Why the Future of Remote Production May Run at the Speed of Light
It seems only yesterday that broadcasters were rewiring their transport networks from coax to ethernet and SDI to IP, but there’s momentum building to integrate new photonic capabilities into existing computing and networking infrastructure.
Technology giants including Sony, Google, Microsoft, Intel, and Nvidia are backing a move to shift networks from electrical signal processing to laser light-based transport. Photonics promises superior bandwidth, ultra-low latency, far greater energy efficiency and, crucially for media production, deterministic latency.
The case for a photonic future
“It’s becoming clear that existing network infrastructure wasn’t built for what’s coming next,” Katsutoshi Itoh, senior wireless communication engineer at Sony and head of its R&D lab based in Sweden tells Streaming Media. “The bottleneck isn’t cameras or codecs — it’s the backbone. In live sports broadcasting, the next innovation on the horizon revolves around photons and transmitting data at the speed of light.”
Sony senior wireless communication engineer Katsutoshi Itoh
The need for an advanced data connect system is being driven by AI – and with an eye toward Quantum compute. Data center bandwidth is doubling every two years under the weight of AI, pushing networks beyond the limits of electrical interconnects.
“Compute systems based solely on electronics are increasingly reaching their limits,” confirms Cambridge Consultants, which is part of Cap Gemini. “The rising demands of AI and increasingly complex computing systems has intensified the development of new routes to high-performance computation.”
Chip maker Broadcom echoes the argument: “The insatiable demand for compute power in AI and high-performance computing is rapidly approaching a fundamental physical barrier: the limits of copper connectivity. As next-generation XPUs demand bandwidths soaring toward 28.8 Tbps, traditional copper interconnects are struggling to keep pace.”
Photonic computing “offers a compelling solution,” argue Cambridge Consultants. “Replacing electrons with photons across all or part of the computing system to process and store data through light waves. Since photons can process at the speed of light, photonic compute offers minimal latency and a 10-50x bandwidth improvement over traditional computing. It also has the potential to give a tenfold increase in energy efficiency as it can increase processing power without increasing the power usually associated with higher clock frequency.”
Building the photonics ecosystem
The first area of photonics adoption will be in data centers. There, according to Cambridge Consultants, photonics will no longer act simply as fibre links but as part of the photonic computing architecture through co-packaged optics (CPO), photonic interposers, and high-speed optical switches.
“This will not completely replace electrical processing units, but will create a symbiotic compute system of photonic-electronic integrated circuits,” the analyst notes.
The photonics ecosystem is already building out. Nvidia and Broadcom have commercialised CPO chipsets. Other technology developers are lining up to incorporate CPO semiconductors, switchers and interconnects including Twinstar Technologies, Delta Electronics, and Corning Incorporated.
Enter IOWN and the All-Photonics Network
Beyond the data center there are plans to create direct optical end-to-end communication paths for applications in industry, health, digital twins, remote learning and entertainment. This All-Photonics Network (APN) was developed by Japanese telco NTT and is now moving out of the lab and backed by 170 members of the Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN).
This coalition includes telcos Nokia, Ericsson, Orange, and KDDI; semiconductor and GPU makers Qualcomm, Intel, and Nvidia; communications infrastructure vendors Cisco, Ciena. and Red Hat; device makers Samsung and Sony; and internet/device making powerhouses Microsoft and Google. Its ambition is to deploy APN by 2030.
All-Photonics Network (APN)
“Traditional optical networks convert signals back and forth between optical and electrical,” explains Itoh, who is Chair of the Use Case Working Group at IOWN. “That adds latency, buffering and power consumption. With a photonics based we reduce or eliminate those conversions. In other words, timing you can trust.”
The implications stretch beyond the data center and IT engineering. Surging data demands for online video and interactive and immersive experiences are predicted to stretch the world’s communication networks to breaking point.
“As data demand grows exponentially and current network infrastructure struggles under growing pressure and increasing demand, the broadcast industry must look toward APNs to deliver the future of live broadcast,” Itoh says.
According to NTT, photonics can eliminate latency fluctuations. Conventional TCP/IP-based networks experience variable delays depending on network traffic, which can disrupt services that depend on real-time responsiveness. With APN, latency remains constant and predictable, enabling accurate remote operations and real-time data communication across long distances.
“In media production, from multi-camera sports coverage to immersive, free-viewpoint experiences, precise synchronisation is critical. Even minor latency variations can disrupt 3D reconstruction and real-time interactivity. Photonic networking introduces deterministic latency, meaning predictable, tightly controlled timing across the network.”
Such technology could “simplify remote production at scale” Itoh says and unlock more immersive formats, including XR and AI-assisted workflows. “As video moves from 4K to 8K and increasingly uncompressed streams, infrastructure must evolve to keep pace,” he adds.
Sony is trailing this with NTT. The Remote Media Production project, details of which were published last month on the IOWN website, aims to connect remote sites such as broadcast stations, venues, and cloud-based production resources purely optically.
“An APN removes much of the optical-electrical-optical conversion that slows and buffers traffic in traditional IP networks,” it says. “Fewer conversions mean less delay, lower power consumption and predictable timing across the network. For large-scale remote production, that could be transformative.”
Photonics could also make streaming a less power-intensive process. Streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime use huge amounts of data to facilitate cloud-enabled delivery of movies and TV shows. Using photonics could boost transmission capacity by up to 125 times while cutting latency to just 1/200 of current levels, according to NTT.
Momentum is already building in Japan where NTT is pushing photonic components into commercial networks yet the industry is not yet at the pace which IOWN would like.
While Nvidia is introducing CPO technology in two new networking chips, CEO Jensen Huang said last year that he wouldn’t use optical in the firm’s flagship GPUs because traditional copper connections were currently “orders of magnitude” more reliable.
IOWN is not suggesting replacing ethernet and IP but integrating photonics so they work together seamlessly with electronics. In practice, this involves the use of fibre throughout the network along with photonic gateways to render the entire network more efficient.
“At the heart of this is photonics-electronics convergence, often referred to as PEC. Once considered experimental, it has already been demonstrated and is now moving towards real deployment,” it states.
The APN is still at an early stage, but it represents a fundamental shift in the way communication networks are designed. By moving away from fragmented, purpose-built infrastructure to a unified optical foundation, APN could provide the backbone for future 6G networks and beyond.”
Earlier this month a group of companies including IOWN members Microsoft and Nvidia alongside Meta, OpenAI, AMD, and Broadcom launched the Optical Compute Interconnect (OCI) Multi-Source Agreement (MSA) group.
This consortium of hyper-scalers aims to propel the industry toward development of a multi-vendor supply chain to ramp up optical connections. Its mission statement: “By aligning on an open specification, the OCI MSA members are promoting a robust optical ecosystem which will ensure that the future of AI interconnects is built with a flexible, multi-vendor foundation to meet the optical interconnect needs of modern AI infrastructure.”
Richard Ho, Head of Hardware at OpenAI, added in the statement: “The continued improvement of artificial intelligence relies on scaling of AI supercomputers with more petaflops, more memory bandwidth and, importantly, more network bandwidth across larger domains requiring further reach. The OCI MSA will be critical to allow the industry to build the AI systems that will get us to AGI (artificial general intelligence).”
According to Cambridge Consultants, photonics will also play a key role in providing control, networking and interconnection of qubits for scaling up quantum computing.
Further down the line, what it calls the “holy grail” of photonic computing, will be to use photons to perform the computation part of compute.
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