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Tyler on AoIP for Everyone

“The container virtualization layer is extremely flexible and can scale up as we need”

jay tyler in wheatstone boothThis is one in a series of articles from the ebook “The Real World of AoIP.”

Radio World recently asked several manufacturers to identify the most important technical development or trend in the use of AoIP.

At Wheatstone, Jay Tyler, director of sales, said AoIP today is all about access — access from home, access through the cloud, and especially about access for everyone.

“Our customer base has traditionally been the iHearts and Townsquares of the industry, but more recently, we’ve been getting calls from GMs of family-owned stations or of smaller regional station groups who find that they can’t maneuver in these times without AoIP,” he said.

“Events [of the pandemic] just pushed their plans for AoIP further up on the calendar.”

At the same time, he said, AoIP is following the same trajectory as IP in general and has become a lot more scalable.

“We can now scale the systems used by the iHearts and the Townsquares for those smaller operations and smaller budgets, and we can scale a lot about what makes AoIP useful by adding more and more functions to it. We started out replacing soundcards with AoIP drivers, and now we’re adding appliances, virtual mixers and UIs, software apps, and even, in the case of our Blade-4, codecs.”

Tyler said Wheatstone sees the cloud as the next trend in AoIP, and an important one for regional broadcasters or anyone who wants to join operations and get some of those cost savings.

“Wheatstone has been doing a lot with container platforms like Docker for some time, and this is a great option for running many different applications on a single machine or cloud instance.

“We’re talking about a very lightweight, resource-efficient VM, where one container could host WheatNet-IP audio processing and another could host the station automation. Each is totally isolated yet both run off the same OS kernel. One container communicates with the other through APIs and because each container operates independently of the other, you avoid unintended interactions between software components and eliminate a single point of failure,” Tyler said.

“The container virtualization layer is extremely flexible and can scale up as we need.”

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