Words by Xxxx Xxxxx BEST-OF-BREED BROADCASTING W ith advances in cloud technology Sony’s senior consulting architect Martin Irvin discusses software-defined broadcasting – an up-and-coming modular approach that will ultimately rely on industry standardisation and remote production becoming the that event, it’s out of their hands,” describes Irvin. “They believe the benefit lies in having that capability in-house – still having that tin. If something fails, they can either reboot a server or bring up a replacement service. That’s the advantage they see.” In other words, a hybrid approach – a blend of software and hardware – is appropriate in this case, especially given the unpredictable and often costly nature of the cloud. In order to minimise costs, Irvin suggests an ‘orchestration platform’ – one “that allows you to dynamically bring up this application when you require
on a single approach. Recently, the European Broadcasting Union released a white paper which has been ‘instrumental in bringing these ideas and concepts together’, providing recommendations to vendors looking to offer up their own solutions. A few have already hit the market, including Nvidia’s Holoscan for Media – which integrates and streamlines software applications from multiple vendors. While waiting for the industry to achieve full standardisation, Sony is providing pre-packaged solutions – a combination of Sony and third-party software – which are compliant with one another and available today. Much like templates, these solutions “are easy for our customers to deploy and run in their chosen environment,” explains Irvin. WHY A HYBRID MODEL? With the broadcast industry still at a turning point, companies vary in their preference for cloud-based versus on-premises production – both of which can benefit from software- defined broadcasting. For customers working in live production, for instance, “one of the key challenges is when they’re contracted onto some of these large premium events and if they’re wholly reliant on the public cloud, if something goes wrong during
new normal, it’s no wonder that broadcasters are looking for a more modular, software-driven approach – a core infrastructure that streamlines workflows. “The industry is in a state of transition,” begins Martin Irvin, senior consulting architect at Sony. “It’s starting to move away from dedicated hardware devices of old and looking to the future,” also known as software-defined broadcasting. broadcasting’ is “analogous to software Legos,” suggests Irvin. “Taking different building blocks from different vendors in a best-of- breed approach. Customers want to have that choice of which tools they deploy,” he continues, suggesting that a client may want to operate a Sony M2L-X vision mixer with a third-party audio mixer, for instance. “To make all of the software work BUILDING BLOCKS The term ‘software-defined together,” notes Irvin, “you need some type of common framework.” As with SMPTE ST 2110, it could end up taking some time for the industry to develop and agree
it and then release the resources when you’re done. That tends to be more efficient and also helps to give you
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