When assessing a product, inquire about the specifics of each plane. As the broadcast and professional video industry moves forward, these planes will become fully standardized. At this point, the data plane is the most mature, followed by the control and management planes. Before leaving the topic of planes, it s worth mentioning the need for file exchange interoperability. Most servers compress the incoming audio and video and store the content as either MPEG or DV files.
Many scenarios require that files be transferred between servers over LANs and WANs.
For this to work smoothly, the file types and associated metadata must be standardized. When evaluating a server, verify whether the exchange format is a recognized standard. Post a message in the Broadcast Engineering Magazine World Wide Users Group, or send email to the editor .