Tawfiq Rahman says ST 2110 and NMOS anchor new broadcast builds
BMG's VP of System Design & Engineering, Tawfiq Rahman, presented on the evolution of broadcast infrastructure towards software-defined and AI-augmented systems at SMPTE Bits by the Bay. The presentation highlighted the shift from SDI to IP and NMOS as a foundation and identified practical AI use cases in operational workflows. It emphasized the need for facilities to be designed for flexibility and for engineering teams to expand their skill sets to include IT and AI literacy.
Key Takeaways
- Rahman framed ST 2110 as separately routable video, audio, and metadata streams synchronized with PTP over Ethernet.
- He said NMOS is the control layer that lets devices, sources, senders, receivers, and flows be discovered and connected at scale.
- Practical AI use cases cited were speech-to-text, automated QC, metadata generation, compliance monitoring, content search and reuse, and predictive maintenance.
- Rahman highlighted provenance, watermarking, chain of custody, and verification as infrastructure needs as manipulated media becomes easier to create.
- He said engineering teams now need broadcast fundamentals plus networking, cybersecurity, orchestration, APIs, observability, and AI literacy.
Why It Matters
The immediate implication is that broadcast infrastructure planning is moving from fixed SDI design toward IP, NMOS, and software-defined operations that can handle UHD, HDR, multi-language audio, remote contribution, and multiple delivery formats. BMG’s framing also ties AI to specific workflow pain points rather than abstract automation, while treating provenance and verification as part of the production stack. The ecosystem signal is that new builds, brownfield upgrades, and managed operations are converging around the same control and orchestration problems. What to watch next: whether facilities adopt ST 2110 plus NMOS as the default base and which operational tasks get automated first, especially captions, QC, and metadata.
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