38 ROUND TABLE Broadcasting In The Cloud
FREETV: FREEDONIA HAS THE WORLD’S HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF PROFESSIONAL OSTRICH RACERS (AS YOU WELL KNOW). WE’LL BE HOSTING THE OSTRICH RACING WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS IN 2020. HOW CAN CLOUD SERVICES HELP WITH OUR LIVE SPORTS COVERAGE? CRISTIAN LIVADIOTTI, WILDMOKA: We have never yet served a customer organising an Ostrich Racing Championship (we hope we will one day), but we have done other large sports events, and our customers have seen real value from our cloud solution. One benefit is the ability to deliver more content. You can create feeds and content from multiple venues simultaneously, and let your audience choose what they want to watch. And using some cloud services, you will be able to deliver branded content, as close-to-live as it can be. This would enable you to involve your sponsors in a digital- focused campaign, leveraging the power of near-live content But there are challenges. For this kind of Tier1 sports event, you would have some contractual engagements to deliver the content to the audience. You may know that most cloud platforms are not in a completely fail safe mode. The better known services commit to a 99.9% SLA, meaning that the infrastructure might not be there for up to 44 minutes each month. What if those 44 minutes happen during your prime time Ostrich Race Championship finals? The cloud’s typical ‘best-effort’ commitment is not enough for broadcast- grade services. Servicing a broadcast-
THE COST OF CLOUD IS GOING DOWN, MAKING IT MORE AND MORE VIABLE ACROSS SEGMENTS, INCLUDING FOR 24/7 USAGE
grade SLA based on a cloud infrastructure requires some additional layers of supervision, together with a set of fail-safe mechanisms – “if Cloud A falls, switch automatically to Cloud B”. KARL MEHRING, GRASS VALLEY: Nearer the time, additional channels can easily and quickly be provisioned. Most importantly, these will only be paid for when they are in use, so once the championship is over, the channels can be deactivated and the billing for them stops. MARC RISBY, BOXER SYSTEMS: Cloud is perfect for event coverage and large, prestigious events like ostrich racing can benefit from platforms that can be built quickly, at scale, and for a short period, but may not be required for some time after that. Linear channels and VOD, SVOD and live streaming can all be clouded and deployed this way, providing great flexibility at reduced costs. JONATHAN SOLOMON, IBM ASPERA: The 2020 Ostrich Racing World Championships can benefit from the cloud in the same way as a major network’s success at a similar event earlier this year. The cloud will allow you to scale to support multiple venues and events simultaneously.
Equipment can be operated remotely, whether in the host country, locally at the FREETV offices, or even from the operator’s home. You can deploy tools and processing resources when needed, with predictable per-event costs, eliminating the need to capitalise hardware, software, services and infrastructure over the long term. FREETV: WHAT ABOUT USING CLOUD FOR PLAYOUT? KARL MEHRING, GRASS VALLEY: Cloud- based playout isn’t the only solution. It’s often appropriate to have orchestration and automation hosted in the cloud with playout ‘nodes’ located at media distribution points for localised insertion. Because content is expensive to transfer over the public internet or wide-area networks, it’s often desirable to architect systems in this way. Alternatively, for internet distribution, everything from content production and storage to the orchestration layer and playout ‘nodes’ can be located in the cloud. MARC RISBY, BOXER SYSTEMS: Select a vendor and cloud partner that you trust. Like outsourcing playout in the past, you need to have confidence that your ‘crown-jewels’ service will be maintained at the highest level. What redundancy do you/they have in place? What SLA terms are provided? How do you trace fault in an outage? The cloud isn’t magic nor a panacea. Plan for the worst!
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