The basics of conventional A/V distribution in the pre and post IT world

To date, designing and building an IT based television facility has been a Herculean task due to the high cost and proprietary nature of the systems. However, due to a series of recent developments in both IT technology and broadcast industry standards, it is now possible to build such a facility using the open standards based equipment from a wide variety of vendors. In this paper, the author discussed the basics of the conventional A/V distribution including the characteristics of the physical interface for analogue and digital systems, the bandwidths of analogue and digital signals, traditional A/V point to point interfacing, packetisation and streaming, networks and protocols, QoS issues, typical broadcast facilities using SDI and file transfer, and monitoring of the analogue and digital signals.