Exploring the future of media technology
HAPTIC TECHNOLOGY CONTENT STORAGE SOLUTIONS TRUST IN MEDIA REPORT
Podcasting catches the ear of big broadcast
3 CLOUD FOCUS Wildmoka WELCOME
After a decade or so on the fringes of media, podcasting has hit the mainstream. Ask anyone from a banker to a bus driver what their favourite podcast is and they’ll give you a list of their new audio discoveries. One of the great
EDITORIAL EDITOR Neal Romanek +44 (0) 1223 492246 nealromanek@bright-publishing.com
successes of podcasts is that they make it easy on the audience. Unlike video, they can be consumed while driving, while sitting on a train, while riding the bus, while walking from the train to the bus. They’re also still at heart a downloaded rather than a streamed medium, so they resist network issues. You’re not held hostage to a podcast – you can enjoy one while still taking care of business. As podcasts are relatively easy to make – easier than the equivalent video – they are a low-cost way for organisations and businesses to grow their reach. Podcasts can be great marketing tools, or a way to try out new ideas, or to build a community. In this issue, we look at platforms helping big broadcasters move into the medium and we learn some tech tips for better podcast recording. It’s also time to talk about storage again. Whether you’re shooting on a shoulder-crushing ENG camera from the 1990s or streaming directly from your iPhone, you need a place to keep all that footage – and the work you will subsequently produce. We learn in this issue that it’s not always technological needs that are going to determine how to store your content, but what your business plan is.
CONTRIBUTORS Ann-Marie Corvin, David Davies, Phil Rhodes STAFF WRITER Chelsea Fearnley
CHIEF SUB EDITOR Beth Fletcher SENIOR SUB EDITOR Siobhan Godwood SUB EDITOR Felicity Evans JUNIOR SUB EDITOR Elisha Young ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR Matt Snow +44 (0) 1223 499453 mattsnow@bright-publishing.com KEY ACCOUNTS Chris Jacobs +44 (0) 1223 499463 chrisjacobs@bright-publishing.com DESIGN DESIGN DIRECTOR
Andy Jennings DESIGN MANAGER Alan Gray SENIOR DESIGNER & PRODUCTION MANAGER Flo Thomas DESIGNERS
NEAL ROMANEK, EDITOR nealromanek@bright-publishing.com
Man-Wai Wong Lucy Woolcomb PUBLISHING MANAGING DIRECTORS Andy Brogden & Matt Pluck
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06 NEWSFEED
46 XTREME
Dispatches from the world of online video
Outside broadcast company NEP brings top gaming from London to the world 48 HAPPENING – SPORTSPRO LIVE The SportsPro Live conference offered big ideas about the future of sports tech
10 YOUR TAKE
Change is on the way – and its name is Cloud
12 STREAMPUNK TOOLS
52 FUTURE SHOCK
Selecting the right storage comes down to good business strategy
Haptic technology is still in its infancy, but are the “feelies” on the way?
22 TECHFEED – STORAGE How one tech company helps post- production houses store their most important assets 26 ROUND TABLE – STORAGE
56 START-UP ALLEY
This month’s start-ups include a way of investing in talent and two blockchain- enabled initiatives
60 OVER THE TOP
Our panel of experts helps a burgeoning post-production business develop a new storage framework
We take a deep dive into a report on media trust in Europe. But trust can be a tricky business
40 GENIUS INTERVIEW
64 FEED SCHOOL
We talk to Brian Sheil, whose company has become a go-to for livestreaming
We untangle industry jargon and tech lingo so you don’t have to
22
48 52
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SEE PAGE 54
32 PODCASTING FOCUS
32 PODCAST FOR BROADCAST
Even big broadcasters are jumping into podcasting. StreamGuys is helping them do it
36 PODCAST GEAR
You might have a great idea and a devoted audience, but a top podcast still needs top gear
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BREAKING NEWS FROM THE STREAMING SECTOR
HOTSTAR SETS RECORD FOR LIVE CONCURRENT STREAMS
Hotstar, India’s Disney-owned streaming service, has set a global benchmark for the number of people an OTT service can draw to a live event. Over 18.6 million users simultaneously logged in to the deciding game of the 12th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) cricket tournament. The figure marks another milestone for the streaming giant with Hotstar breaking its own previous
world record of 10.3 million viewers, which it set last year. Hotstar topped the 10 million concurrent viewership mark multiple times during the 51-day IPL season. Early in the tournament, more than 12.7 million cricket fans watched Royal Challengers Bangalore take on Mumbai Indians. Overall, the series gained over 300 million viewers. Last year’s IPL clocked a 202 million overall viewership.
The scale of the figures becomes clearer when compared to, for example, YouTube’s most popular live broadcast. The 2012 livestream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from the stratosphere to the Earth amassed eight million concurrent viewers. In the last two years, Hotstar has expanded overseas – to the US, Canada and, most recently, the UK – in order to chase new audiences.
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7 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
UK GOVERNMENT CALLS FOR ACTION ON SAUDI PIRATES
The Walt Disney Company has agreed to acquire Comcast’s one- third stake in the video streaming service, Hulu. Disney helped launch Hulu nearly 12 years ago and already owns two-thirds of the streaming and video on-demand service. Under the terms of the deal, Comcast won’t sell its interest to Disney for at least another five years and Disney has guaranteed the potential payout will be based on Hulu’s current $27.5 billion valuation. Disney is now able to integrate or bundle Hulu’s three video tiers (ad- supported VOD, ad-free VOD and live TV) with Disney+, launching at the end of this year. NBCUniversal parent, Comcast, is keeping NBC shows, such as The Office , on Hulu until 2024. The decision signals no sudden disruption, and shows that both NBCU, which plans to launch its own service in 2020, and Disney are being thoughtful about the consumer experience. DISNEY TAKES OVER HULU
British MPs have called for a “robust attack” on Saudi Arabia-backed TV operation BeoutQ, amid accusations it is stealing intellectual property from UK sport and entertainment proprietaries. The UK secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS), Jeremy Wright, confirmed a number of government bodies are investigating and that the embassy in Riyadh is speaking with the Saudi authorities. He said: “If we want to see good quality sport, we have to make sure people are able to protect those rights. Those who are seeking to undermine those rights of course undermine that process.”
British MP Damian Collins said: “The issue of BeoutQ is straightforward piracy” and questioned whether the government is taking appropriate independent action, adding: “I’d be concerned if our interest in this issue is being balanced with other trade interests in the region.” Back in April, former UK secretary of state, Alistair Carmichael, argued: “The government has got to challenge their friends in Saudi Arabia and get them to take more action to protect the future of sports and entertainment industries, and ensure that the football teams that we all love can continue to thrive.”
BeoutQ’s bootlegging operation began in 2017 over a political dispute between Qatar and a coalition of countries led by its largest neighbour, Saudi Arabia. Since then, it has pirated content from beIN Sports and other sports providers, broadcast over Arabsat. Other internationally pirated content has included the Super Bowl and English Premier League.
US BLACKLISTS COPYRIGHT VIOLATORS
The US Trade Representative (USTR) has named China and India among 11 countries that aren’t doing enough to fight intellectual property (IP) crimes, warning of trade- secret theft alongside the proliferation of generic drugs and counterfeiting. where IP protection and enforcement has deteriorated or The report identifies
remained inadequate, and where US persons who rely on intellectual property protection can have difficulty with fair and equitable market access. Concerns about India’s trade practices have escalated since an investigation
aimed at protecting local generic drug makers over foreign companies. The US estimates that counterfeiting cost copyright holders almost $12bn in 2012, contributed to by pirated versions of software programs and operating systems being sold in Nehru Place – the
most notorious market for piracy in the world. The USTR also registered “significant concerns” about the theft of trade secrets in China and urged the government to take steps to stop Chinese companies taking advantage of overseas competitors. Italy was removed from the blacklist after taking new steps to combat copyright piracy over the internet.
ordered revealed
India’s patent policies are
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8 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
ANNOUNCEMENTS FROMGOOGLE I/O Better privacy controls, including the option to automatically delete
Google has unveiled some of its latest hardware and software offerings at its annual developer conference. Here’s our rundown of what was on show: A more affordable version of its
web and app data after three or 18 months, with the option to delete location history coming next month. Also, an incognito mode in maps and search, so you can start a private session without fear of being tracked. background and white text – said to be easier on the eyes and battery life – is available in the next OS. Google is also adding features to help people use phones more mindfully as part of its digital well- being push launched last year.
flagship smartphone. The Pixel 3a is half the price of its fancier forebears at $399 and comes with the same primary camera, but with stripped down internals. upgrade. The AI has shrunk down, meaning it is much quicker at understanding and responding to queries. It also includes new features, such as live captioning for web or home videos and podcasts.
A new dark mode, with black
Google Assistant gets an
Nanocosmos and Videon have partnered to provide a low latency livestreaming workflow based on Videon’s edge compute encoder technology and Nanocosmos’ low latency nanoStream Cloud. The nanoStream Cloud contains Nanocosmos’ H5Live technology, which enables plug-in-free delivery and playback on any device and HTML5 browser. Videon’s edge computing platform moves computer and time- exhaustive cloud processes to the edge rather than the cloud. Combined, these technologies will deliver one second end-to-end latency and two-way active engagement to support a range of interactive applications, such as auctions, sports and other live events. Nanocosmos and Videon have further heightened the integration between these technologies, with nanoStream Cloud and H5Live now accepting encoded video from Videon’s LOW LATENCY STREAMING FROM NANOCOSMOS AND VIDEON
HTC BLOCKCHAIN PHONE
HTC is doubling down on its blockchain mobile idea with the Exodus 1s, a cheaper version of the Exodus flagship that launched last year. Details surrounding exact pricing haven’t been announced yet. Instead, the Taiwanese company is calling it “a more value-orientated version” of the original. HTC is also keeping quiet
about the actions it is taking to reduce cost. The basic specifications, including processor, display and camera set-up are all a mystery for now. One thing we do know: the mobile will run as a full node. This means the device will validate and relay bitcoin transactions and help keep the blockchain network running.
This functionality will also be released on the Exodus 1, but it will need to be stored on a separate SD card. Exodus 1s won’t be able to mine any cryptocurrency itself, but HTC hopes the new phone will appeal to those who are curious about cryptocurrency and want to support public blockchains.
edge compute encoders, which supports HDMI and SDI inputs.
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10 YOUR TAKE Industry Analysis
ow that the whirlwind of the NAB Show has settled, I wanted to share a few reflections on what I observed this year in FORECASTING CLOUDS This year’s NAB Show made it clear that change is here – and its name is cloud JON FINEGOLD, CMO, SIGNIANT The cloud is becoming an essential part of every video workflow
Vegas. It’s always interesting to hear the topics that bubble to the surface in the different conversations on the trade show floor. This year, three themes really stood out. First of all, the media industry is fully embracing a hybrid-cloud/multi-cloud world. This was not only prevalent in much of the messaging and press activity from hardware and software vendors around the show, but it was clear in the Signiant booth in our discussions with customers. Here are some key takeaways. MULTIPLE VENDORS ARE THE NORM No one appears to be going all-in with one single vendor any more. Even Netflix, once the poster child for Amazon Web Services, appears to be doing more with Google Cloud. We’re also seeing Signiant customers using a mix of on-premises storage and cloud storage, and more and more from multiple vendors. Cloud services are not commoditised. The big vendors are working hard to differentiate themselves and continue to add new services in an attempt to one-up each other. The cloud wars are on! Cloud vendors are taking media seriously. There have been many key industry hires, new media specific services conglomerates. These are all indicators that our industry is front and centre on the radar of the big cloud vendors. While these are all positive trends for the industry in terms of the pace of innovation and flexibility of options, they are adding more, not less, complexity for technical staff. This turns out to be great rolled out and vendors negotiating long-term deals with large media
that surround this affect everyone in the media supply chain. It not only has direct costs that may
news for companies like Signiant, as our products work with all types of storage and are seen as an abstraction layer for removing the complexity of dealing with multiple storage types. SAAS REPLACES CUSTOM SOFTWARE The industry is transitioning away from custom software to multi-tenant SaaS. If you were fortunate enough to be at NAB’s Devoncroft Executive Summit, you got to hear a unique view of the economics of the media technology industry from Joshua Stinehour, principal analyst at Devoncroft Partners and former industry investment banker. If his presentation appears online, I highly recommend it, and certainly this event will be on my calendar again next year. In his presentation, Stinehour talked about the challenges for vendors in committing to every special request from their customers. He showed mathematically, using MAM vendors as an example, that most vendors max out at around six customers as a result. This isn’t just a challenge for vendors, the economics
be orders of magnitude higher than it needs to be, it inhibits business agility. As media companies look to compete with the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime, many are starting to realise there’s a different approach, asking themselves if it’s time to sacrifice a handful of features that their tech and ops teams ‘need’ for the reward of agility and massive cost savings. We certainly see this shift in thinking in our business, and this was illustrated on the NAB floor with many discussions around cloud ingest portals. Many of our customers are moving away from expensive, highly customised solutions for collecting finished assets from content producers around the world, in favour of Media Shuttle. Shuttle has most of the functionality of custom cloud ingest portals, but is available as an off-the-shelf, multi-tenant SaaS solution. At Signiant, we are, of course, proponents of SaaS, but our
BIG VENDORS ARE WORKING HARD TO DIFFERENTIATE THEMSELVES. CLOUDWARS ARE ON!
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11 YOUR TAKE Industry Analysis
enthusiasm extends beyond just what is good for our business. We think it’s a good trend for the industry that SaaS is now mainstream. MORE SCREENS, MORE COMPLEXITY In the bigger picture, we are seeing ever growing complexity in the global media supply chain. This is more of an ongoing evolution than a radical shift, but it is clear the media supply chain is growing more complex each year. It makes sense when you think about how consumers demand content, on any device, at any time, anywhere in the world. Content producers now have to distribute content in many different formats across many regions, each with its own regulations and processes. Standards like IMF are emerging to help
with some of this complexity, but one trend that seems to be more prevalent this year than in years past is the reliance on smaller, highly specialised suppliers working closely with the large content creators and distributors. Our customers are looking to us more and more to be the trusted broker for easily, securely and quickly moving content between companies, large and small, all over the world. This role isn’t new to Signiant, but it’s becoming more important to our customers and we will have some announcements on this front soon. Stay tuned!
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12 STREAMPUNK TOOLS Storage
THE DRIVE FOR TOP STORAGE electing the right storage technology still comes down to careful deliberation and considered business strategy
Words by Phil Rhodes
nternet video distribution has long since beaten the technical quality of broadcast TV. The network shifts masses of data faster than most
Until recently, the only way to store that sort of data was on a bank of hard disks in the same building – if not the same box – as the computer doing the work. And throwing commodity hard disks in a RAID enclosure is still a cost-effective approach. Companies like G-Technology offer devices designed to do that off the shelf. For under £600, a G-RAID II storage system provides 12TB of storage and can achieve over 400MB/s while still remaining portable enough to take on set.
Choosing the right backup option can be challenging and sometimes there’s no simple choice. Camera cards are too expensive to keep on the shelf for months, offloading can be a pressured rush that can’t delay the shoot and shoots may happen miles from a fast network connection, making online storage unreliable. And no matter what the storage medium, reliability is crucial. The first instinct is to specify a RAID, but it’s not quite that simple. A RAID of many disks might survive the failure of any one, but it’s still one RAID, with single points of failure. It will also carefully preserve human errors. RAID is not backup. LTO tape, on the other hand, is backup. Two copies on LTO and one on disk will make most insurance companies happy. LTO drives come in internal or external formats, mainly for on-premises backup of bulk data such as video files. The latest LTO-8 drives, made by Quantum, HP and IBM, achieve 360MB/s onto 12TB tapes and sell between £4000 and £6000, depending on the configuration. LTO-8
satellite or broadcast channels, and laptops, phones and even modern TVs have lots of processing power and can be updated to handle new codecs. It sounds great, but all this quality means the sheer amount of data involved in producing content can be huge, even if the project is not for a traditional distribution channel.
THE IT CLOUD Zoolz’ AI-based BigMIND cloud backup service
provides intelligent search and content recognition
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THERE ARE LIMITED BANDWIDTH CAPABILITIES IN SOME PLACES, BUT TRANSFERRINGDATA ISSOMETHINGYOUCANDO INTHEBACKGROUND
media is probably unavailable until mid- 2019, given a legal disagreement between two manufacturers, but 6TB LTO-7 tapes can be found for around £50 apiece. RUNNING HOT AND COLD Adam Bushnaq is business development manager at Zoolz, a provider of cloud backup for small and medium businesses. He says there are huge advantages to online and cloud storage, explaining: “You can upload data from any device. You can access it from anywhere. You can share it with anyone. You can have passwords with an expiry date. If you are a broadcaster and you want to get opinions before you post, you can share it.”
The cloud brings sophistication. Zoolz’ AI-based BigMIND service provides intelligent search and content recognition for both personal and business customers, and there are two ways to store arbitrary data: hot storage and cold storage. “We have cold storage,” Bushnaq explains, “which is cost-efficient storage, and we have hot storage. The main difference is restoration time. On cold storage, you have to wait three to five hours for your files to be available. With hot storage, if you request a download, it starts immediately.” Bushnaq adds that another neat trick is the automatic transcoding of large media files to smaller proxies. “You can store
your full-resolution videos, 4K or Full HD, on cold storage to save money. Then, on demand, you can have SD, HD or both.” Prices for the smart archive solution start at £30 a month for 1TB, with unlimited uploads and downloads and, while a moving-image production could fill that in a single morning, the cloud allows for ever- expanding capacity. It offers security as well. “If anything happens to your device,” Bushnaq affirms, “you’ll find a backup of this file safe in the cloud.” NEARLINE MADE SIMPLE Those with an existing infrastructure might not want to do a wholesale cloud migration, but instead incorporate cloud features
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15 STREAMPUNK TOOLS Storage
into what they already have. Avid recently unveiled Cloudspaces, an extension to its Nexis on-premises storage system, at its Connect event to coincide with the NAB Show in Las Vegas. David Colantuoni, Avid’s vice-president of product management, describes Cloudspaces as a simplifed, demystified approach to nearline storage. “It’s the same thing as a workspace on a Nexis,” he says. “You can move your media to the cloud. Why would you want to do that? Well, often your storage is defined by the amount you’ve purchased. You have a fixed capacity. Sometimes you don’t have the capacity to buy more storage, or you need to temporarily park media while you finish a project. Or maybe it’s for safekeeping. “The workflows aren’t different. The storage is just located somewhere else. You can have an editor that’s in a different area from where the content’s been shot.” As ever, performance relies on a speedy internet connection, and Colantuoni finds that connectivity problems are becoming a thing of the past. “I don’t hear that concern as much anymore. There are limited bandwidth capabilities in some places, but transferring data is something you can do in the background while you’re working,” he says.
one at Microsoft. It’s a humongous concern, but we do take so many steps.” The set-up process is, he says, “an engagement”, adding: “We have teams that will go look at your workflow: how many editors you want to have, where are the productions going to be located, so we can find the best bandwidth and storage.” BLACKBIRD ASCENDING Editors eager to dive deeper into the cloud might consider Blackbird and its Ascent editor. Ascent is a web application, available on most connected devices, intended to assemble and publish simple edits quickly. It handles video stored almost anywhere thanks to Blackbird’s Edge server. “Say you’ve got some video files in on- premises deployment,” explains Blackbird product manager, Huw Dymond. “In addition, you might have some files or streams that exist within AWS, or Azure or a private data centre. You deploy Edge wherever your content is, users then use our applications through a normalised dashboard that allows them to get access to content wherever it’s located. The thing we always note to our customers is that we’ve built the codec and our apps to run in a standard web browser.” “The key value is that you don’t have to move your original source to the cloud,” Dymond adds. “If it’s in the cloud, great. If it’s not, Edge gets deployed wherever that media is.” The company anticipates three main workflows: “The first is that I want to take all my edit decisions – including transitions, stills, animations, video layers – and then conform and render those decisions. That means Edge is responsible for determining which of the resources were used. It does
HEAD IN THE CLOUDS Cloudian focuses on object storage, which is intended to reduce the complexity of managing large amounts of data
Cloudspaces is implemented on Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure, satisfying both performance and security concerns. “The facilities are secure,” Colantuoni explains. “Microsoft has a bunch of web pages dedicated to this. They’re serious about it. Cloudspaces goes through a security audit internally at Avid and another
DATA IS GETTING BIGGER AND BIGGER ANDMUCH FASTER THANNETWORKING IS GETTING QUICKER. THE NETWORKING GUYS HAVE TO UP THEIR GAME
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16 STREAMPUNK TOOLS Storage
a conform and stitch from each of those resources. The outputs would then go to some on-premises storage, into direct submission to a content management system or social media, but the idea is that the user never has to worry about where the content is.” The other two approaches involve extracting an edit decision list for use in other NLEs for fine-tuning, or to submit an edit for internal review using the Blackbird Player application. Blackbird, Dymond says, avoids being an actual provider of storage. “We’ve been pretty strict on our sales to avoid getting into the cloud storage market. We work with the customer’s existing storage infrastructure, or on AWS or Azure.” BIGGER AND BIGGER DATA One company involved in that global infrastructure is Cloudian, a company founded on the idea of object storage. Object storage is intended, among other things, to reduce the complexity of managing very large amounts of data. Cloudian is a provider of major cloud- based infrastructure, but its products are also available for on-premises installation. Neil Stobart, vice-president of global sales engineering, notes that use cases vary. “I’ve done work where my biggest client had the least amount of staff out of all my customers,” Stobart says, describing warehouses filled with unattended servers. “But if you’re in the data creation business you’re probably going to have your own storage when you buy hardware and software from Cloudian. They’ll stand up a big storage cluster in their data centre.” Cloudian’s storage is compatible with the S3 API, created by Amazon for its
AWS service. “That’s why we can emulate Amazon – because we’re using their API.” Control of where data goes and who accesses it, Stobart explains, is key. “This is one of our unique selling points. We have this concept of policies that we can put on that users’ bucket of data. We provide the storage to the biggest service provider in Europe, a company called GTT Communications, and they have fifteen data centres – fifteen physical locations in countries all over Europe. They have a single cluster that spans all those locations.” Stobart says it would be theoretically possible to automatically keep backup copies of a file at every one of those locations, though two or three generally satisfies people keen on disaster recovery. Stobart concludes by returning to the core issue: the limited availability of network bandwidth. “I was just saying this morning that data is getting bigger and bigger much faster than networking is getting quicker. We’re only just scraping 4K. I was at NAB four years ago and they were talking about 8K then. As that data grows, it’s going to become harder and harder,” he says, before adding: “The networking guys have to up their game.”
THE USER NEVER HAS TO WORRY ABOUTWHERE THE CONTENT IS
THE BIGGER THE BETTER? The increase in internet video quality means that the sheer amount of data involved in producing content for laptops and phones can be huge
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18 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
KEEP YOUR EYE iSportsAnalysis has moved to AWS cloud services to make tagging and analysis of sports easy for everyone, from school teams to pro
BLOCK ATTEMPT
ports organisations, coaches and players are welcoming a host of tools to more effectively evaluate and improve player and team performance. Leading sports performance software provider, iSportsAnalysis, addresses some of the most pressing analytics challenges that sports clubs face today. The iSportsAnalysis service creates a synchronised set of XML data, along with a video asset to provide sports organisations with a robust game analysis toolset. iSportsAnalysis started as a video streaming platform, providing online sports performance analysis serving private schools, colleges and universities. Recognising there was a need for these clients to be able to analyse games at scale cheaply, it developed a toolset that is now being used worldwide. Coaches or analysts go through a process of tagging video from a match, which can then generate a report about that team’s or an individual’s performance. To tag a match, a coach or player watches
a stream of the match footage and, via buttons in a ‘code window’, marks significant events throughout the match – penalties, points scored, etc. “And that can get very, very detailed, down to positions on pitch, to attempts on goal, home possessions, away possessions. The list just goes on,” notes Anadi Taylor, iSportsAnalysis CEO. “For as many coaches that exist in the world there probably are that many different ways of tagging.” Taylor emphasises that the toolset can be customised and adapted for any type of sport. “We do rugby, football, hockey, netball, basketball, arena soccer, the list just goes on and on,” he says. “Coaches can sign in, upload a video of any sport, create as many code windows as they want, and then code or tag their matches. “And they can can also have their players - or students if it’s a school or university – sign in and use those same code windows to tag the match.”
CLOUD SPORTS Recently, iSportsAnalysis moved its solution from on-premises to the cloud with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), electing to also use AWS Media Services for video transcoding and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for greater efficiency and elasticity. With a background in corporate streaming, iSportsAnalysis quickly garnered interest from sports organisations looking to analyse performance during games and matches. As analytics fever caught on in sports, more of the company’s clients began asking for a way to combine live footage with analysis. Working closely with universities and sports clubs, the company developed a tool to tag possessions and other stats called ‘Sports Performance Analysis’, which was designed to integrate with third-party analysis tools. Taylor then began to envision a more cost-effective solution to meet the increasing demand. Drawing on his background in programming and
ANADI TAYLOR “Moving over to AWS was a no-brainer. We’ve never looked back”
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19 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
SHOOTING
POSITIONING
DEFENSIVE COVER
livestreaming, he studied existing solutions, identified gaps in functionality, and interviewed coaches, sport scientists and analysts to uncover their specific needs. The resulting solution, iSportsAnalysis, has been used in real- time matches since 2017. Taylor and his team have continued to refine the solution, adding an online messaging system, synchronised video and analysis, filtering options, playlist generation and more. Taylor migrated iSportsAnalysis into the AWS Cloud from a rented server. “Transferring to running Amazon EC2 instances was easy and super-fast,” he says. “I was ready to go in a few hours. We even moved our transcoding over to AWS Elemental MediaConvert. I also love that AWS tools give us the ability to regularly bring new features to our clients.”
set that is linked back to the processed asset. The way the technology pairs data with video makes it simpler for users to search and identify key moments that may provide insight as to how players and teams can improve their performances. The company aims to increase its use of AWS Media Services, with an eye to using Amazon CloudFront content delivery network (CDN) to allow coaches and players to stream game footage with analytics to any connected device, making it faster and easier to improve game strategy as well as individual performance. “What’s very nice for us is that performance analysis has becomes a buzzword,” says Taylor. “More and more people are investigating it and are recognising that it’s more affordable now, because of iSportsAnalysis.” “Our company has various teams in America. We’ve got another team that will eventually manage Holland, Germany, Belgium and Scandinavia. Our model now is to scale out. Moving over to AWS, with all of the elasticity and availability, and to have everything under one roof, was a
iSportsAnalysis also migrated from a MySQL database service, hosted on Amazon EC2, to using Amazon Aurora. “The transition was incredibly smooth and the backup functionality, failure detection and scalability has proved invaluable, let alone the time savings,” Taylor adds. AFFORDABLE ANALYSIS iSportsAnalysis clients – whether coaches, players, or other sports professionals – can now log into an online dashboard to get a customised view of their video footage and associated data. They can easily upload new videos, which are stored in an S3 bucket. From there, content is transcoded to a unified video file format and specified resolution using AWS Elemental MediaConvert. Users can then tag or code the video and generate an in-depth data
FOR AS MANY COACHES THAT EXIST IN THE WORLD THERE PROBABLY ARE THAT MANY DIFFERENT WAYS OF TAGGING
no-brainer. We’ve never looked back.”
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20 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
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21 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
Tangent Studios harnessed the power of cloud rendering to tackle the size and scope of animated feature, Next Gen NEXT GEN RENDERS IN THE CLOUD
angent Studios is a computer graphics animation company with headquarters in Toronto and Winnipeg, Canada. Last
“AWS Cloud was a godsend for us on Next Gen ,” says Jeff Bell, Tangent Studios COO and co-founder. “It allowed us to render about two and half versions of the movie in just 36 days and far outstripped our on-premises capabilities. Without it, lighting and rendering would need to have started nearly eight months ahead of time and that would have required an entirely different creative strategy. We’ve always used Deadline for managing resources on premises, but our per-hour compute costs are so low, we weren’t sure if the cloud was the right option until it became clear we needed a lot more CPU to get the job done. We couldn’t have hit our deadlines without AWS.” Ken Zorniak, CEO and president of Tangent Studios, adds: “Removing the limitations of a physical farm allows creatives to make changes to the story and look until the last minute, then let the computers do the heavy lifting. Since artists receive shots back faster using AWS, they can work more effectively. It’s definitely improved our studio’s flow and throughput and that helps keep everyone motivated and engaged.” SERVER POWER Tangent deploys open source software for 3D production, primarily using Blender for
content creation. Tangent’s local 600-node farm is housed at the studio’s Winnipeg headquarters, employing about 60 people who typically focus on asset creation, lighting and VFX. Much of Tangent’s animation is done out of the Toronto location, which is about twice the size of the Winnipeg site staff-wise and designed to be highly flexible. “Our Toronto office is run on a data centre, so looking to the cloud wasn’t a foreign concept,” Bell explained. “After just two months of set-up, configuration and testing, which AWS Thinkbox helped us with, we went from being inexperienced to spinning up 3000 AWS instances – five times the capacity of our local resources.” Already well into production when it decided to leverage the AWS cloud, Tangent employed AWS Snowball, a data transport solution that can be sent to a studio’s location, to quickly load upwards of 100TB of data on to AWS servers. AWS Thinkbox helped the company determine where to locate the data and how to balance machine power and RAM needs with pricing and core availability, making use of economical Spot Instances wherever possible. Looking to the future, Bell envisions broadening Tangent’s relationship with AWS. “I can see us moving our whole production pipeline to AWS – disk tiering for cold storage, remote users, backups, virtual workstations and beyond. With AWS, we see a partner that we can rely on long term, not just to bring more cores online to finish a project but also a resource for the work
year, the company released Next Gen, an animated sci-feature on Netflix. It tells the story of a lonely, rebellious teenage girl who teams up with a top-secret robot to stop a madman’s plot for world domination. Featuring the voice talent of John Krasinski, Charlyne Yi, Jason Sudeikis, Michael Peña, David Cross and Constance Wu, the CG action-adventure was created as a joint effort by Baozou and Tangent Animation, a subsidiary of Tangent Studios. Next Gen marks the largest project that Tangent Animation has tackled both in size and scope, requiring four 2K resolution deliverables, including mono and stereo versions in English and Mandarin. HITTING DEADLINES With only 25% of the project’s rendering completed and three months until the film’s promised delivery date, Tangent looked to AWS Thinkbox to help scale compute resources using Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and ultimately completed more than 65% of the film’s rendering with AWS.
WE WEREN’T SURE IF THE CLOUD WAS THE RIGHT OPTION FOR US UNTIL IT BECAME CLEAR WE NEEDED A LOT MORE CPU TO GET THE JOB DONE
we do beyond the animation studio in developing SaaS technology.”
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22 TECHFEED Storage
SAVING NATURE
Films at 59 recently switched its storage system to address the rising demand for 4K natural history programmes
Words by Chelsea Fearnley
ristol, UK, known by British millennials as the backdrop for angsty teen drama Skins , also happens to be a world
scale-out NAS and Fibre Channel (FC). Ben Leaver, Pixit Media CEO, explains: “It was no longer able to deliver the performance or reliability that is required to keep up with the demands placed upon it.” To support the increase in 4K workflows and provide scalability to accommodate future demands, both in terms of volume of work and potential shift to 8K finishing, Films at 59 needed to replace its current storage system. TO THE LAB Following an in-depth examination of the leading systems on the market with integration partner Digital Garage, PixStor was recommended to Films at 59. PixStor is a software-defined storage platform by Pixit Media, a company that has become a mainstay for improving workflow efficiency with its storage
centre for the more wholesome genus of wildlife filmmaking, and home to the finest production and post-production facilities in natural history programming. Post-production house, Films at 59, founded in 1990, is widely recognised for its grading and finishing work on wildlife docuseries from the BBC and National Geographic. Recently, the company has provided its services to the 4K programming of Netflix’s Our Planet and BBC1’s Dynasties . But in the industry arms race for ever higher quality, the throughput capabilities at Films at 59 are becoming overwhelmed by the enormous volume of 4K data that is bottlenecked by the facility’s legacy
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23 TECHFEED Storage
WE’VE INVESTED IN APPLICATIONS AND TOOLS TO SUPPORT AWIDE RANGE OF CONTEXTS ANDWORKFLOWS solutions in the UK post-production and broadcast industries.
capacity, with no negative effect on the finishing editors’ or artists’ user experience. “They posed questions and we responded by demonstrating the results in PixStor. They asked to see 4K and we delivered that – and showed them 8K seamlessly, too,” adds Leaver. The storage solution was installed on- premises at Films at 59 in December 2018. SCALABLE STORAGE PixStor has a software-defined architecture that offers scale-out capabilities without the commercial pressures that come with being restricted to one particular vendor’s hardware ecosystem. When combined with the cloud-based infrastructure, PixStor’s software-defined storage frees Films at 59 from the restrictions of its brick-and-mortar facility. Leaver explains: “It becomes easy for them to add multiple vendors moving forward, ensuring economic architectural longevity and adaptability to future technologies. PixStor’s software-defined architecture provides choice and enables
SAVVY STORAGE Films at 59 has installed PixStor in its digital intermediate suite to support 4K high-end grading and finishing work
Films at 59 was invited to visit Pixit’s Technical Lab in High Wycombe, two hours east of its Bristol headquarters. The lab is a space dedicated to showcasing the complete PixStor ecosystem, where guests can test, collaborate and train with Pixit’s technical team in a real-world environment. “We’ve invested in a full complement of legacy, current and bleeding-edge hardware, applications and tools to support a wide range of contexts and workflows that are integrated with major cloud services,” says Leaver. “Featured technologies include Dell, NetApp, Islion, HP, Storbyte, Excelero, Mellanox, Baselight, Resolve, Transkoder, Adobe Creative Cloud, Avid ProTools, Autodesk Flame, Mist, Nucoda and Signiant.” During the visit, Pixit’s technical team recreated Films at 59’s workflows using its standard applications, and were able to demonstrate performance of multiple workloads running full output at up to 99%
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24 TECHFEED Storage
IT’S SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO SOLVE THE MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY’SWORKFLOW CHALLENGES Films at 59 to take advantage of the technology and commercial benefits, and the ability to choose where, when and on what platform the software is run.” The tailored PixStor system at the Bristol site currently has six workstations attached to it: two Autodesk Flames, two FilmLight Baselights and two Assist systems. It connects together the company’s Avid network, Storage DNA archive system and Object Matrix nearline storage. It also has a parallel file system that can manage petabytes of data and billions of files, all under a single global namespace. The data architecture foundation relies on a scatter algorithm to distribute writes across a spinning disk, removing the impact of fragmentation on performance so that there is no bandwidth degradation as the system fills – as is common on some file systems. “Most other high-performing shared- access storage solutions require defragmentation to restore performance as they fill, causing downtime and loss of bandwidth,” Leaver points out. With its foundations leveraging standard-compute, flask and disk platforms, alongside low-cost commodity ethernet technology, PixStor is more cost effective than the traditional legacy LAN at Films at 59. AS NATURE NECESSITATES Since installing PixStor at the Bristol site, and with the introduction of modern flash technologies, the system now supports the latest in NVMeOF, creating a fast performance storage layer alongside the traditional spinning disk tiers, and a proven delivery of 16K workflows. In the future, Films at 59 will be able to make use of PixStor’s intelligent automated tools, including analytics, enhanced search using the AI and machine learning, and auto-tiering to collaborate remotely. As capacity and performance requirements inevitably increase, PixStor
MEN AT WORK Films at 59’s operations manager, Stuart Dyer (below right), and senior technical support engineer, Andrew Farmer (below left), have found their grading and finishing for wildlife documentaries made easier by Pixit Media’s PixStor
can be scaled up (or down) by additional commodity storage. Even now, Bristol-based Icon Films is working on an 8K feature documentary of Africa’s wildlife oasis, titled Okavango . Additionally, PixStor has the option to scale capacity into multiple cloud and object resources transparently through specifically designed to solve the media and entertainment industry’s workflow challenges. It binds changing technologies and business requirements in seamless fashion to help content creators and distributors remain competitive, without sacrificing the quality of their work.” Pixit Media’s Ngenea offering. “It’s the only storage platform
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25 TECHFEED Storage
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26 ROUND TABLE Storage
This month’s round table features our experts advising a hypothetical post-production house on how to future-proof its storage TERABYTES
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27 ROUND TABLE Storage THISMONTH’S FEED ROUNDTABLE GUESTSARE:
DUNCANBEATTIE,CHIEFPRODUCT OFFICER,GBLABS Duncan Beattie is chief product officer for GB Labs, a shared media storage technology company headquartered in the UK. Beattie has been with GB Labs for eight years and was instrumental in the development of the company’s HyperSpace SSD acceleration unit and important customer wins.
JAICAVE,HEADOFOPERATIONS, ENVYPOST Jai Cave is responsible for all of Envy’s day-to-day operations and directly manages a team of department heads throughout the facility. He is involved in all aspects of the business, from client liaison through to workflow design, system implementation, business strategy and staff management.
MEIRLEHRER,VP,VSPPPORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT,MEDIAKINDGLOBAL Meir Lehrer is a member of the MediaKind Portfolio Management Team. He has worked in the TV industry for nearly 25 years, with expertise covering all aspects of the video ecosystem, including middleware, cloud DVR, CAS/DRM and compression. Lehrer is responsible for strategic planning and market development of MediaKind’s Pictor solutions.
MARCRISBY,BOXERSYSTEMS Mark Risby is Group CTO at Boxer Systems, a major technology integrator and digital solutions provider for the moving image industry. Risby has worked in the broadcast and post- production market for over 25 years, specialising in linking the worlds of traditional video and data.
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28 ROUND TABLE Storage
HI, EXPERTS! WE’RE A NEW POST- PRODUCTION HOUSE CALLED DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS (DBATC), AND WE’RE BUILDING A HEADQUARTERS FROM THE GROUND UP IN OUR NATION’S CAPITAL. WE ALSO HAVE TWO OTHER SATELLITE FACILITIES OVERSEAS THAT WE ARE IN CONSTANT COLLABORATION WITH. We have recently been swamped with more and more work – from editing to grading to VFX – and we want to get this new facility up and running fast. Given the amount of material we have to deal with now, we want to make sure our storage set- up is the best it can be, so we have some questions for you about how we might approach best practice for our storage. DBATC: What should our most important consideration be in building storage solutions for Death by a Thousand Cuts? DUNCAN BEATTIE: I feel there is no single consideration but rather a list of priorities to be decided on, and as much as possible to try and define where you are headed as a company. Many are tempted to buy the first thing they find but when it goes into production there can be fundamental tools missing that can make life less stressful for admins and great for the creatives. What I mean by that is, invest in a system that will do exactly what you need it to do right now, and for your best determination of what
The bottom layer is for long-term assets that will rarely need access beyond archive pulls. When you build storage, you need to consider the number of team members in the organisation that will require simultaneous access and how dispersed they are globally. MARC RISBY: Firstly it’s important to understand DBATC’s specific requirement in detail. What are its key workflows? What systems are being used? What’s the life cycle of the data? How does it need to be shared? It’s essential to understand the customer’s needs to make the best choices when looking at shared storage. This is often a reasonable amount of work as the customer may not know all the specifics themselves, especially when workflows have grown organically over time. DBATC: If we don’t care about anything else but price, what are our best storage options? DUNCAN BEATTIE: If price is your only consideration, just make sure that whatever holds your data is, at the very least, reliable and – crucially – protected. Of course, your workflow will suffer because files will have to be dragged away from the system to be worked on, but at least you have a central repository that will be safe. JAI CAVE: You can always build your own NAS solution in-house, but to be honest if you only care about price, your
you’ll need for at least the next five years, if not longer. It’s also a case of taking a close look at what you already have. Finding a new online solution that will help you reuse or repurpose as much as possible of this can be a vital initial cost-saving to a fledgling operation. This also has the benefit of allowing budget to be driven towards your new online storage which is an investment with the biggest possible ROI. From my previous life, as a reseller, I have always maintained the consultative approach, and not just talking about the storage, but how the storage will interact with everything else is key. In short, it’s all about being smart, scaleable and flexible. JAI CAVE: Starting to think about storage policies is the best place to start. If you are looking at storage for the whole facility, then you will be tiering storage based on use cases. The performance you need out of a nearline tier will not be the same as you need out of your finishing and QC storage. Should every tier be part of the same solution? Or does it make sense to look at different products for each tier you need? MEIR LEHRER: In many ways, storage can be viewed as a layered cake. The different layers of the ‘storage cake’ reflect the storage life cycle of the assets. For example, the top layer is assets in need of frequent editing via collaborating parties. The mid layer is where less editing is required, but with relatively new content.
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