Your viewers love you. You consistently bring them their preferred channels 24/7. They’ve come to rely on you for their viewing pleasure. They never miss cheering on their beloved sports teams. They’re the envy of their friends as they watch live concerts of their favourite bands. They gather the family around and catch up on their must-see shows. They don’t have a bad word to say about you.

Then the unthinkable happens: the black screen. Dead air. Your satellite feed is gone. And your backup fibre option has failed, too. Maybe it’s caused by a natural disaster. Maybe human error. Maybe sabotage by hackers.

But whatever the cause, you can almost hear the screaming from living rooms everywhere.

Having an effective disaster recovery system in place is a must have for broadcasters. But it involves more than having the IT team create cyber security protocols. It means having systems ready to go at a second’s notice so your viewers don’t change the channel, or worse — drop your service altogether.

Stay calm. There’s no need to fret just yet. The answer to broadcast continuity is simple, easy to access, and won’t break the bank — the public Internet.

I know what you’re thinking. What about resiliency? What about the security of my content?

The key here is using the public Internet. It is not only resilient and secure, but also immediate, efficient and cost effective — if you have the necessary error correction solution at both the transmission and receiving ends of the link.

One popular error-correction method is ARQ delivery (Automatic Retransmission Request). When data packets are transmitted, the receiver sends a message back to the sender to indicate that a packet hasn’t arrived and requests the sender to send another copy of the same packet. This is essential when sending data over unreliable connections, such as the public Internet. With added Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) support, your content is also secure.

A number of solutions have been created, and with them another problem: devices from different suppliers are often incompatible. As a result, a group known as RIST — Reliable Internet Stream Transport — was formed in 2017 by Video Services Forum (VSF), an international association of service providers, users and manufacturers. The group has been working to create a standard for the transport of live video content in real time at low latency over unmanaged networks, including the public Internet.

One of our supply partners at Garland, Artel Video Systems, was part of VSF’s RIST demonstration at the recent IBC Show in Amsterdam.

"Many of the applications where RIST is used and needed involve hand-offs of content between different organizations where multiple media transport vendors are required to interoperate," said Rafael Fonseca, Vice President Product Management at Artel. "This demo was the first step towards accomplishing that."

Artel is at the forefront of the work being done to ensure the public Internet is a viable solution for broadcasters looking to develop a fulsome disaster recovery strategy. They bring more than 30 years’ of expertise in IP- and fibre-based technologies in developing integrated solutions for contribution media delivery, data networking, OTT and precision timing (PTP) over managed and un-managed networks.

Artel’s new ARQ IP Streaming System uses ARQ error correction technology and serves RIST for video applications. Because the ARQ solution is scalable in single-stream increments, broadcasters can quickly add additional ARQ licenses to deliver multiple UDP unicast and multicast services.

The ARQ system is simple to configure, flexible and ideal for distributing high-quality video over unconditioned IP networks, including Internet, cellular and satellite. There are no licenced costs on transmission bandwidth, only an upfront cost (capex) for the TX and RX chassis and licences per stream. It is very scalable — you can easily add more licences for more channels, with each chassis having throughout of 800Mbps. Software-only based licences are on the roadmap, too.

As with any good solution, the ARQ system’s uses extend beyond those related to disaster recovery.

“Rather than putting in expensive private lease lines to places such as the Maldives, it’s much more cost-effective to use the ARQ IP streaming solution and error correction over the public Internet,” says Fonseca.

“It can be used by content owners wanting to distribute live channels to multiple international locations, such as a European football club selling content to a broadcaster in Asia.

“Some smaller clients who can’t afford primary satellite delivery may prefer to use the public Internet. So, this offers a low-cost way of providing them with their video content, with confidence the error correction methods will keep it reliable and resilient.”

Ultimately a good strategy will be a hybrid of content security, cyber security and disaster recovery. When created thoughtfully, your strategy will ensure that your channels continue to be available to distributors and viewers alike.