Roger Crothers: BBC Wales has been live now for about a year and we’re making live programmes on a regular basis using the IP infrastructure – it’s performing very well. Daniel Url: At heart, the only thing different about cloud is where the storage and servers are. It used to be on-premises, then we had it in on-premises data centres, and now it’s distributed across private or public clouds. Roger Crothers: Another thing at BBC Wales with IP is we are now forward-agnostic. We can take feeds of any kind – HD, 4K, 8K, even 360 – and move that video anywhere. If we suddenly decide to do all our programming in 4K, we don’t have to rip out all the hardware and replace it. We might have to increase bandwidth on the network, but technically there’s nothing stopping us from doing it. It also allows us to be more resilient in how we work. We have something called dynamic allocation, allowing us to allocate cameras or equipment from one gallery to another. We have three galleries in the building and four studio floors – and we can drive any one of those studio spaces from any one of those galleries. That’s only possible because of IP. Gerhard Lang: With our customers, we’ve seen IP as a huge enabler. Some of them are not putting dedicated hardware in certain control rooms and instead doing everything in software. Before, you needed hardware to receive an SDI stream, and the number of simultaneous signals you could receive was limited. When you wanted to receive a different signal source, you had to talk to a router. The flexibility you get with an IP infrastructure – whether it’s NDI-based or 2110 with NMOS – is a completely different beast. You have all the sources in your facility at your fingertips.
Q : How do you see the cloud contributing to broadcast, especially for live production? Roger Crothers: We didn’t build cloud into our infrastructure originally, but have since bought some cloud services – like storage, which is a pretty simple thing that allows us to store media off-site, protect content,
and make it more accessible for our people around the world. We’ve also been looking at cloud- based galleries, allowing you a vision mixer and multiple feeds you could literally control from an iPad if you wanted to. It’s attractive, because you don’t have a large capital outlay. Those solutions allow us to pay by the hour, so if we have rights for a show one year, but not the next, we haven’t invested a lot of up-front money that we’re desperately trying to recover. Daniel Url: We can see around the globe, in all areas, a huge shift towards the cloud. Cloud is an economic decision now; not a technological one.
CLOUD IS OFTEN AN ECONOMIC DECISION NOW; NOT A TECHNOLOGICAL ONE
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