Channel In A Pox

So let’s say you want to buy some “Channel-In-a-Box” servers. Your network runs up to ten feeds – East, Central, Mountain, Pacific, a North regional feed (for snow tire commercials), a South regional feed (for the radial tire commercials) and three occasional feeds for those regional college games. You buy 15 Fast Allegro Real Time CiaB systems – a primary for each feed and a backup for every two channels. (Remember – no single point of failure!) Of course it’s 2016 (and you want to save some $$) – so you skip the HD-SDI outputs and order the 10Gb Ethernet IP only version.

Now your vendor has configured your system with at least two of everything so that you can sleep at night. So what are the chances that all of your primary FARTs will be non-airable all at the same time? Well if your vendor promised you “six nines” of uptime over the course of course of a year I hope you have that in writing ’cause I bet you’ll only get “two nines” (3.65 days of downtime) till your vendor exorcises all the software bugs from your system!

Now I know that your old “single function” equipment had downtime too. But you were always able to patch (or route) around a bad piece of baseband equipment. But what do you do when that new banner/bug/snipe that graphics just made takes your CiaB off the air?