BUILDING A HYBRID INFRASTRUCTURE
Multiple camera angles present an opportunity to give audiences more control over how they view content – one of the holy grails in today’s ever- tougher war for eyeballs. “We want to give audiences exciting new features that put them in the director’s chair, and having a cloud-native SDE platform frees us from traditional hardware constraints,” adds Gandino. Being a multi-regional deployment, the new platform also serves as a disaster-recovery solution. Previously, on-premises set-ups took minutes or even hours to spin up; now, recovery is near-instant, according to Gandino. It is now feasible to broadcast professional sports matches entirely from the cloud, as the National Hockey League (NHL) proved last year when the Washington Capitals took on the Carolina Hurricanes in Washington DC, using technology from AWS. “We’re abstracting the truck from the broadcast and sending camera feeds to the cloud,” reports Grant Nodine, the NHL’s SVP of technology. “Live cloud production (LCP) allows you to have an unlimited number of outputs, just governed by how much compute you want to dedicate to it. “It enables us to break down the components of a broadcast and realise some of the ancillary benefits, particularly replay. There’s no reason I can’t cut near-live melts and have them available instantly to anyone from the cloud. We can produce a crafted highlight for each game that’s shared on every platform – digital, social or broadcast. We can make content available on one platform and have all these components talk to each other in near-real time, without having to buy most of the actual hardware.” The inaugural live broadcast feed was produced from a temporary control room in the NHL Network studios in New Jersey, while another team cut the stats-enhanced feed with live studio talent from a control room at the NHL headquarters in Manhattan. Just one AWS employee was present at the game to help co-ordinate feeds and troubleshoot technical issues. A live sports production of this size would typically require at least one production truck
Eventlive Pro, which specialises in livestreaming private events, has a cloud-native platform designed from the ground up to combine the scalability, flexibility and global reach of cloud with the transcoding performance of dedicated hardware. “Content delivery networks are a key component – global networks of computers that cache your content and bring it closer to your users worldwide,” says Eventlive Pro’s CTO, Mark Sergienko. “We use a blend of Cloudflare, BunnyCDN and Amazon Cloudfront.” For video storage and archiving, the company uses Amazon S3. “It’s a gold standard for object storage on the internet with unmatched reliability and a standard price of $23 per TB per month,” continues Sergienko. However, in order to reduce egress costs, Eventlive Pro also
uses compatible alternatives for different asset classes and secondary backups, including Amazon S3 Glacier, Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Digitalocean Spaces and Vultr. “Choosing the right CDNs and object storage is critical to balancing cost, performance and reliability in video streaming, optimising for affordability and global reach,” adds Sergienko. Not all of Eventlive Pro’s infrastructure is in the cloud, however. “We did use cloud servers for their flexibility (on-demand provisioning, autoscaling and per-minute billing) and still use them for non-transcoding needs,” says Sergienko. “But they couldn’t match the performance per dollar you get with dedicated hardware, so now we rely on dedicated, ‘bare-metal’ servers for transcoding live streams.”
and 20 people on site, generating more than two tonnes of CO2, so the cloud production was greener and saved on travel too. By combining LCP technology with advanced analytics, the NHL is able to enhance the fan experience, providing more insight, information, analysis, camera views and statistics during the broadcast.
“We’re going to take one NHL game and create multiple broadcasts to address all fans interested in more of a lifestyle experience, or those looking for a stat-heavy production,” expresses David Lehanski, the NHL’s EVP of business development and innovation. “Cloud production is going to be at the fore of our fan development around the world.”
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