https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/1230/where-to-locate-transcoding
One of the prevailing technology narratives across the industry is the wholesale transition of processes from dedicated machinery housed on site and managed internally to remotely located servers which offer greater scalability and efficiency. Yet the answer is rarely as simple as transitioning an entire process to the cloud, and nowhere is more apparent than in transcoding/ repurposing. Here, select transcoding vendors share advice with operators on where to place their investment. Broadly speaking they come down on the side of hybrid solutions but there are nuances.
There are number of variables to consider when deciding where to locate transcode farm, such as live vs. file-based workflows, content security requirements, costs of transport links, and how the content will be eventually consumed.
Remi Beaudouin, product marketing director, ATEME: In our view, a hybrid approach is the right architecture. It is clear that off-premises processing will play a key role in the near future as it provides operators with (almost unlimited) capex-free processing resources, on demand. However, to say the entire linear video head-end will migrate right away to the cloud is a different matter. It remains pertinent for operators to keep some on-ground processing, technically and financially speaking. Having said that, even in a hybrid approach, on-premise processing workflow must evolve to provide more flexibility and scalability .
Tom Lattie, VP market management & development, video products, Harmonic: If a customer is working with high-quality studio masters, they may be required to house the assets in a secure location. On the other hand, if the source assets are mezzanine quality, it is more viable to transcode in the cloud as security requirements may be less restrictive and the file sizes will also be smaller, making the economics and time of transferring to the cloud more reasonable.
Furthermore, if you’re hosting the final assets in the cloud, the economics of cloud transcoding become stronger because the transcoding, repurposing, hosting, and final distribution can all be co-located in the cloud, minimizing transfer times and costs. Hybrid models for file transcoding are starting to gain traction, especially when the workflow orchestration is hosted in the cloud, with the processor-intensive transcoding workloads happening on-premises or in the cloud. With orchestration in the cloud, creating new workloads in different hosting environments and geographically different locations is easier as the “brains” are already in the cloud. Hosting transcoding on-premises has two primary benefits for the operator: it addresses asset security concerns, and it can improve the economics. The ability to capitalize and depreciate, over time, compute infrastructure for baseline transcoding workloads can lead to significant cost savings versus a pure OPEX cloud solution.
Live transcoding workflows are trickier to burst, or run in the cloud. Signal acquisition is still very much a brick and mortar proposition, and pumping these streams into a cloud-based operation can be expensive and bandwidth-intensive. For cloud transcoding to make sense, the delivery network must also be cloud-based. If the end point of distribution is across the Internet, then transcoding, packaging, and hosting in the cloud can make sense. If the end point of distribution is across the operator’s private network, then the economics of transferring into the cloud and back down need to be evaluated closely.
Tony Jones, head of technology, TV compression, Ericsson: Even partial outages to the service carry serious consequences for operators, both from a financial perspective and from a reputation perspective. Most broadcast services need 99.995 to 99.999 percent service reliability – especially when their platform is advertising-funded – which data centres are currently not delivering. From a linear perspective, we are still seeing operators following an on-premises and capex model and taking a 24/7 transcoding approach. This gives operators peace of mind when it comes to performance of their service.
On the file-based side however, and also for services that cover one-off events, operators are looking to the cloud for flexibility and lower costs – but often trading off performance by doing so. These operators need to be constantly on their guard for problems with the service, and invest significant energy into planning for the eventuality that their service will go down.
For file-based operators the decision between cloud and on-premises ultimately comes down to the sort of commercial hardware that operators are looking to use. Going down the route of getting a CPU server to run encoding from the cloud, for example, is more flexible, but if it’s used heavily becomes expensive. Consideration also needs to be given to data traffic, since if the content is not processed in the same location where it is stored, then large media files must be moved across networks.
John Riske, director of product marketing for media, Brightcove: Certain operations are better suited to in-house processing – standards conversion, editing, colour management and other features are best handled before encoding for distribution. To the extent that encoding/re-encoding is part of these processes, it can make sense to keep encoding in-house.
However, if multiple renditions of a file are being created and are ultimately destined for some kind of distribution end-point (CDN, broadcast head ends, etc.), the reasons for keeping encoding on premises are decreasing every day. Cloud-based solutions offer many of the same features as on premises solutions, and with rapidly decreasing costs for storage, bandwidth and compute, there’s an attractive ROI to moving more of the workload to the cloud. With video creative workflows still traversing the two alternatives above, you can start to see where a hybrid approach can be useful.
Chris Knowlton, streaming industry evangelist, Wowza Media Systems: Any way you look at it, the decision to go with cloud vs. on-premises vs. hybrid really comes down to one thing: cost. Cloud transcoding allows an operator to get started with any-screen delivery faster, and with minimal capital expense. Over the long run, on-premises might be more cost-effective, assuming you have sufficient space, IT staffing, and a transcoding solution that continues to evolve with market changes through software updates. A hybrid solution provides the most flexibility, allowing fixed on-premises costs for predictable workloads and quick access to additional capacity in the cloud when needed.
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