Your Dose of Workflow Therapy from CHESA

Modernizing Broadcast at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

How CHESA designed, staged, and deployed a complete SMPTE ST 2110 broadcast infrastructure for one of the largest federal communications operations in Washington, D.C.

AT A GLANCE

THE SITUATION

The broadcast facility at HHS serves a critical public affairs mission. HHSTV produces live and recorded programming across multiple production spaces in the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, supporting everything from press briefings and executive communications to internal programming. When the facility’s aging infrastructure began limiting what the production team could deliver, HHS leadership made the decision to modernize.

The existing environment was built on a conventional SDI architecture centered on a Utah Scientific router at roughly 64×64. Signals traveled as home-run SDI paths terminating in the Central Equipment Room, with remote production areas connected via SDI-to-fiber extenders. The system operated in 1080i with limited 720p sources. There was no 3G-SDI, no progressive HD, and no UHD capability anywhere in the chain.

Audio routing was handled ad hoc. Standalone converters from AJA and Blackmagic were inserted into signal paths for embedding and de-embedding as needed. Over time, this created fragmented signal chains with undocumented insertion points and increasing troubleshooting complexity during live production. Monitoring relied on a legacy SDI multiviewer and older waveform tools. Display infrastructure consisted of consumer-grade televisions mounted in grid arrangements across production spaces.

The system had no redundancy. No alternate signal paths, no failover, no automated recovery. Any failure required manual intervention, often while a production was live.

THE APPROACH

CHESA was engaged as the sole systems integrator, responsible for architecture, design, procurement, staging, deployment, and commissioning. The mandate was complete replacement, not incremental extension. The design had to meet four non-negotiable requirements: deterministic behavior under live production conditions, elimination of all single points of failure, consolidation of signal processing into core infrastructure platforms, and reduced dependency on engineering intervention for routine operations.

Those requirements drove the selection of SMPTE ST 2110 as the transport architecture, with ST 2022-7 seamless protection switching as a baseline across all signal flows. The entire media network was built on a Cisco Nexus 9000 spine-leaf topology implementing two fully independent fabrics that carry identical flows simultaneously. The SDI router was eliminated entirely and replaced with EVS Cerebrum as the orchestration layer, managing signal routing, device control, tally, and UMD coordination through NMOS discovery and connection management.

A critical design decision was to stage approximately 60% of the system off-site before deployment. The full media fabric was constructed, configured, and tested in a controlled environment, covering network bring-up, switch configuration, PTP timing validation, NMOS registration, and initial endpoint commissioning. This approach substantially reduced on-site integration risk and compressed the deployment timeline.

HHS provided a temporary production capability during the transition period, enabling a hard cutover rather than a phased migration. On-site execution followed a structured sequence: rack deployment, network bring-up, system integration, and endpoint connection, followed by full production walkthroughs under live conditions.

KEY ENGINEERING CHALLENGES

Timing as Infrastructure

In an ST 2110 environment, timing is not a configuration detail. It is load-bearing infrastructure. Timing failures manifest as audio/video sync loss, frame discontinuities, and in severe cases, complete flow failure. The system uses a redundant pair of Telestream SPG9000 sync pulse generators as GNSS-locked PTP primary reference time clocks, with GPS antennas physically separated on the HHS rooftop to eliminate single-point timing failures. Boundary clock operation is distributed across every switch in the media path.

Bridging Dante and ST 2110 Audio

The audio system required bridging two fundamentally different timing domains. The production console is a Yamaha CL5 operating natively on Dante, which uses a 1 ms packet boundary. The ST 2110 fabric transports audio on ST 2110-30 at a 125 µs packet time. A Studio Technologies Model 5682 provides 64-channel bidirectional conversion, but resolving the timing alignment required direct analysis of the relevant SMPTE standards and iterative testing with the bridge vendor to validate behavior under production load. This is representative of a broader pattern in ST 2110 integration: domain boundaries concentrate integration risk, and vendor documentation alone is not a substitute for validation.

Vendor Interoperability in Practice

The system uses NMOS IS-04 and IS-05 for discovery and connection management. In principle, NMOS provides a vendor-neutral control surface. In practice, CHESA’s integration team encountered implementation-level differences across vendors, including inconsistencies in how frame rate information was represented in SDP descriptions. These issues are resolvable, but they underscore the importance of hands-on interoperability testing during equipment evaluation rather than relying solely on compliance declarations.

THE RESULTS

HHS now operates a fully modernized broadcast facility built for the next decade. The infrastructure supports current HD production with a clear architectural path to UHD. Format expansion and workflow changes can be achieved through configuration rather than physical infrastructure modifications.

The transition from consumer display grids to Christie LED videowalls driven by Viz Multiplay gives operators a configurable visual canvas rather than a fixed array of independent screens. Wireless intercom coverage via Riedel Bolero spans four discrete production spaces, enabling production coordination across the entire facility without reliance on fixed panels.

WHY IT WORKED

Stage first, integrate once. Off-site staging and pre-validation of the media fabric is the primary risk management mechanism on a project of this complexity. Building and testing 60% of the system before it ever reached the site compressed the deployment timeline and eliminated categories of integration risk entirely.

Treat timing and multicast like structural engineering. GNSS-locked redundant PTP, boundary clock distribution across the fabric, and rigorous IGMP and QoS policy are what make an ST 2110 system behave deterministically. These are design elements, not tuning tasks.

Validate interoperability through integration, not spec sheets. Compliance declarations are a starting point. Real-world interoperability requires testing with specific attention to implementation-level details at domain boundaries.

Full accountability from architecture through commissioning. CHESA carried systems integration responsibility across every phase: design, procurement, staging, deployment, commissioning, and ongoing support. A single accountable integrator eliminates the gaps between disciplines that produce delays and finger-pointing on complex projects.

READY TO MODERNIZE YOUR FACILITY?

If your broadcast or production facility is running on aging SDI infrastructure, you are not alone. Many federal agencies, sports organizations, and enterprise media operations are facing the same decision HHS faced: continue patching legacy systems, or build a foundation designed for the next decade.

CHESA provides architecture assessment, detailed design, and complete deployment and commissioning services for broadcast facility modernization projects. We bring both the broadcast engineering expertise and the IP network engineering discipline that ST 2110 transitions require.