A Service-Oriented Approach for Integrating Broadcast Facilities

Television broadcast production facilities capture, manage, edit, handle, and broadcast audiovisual content by using a wide array of specialized equipment and software. The complex workflow in this environment demands interoperability between devices, but vendor-neutral protocols do not provide access to a significant amount of functionality. This paper proposes the adoption of a Service-Oriented Architecture for controlling broadcasting equipment, addressing difficulties specific to this environment such as the prevalence of non-Web Services, embedded devices, and constrained computational resources. The proposed solution is centered on a semantic service registry, which is able to compose mediators and produces stubs in response to service selection requests. The prototype registry is experimentally evaluated in simulated scenarios, focusing on how size and complexity of the broadcast facility impact on response times.