HOME. Connected. Secured. Managed.

author
LAWO

HOME is a management platform for IP-based media infrastructures. It is designed to connect, manage and secure all aspects and instances of live production environments. HOME provides the tools and centralized services for swift and effective interaction of engineers with their tools.

HOME is cloud-native by design and ready to run anywhere, irrespective of the system’s size. With HOME, the cloud starts on your campus, private and locally. It turns an array of devices, setups, sites, hubs and data centers into a powerful, agile network — quickly and in a perfectly secure way.

Inside HOME, discovery of devices is automatic, while registering and admitting them to the network is only a button press away.

With the adoption of IP well underway, the focus of operators has shifted from whether to adopt IP to how to use its potential with minimal effort and maximum effect. This is where HOME shines: it addresses all pressing issues real-world operators face today and tomorrow. In one place and via a single, platform-agnostic, intuitive user interface.

Lawo’s HOME platform is based on open standards such as ST2110, NMOS, IEEE802.1x and RADIUS and has been designed and built from the ground up using LUX—the Lawo Unified Experience, a framework for conceiving, designing, and building solutions that put you first and defines the standard for user experience and design across the Lawo portfolio.

Discovery and Registration: HOME solves IP complexity with automatic plug & play discovery of IP audio and video devices, which are registered with their name, location, status and type. This applies not only to Lawo products but to third-party solutions as well via NMOS. Discovered devices are managed in a central inventory list, ready for access and configuration.

Device Management: In today’s hectic live broadcast environments, operators rely on speedy, unified device configuration routines, especially when setting generic device parameters or configuring senders and receivers. The ability to save and recall configurations is key to speed up tasks. HOME provides a centralized “mission control” for these processes, providing fast and unified access to device parameters for easy tweaking, irrespective of the end point being controlled.

Operability: With its simple, user-friendly UI, HOME allows users to organize and access processing services. With all required facilities accessible in one place, operators can set up and change stream configurations, and route them across an infrastructure without the need for a separate controller. For large infrastructures HOME works seamlessly with a broadcast controller in the same set-up and helps to speed up configuration and operation. HOME is based on LUX, a UI language common to all Lawo devices and many of their functionalities. Through HOME’s user interface, operators can access and edit device parameters quickly utilizing integral mechanisms that help get the job done efficiently. With HOME, operators quickly get right to what they’re looking for, without distractions and complications, to focus 100% on the task at hand.

Security: The content created by a production crew and transported over a network is any operation’s most valuable asset and deserves strong protection. While a robust security system needs to cover all aspects of media infrastructure and content creation, the key lies in its simplicity. HOME provides a variety of security strategies, first of which is quarantining unknown devices when they come online. Only after being deliberately approved, via an intuitive IEEE802.1X-based routine, can they begin exchanging signals with the HOME network. Secondly, HOME uses an authentication strategy based on a centralized user management system, with dedicated user roles and groups. The LDAP based service allows users to authenticate either locally – within HOME – or via their own corporate IT infrastructure, e.g. Microsoft® Active Directory. Finally comes the arbitration of devices and individual streams based on pinpointed rights management. HOME’s architecture is prepared to manage services such as transport layer security, network segmentation and other IT security mechanisms such as RADIUS. 

Scalable Architecture: Home is cloud-native by design, which means that its architecture is built to run detached from hardware constraints. This does not automatically mean that services must be outsourced to an external service provider whose meter is running 24/7; with HOME, the cloud starts on your campus, private and locally, on COTS hardware. The HOME platform is designed as functional blocks that provide microservices, which are self-contained and supply functionality to operators or other services. 

HOME can be expanded with additional services at any time to increase its functionality — the platform scales on demand. Should there be a need for a larger RDS, because the installation grows, additional instances of the required resources can be added anytime. One of the core principles of HOME is its focus on the utilization of open standards wherever possible, for broadest compatibility and future-proof integration. With HOME, flexibility and resource utilization in IP media infrastructure maximizes.

Product Specs