18 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS
STREAMING EVOLUTION Nine Network’s first iteration of streaming technology was hardware intensive, encompassing a workflow that involved a feed from the broadcast room going to encoders. It involved substantial SDI and an HLS stream output to a CDN, which then streamed content to the consumers. “There was lots of hardware, lots of potential points of failure,” says Kunaal Ramchandani, digital development director at Nine Entertainment. “As you can imagine, as the stress on these boxes increased, so did some of our issues.” One of the worst parts of this set-up was having to literally reboot the entire system when there was a major error, which doesn’t go over well with consumers or sponsors. Nine had already been working as much with cloud as possible, during its digital transformation. With the rollout of AWS Media Services, the network saw a potential solution to its teething problems. The first proposed replacement for the hardware-centric workflow began with a Telestream Wirecast HD output from the broadcast control room to AWS Elemental MediaLive, which outputs an HLS stream to AWS Elemental MediaStore, where it gets stored and is sent out to the player via Amazon CloudFront.
COSTS WENT DOWN, WHICH REALLY SHOULDN’T BE A SURPRISE SINCE WE GOT RID OF AWHOLE LOT OF BOXES “I have to say that the entire proof of concept was set up within 40 minutes,” says Ramchandani. “When we walked out of the room, we were ready to stream live.” The set-up that finally went live maintained the basic simplicity of the initial trial, with a few tweaks. “We didn’t want our devops team to be the roadblock, so we set it up so that the devs team could push out configuration changes themselves. Devs push their code through to Stash and we used Team City for our CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery/Deployment).” The configuration changes are then pushed through to MediaLive, MediaStore,
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