SPONSORED CONTENT | Presented by Skyview Networks
“The work of running it does not land on station engineering staff,” says Aaron Mellis, SVP of Technology at Skyview Networks, describing Cirocast, the company’s cloud-native IP audio distribution platform. That is the starting point for every operational question about the transition from satellite to IP, and it changes the shape of most of them.
The concept of cloud distribution is easy to accept. The doubt is always operational. What changes at the station, what has to be rebuilt, and what happens the first time something goes wrong on air? Here is the practical shape of it.
What the broadcaster provides is modest. Upstream internet circuits, rack space for an on-premises ingest server, and the content feeds. Cirocast, Skyview Networks’ cloud-native IP audio distribution platform, supports multiple audio ingest formats, professional sound cards and audio over IP, so existing plant does not have to be reworked to feed it. From there, distribution intelligence lives in the cloud, in containerized instances built to the unique requirements of that broadcaster and customized to what each feed and its affiliates actually need.
With Cirocast, cues and closures are not an afterthought. They are foundationally integrated, controlling affiliate automation through standard GPIO closures, serial, and UDP, which is the same set of tools those stations use today. For affiliates that have moved to cloud-based automation, a virtualized receiver runs in the VM environment and passes both audio and cues automatically, with no physical connections required.
Store-and-forward for delayed-play broadcasts works as it does on satellite, with emergency failover to alternate feeds added. Dead air, fragmented files and partially recorded segments stop being a category of problem. So do the spring and fall sun outages that satellite customers plan around every year. Operators also get real-time affiliate connection monitoring, which finally answers the question of who is taking the show right now, with live audio monitoring on the roadmap.
Reliability is engineered at the protocol level. The Opus codec provides strong forward error correction resilience over imperfect connections and higher quality at lower bitrates. The Reliable Internet Stream Transport protocol reduces dropped packets, jitter and audio glitches. And SMPTE ST 2022-7 duplicates streams across independent network paths, with the receiver buffering from all paths, aligning by RTP sequence number and timestamp, and selecting the best available packet to reconstruct a single clean output.
Security is usually the question an affiliate’s IT department asks first, and the answer is unusually easy. Cirocast uses AWS IoT Core with X.509 mutual TLS certificate authentication, so both ends present valid certificates before any communication occurs. No usernames or passwords are transmitted, certificates can be revoked by policy, and the model scales to any number of devices. Practically, that means no firewall changes, no open ports and no devices exposed on static public addresses. Each receiver sits behind the station’s own firewall.
The full Cirocast white paper covers each of these areas in detail. Download it or schedule a demonstration with a Cirocast sales engineer here.
This sponsored content was produced in partnership with Skyview Networks.
