Standards based end-to-end metadata transport for live production workflows

One of the factors that has driven the rise to prominence of OTT services that deliver content directly to consumers via IP distribution is the increase in the audio and visual quality of content that they provide. The ability to deliver immersive and personalized audio enabled by next generation audio (NGA) codecs, and 4K/8K high dynamic range video, is one reason consumers recognize these services as delivering the highest quality content. A common requirement to fully enable these advanced and video capabilities is the use of rich, dynamic, time accurate metadata. This type of metadata is also key to enabling new emerging technology, such as VR, and future, not yet defined, technologies that will continue to drive content innovation. While file based workflows for scripted and non-live content have added capabilities to utilize rich audio and video metadata in the production and distribution process, support for this type of metadata in live production and distribution has lagged, partly due to the prevalence of legacy audio and video technology that has limited metadata capabilities. The move to IP transport based methods for live content production provides the opportunity to remove these limitations. Work is in progress to define new standards for metadata transport that not only meet the requirements for current use cases but is flexible and extendable for future applications. Work to define metadata transport standards for SMPTE ST 2110 systems, as well as audio metadata standards for AES67 systems is described. Interoperation with legacy systems, and with file based formats and workflows is also considered, and emerging standards in this area are discussed. How these emerging standards fit into a larger vision of "microphone to speaker" audio metadata and "camera to display" video metadata is also described. Particular focus will be given on enabling rich audio metadata in the latest NGA audio codecs such as AC-4.