post-proprietary solutions, IP technology will give all manufacturers the opportunity to develop products based on open standards for more efficient, flexible and faster workflows for the benefit of clients. More importantly, for their individual infrastructures, customers will experience real freedom in selecting the optimal equipment regardless of manufacturers. This ensures that best-of-breed system designs will be possible also in the post-SDI times of broadcast.

In an industry of post-proprietary solutions, IP technology will give all manufacturers the opportunity to develop products based on open standards for more efficient, flexible and faster workflows

The present success is based on many small steps. Thanks to the collaborative work already performed in SMPTE, VSF, AES and AMWA, our industry has built a solid basis for a sustainable transition to IP. AIMS’s support of open standards and technical recommendations such as TR-03, TR-04 and AES67 afford all of us an opportunity to eliminate the fragmentation of implementations that our industry has endured over the last 20 years. It’s our big chance to avoid repeating expensive and time-consuming mistakes of the past and guarantee customers and manufacturers future-proof investments.

With its long real time IP experience in video and audio, Lawo can contribute comprehensive expertise covering the complete range of solutions for live production environments. Lawo have always been aligned to open standards, be it SMPTE 2022-6/-7 and TR-03 in video, AES3, MADI, RAVENNA or AES67 in audio or Ember+ in control. Lawo strongly believes in these standardised, open approaches, so the initiation and the support of the AIMS roadmap is a logical step on Lawo’s strategic agenda.

Working reality

Today its already obvious, that the AIMS roadmap is not only wishful thinking, but a working reality. For example, beside projects like the VRT/EBU Sandbox project, Lawo IP video technology plays a major role in multiple real-world installations including NEP Creative Technology’s Cloud Production, Belgium’s Proximus Football League and Dorna’s set-up for MotoGP.

Lawo IP was also successfully utilised on a large scale for the production of the European football tournament in France where IP-based video and audio stageboxes in all stadiums and a fully IP-based 900×900 video routing environment contributed to a superb TV production, as well as the recent Games in Brazil, where the remote production set-ups of Globosat, NBC, BBC, YLE and others were also based on Lawo technology and therefore on standards fully in line with the AIMS roadmap.