38 TECHFEED Cloud Editing
MICROSERVICES ALLOWA SERVICE PROVIDER TO IMPLEMENT AND IMPROVE OUTCOMES RAPIDLY
industry-specific interfaces and protocols such as Serial Digital Interface (SDI) are still a dominant transport technology for production and facilities, particularly for uncompressed video. “Dependence on SDI impedes the ability to scale and grow operations efficiently and leads to separate broadcast and IT infrastructures that further inhibits flexibility,” says MediaKind’s Arnaud Caron. For Gallier, the biggest barrier is timing. “When broadcasters refresh their facilities, they tend to question themselves about whether it is the right time for them to move to cloud-native, microservice-based technologies,” he suggests. “They worry about whether it will work well or offers more freedom and flexibility than alternatives.” This mindset battle is flagged by others. “Responsibility is shifting from the customer buying, operating and maintaining the equipment to a business model where companies like Telestream are installing and maintaining the technology,” explains Carnahan, who questions whether organisations are willing to make the change. “Microservices allow a service provider to implement and improve outcomes more rapidly,” he says. “However, if a customer needs to consume those microservices directly, possibly for cost reasons, they must be much more technically capable.” Caron agrees, urging the need to build the right skillset within the organisation, potentially shifting from engineering towards managed services; replacing work siloes with shared practices. “As legacy hardware reaches end of life, and as on-premises data centres run out of capacity; the logical upgrade path will be a move towards an all-IP infrastructure, software-defined media processing, virtualisation and cloud-native solutions,” Caron says. “As the cost of public cloud solutions and related connectivity align with the cost of data centre ownership, operators will use infrastructure transparently and independently from their physical location.” These questions and concerns will be swept away, just as the migration from ASI to IP, tape to file and SD to HD were accepted.
MICROSERVICES 2025 “In five years’ time, cloud-native, microservice-based solutions with orchestration will be mainstream in the broadcast industry,” predicts Gallier. “The main question facing broadcasters then will not be whether cloud is a good solution, but which cloud solution is the best to manage a service that requires delivering personalised content based on analytics and other data to mass audiences. Only an extremely agile solution will be up to the challenge.” Janssen paints a scenario where, with higher and higher bandwidths required, broadcasters will be able to process the signals partly in the cloud with FPGA servers, “but also combine that with a hybrid environment. For example, in a stadium, where you need to aggregate and ingress all the video signals and mix it with the central production”. “Microservices are meant to be stateless and ephemeral, since you’re designing something that is intended to be killed at some point in the future,” says Carnahan. This concept is in direct opposition to something like linear playout, which is 24/7 mission-critical - it’s not a good candidate for microservice application, according to Carnahan. However, as the market moves towards personalised consumption, there is nothing stopping broadcasters creating playout services for very small, specific, perhaps community- based audiences. “Instead of having ten million viewers, they target ten thousand viewers,” he says. “In this scenario, if you’re off-air for 30 seconds, it’s not a big deal. Microservices are an awesome candidate for more personalised playout applications.” The main benefit of microservices is scaleability and high availability. Consequently, we will see an evolution of broadcasters able to work from anywhere, with the latest and greatest functionalities. “The scaleability will enable them to have the resources available when they need them and also only pay for them when they use them,” says Dieter Backx, product marketing manager at EVS. “We could almost say it could become an on-demand solution.”
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