Case Study: Sky Italia achieves scalable, broadcast‑grade SDI‑over‑IP routing and resiliency with Arista Networks

Sky Italia selects Arista for innovative transition to SDI over IP networking while delivering broadcast grade performance and resiliency

Sky Italia, Italy’s largest pay-TV operator, needed to replace a floor-spanning baseband routing architecture in its Milan facility with a large-scale SDI-over-IP routing system that could also interoperate with legacy SDI equipment and support signal contribution for Sky Deutschland. The challenge was to gain the speed and scalability of an IP switching core while preserving the low latency, deterministic performance and broadcast-grade resiliency of traditional routing systems.

Sky Italia deployed Arista 7280SR and 7508R switches with Arista EOS and Imagine Communications’ Platinum IP3 routers managed by Magellan SDN Orchestrators, using VOQ and FlexRoute hardware routing (scaling to over a million IPv4/IPv6 prefixes) and a universal-spine architecture. The result is a fully redundant 1+1 SDI-over-IP workflow that supports 640x640 IP streams and a non‑blocking 128x128 SDI matrix, delivering predictable low latency, seamless integration with existing control and automation, improved operational efficiency and clear scalability for a transition to all-IP production.

Sky

Gabriele Ubertini

Head of Technology Research and Engineering