TVB
Europe p25
According
to some vendors, cloud playout is good to go today. Yet for the most
part, broadcasters are holding off on investment. It is still early
days for the technology of course and Moore's law will send
performance up and costs down so that realtime, highly reactive
graphics, UHD streams and live components can be played from
virtualised equipment running in datacentres.
MAM,
scheduling, traffic and billing, and automation are already either in
the cloud or cloud ready. Even playout and encoding have been
deployed in datacentre environments as pure software systems. This
implies private cloud solutions rather than public cloud hosted
solutions. But, according to Andrew
Warman, director, P&P strategy and market development, Harmonic,
not
all workflows have been replicated for cloud-type environments.
“Some
will take a considerable amount of time to fully transition,” he
says. “An important question that broadcasters must ask is, “which
of my workflows can readily be implemented in the cloud, and which
are better serviced by a more conventional environment?”
The
business benefits
Based
on discussions with customers, Harmonic finds that broadcasters have
two or three reasons for thinking about a move to cloud type playout.
One
is that they are looking to deploy pure software running on
customer/service provider furnished hardware. This, says Warman, may
go hand in hand with virtualization. Broadcasters save money because
it is either part of the IT budget or is built into the service
contract that runs their channels, leading to CAPEX and OPEX savings.
Another
reason broadcasters are considering the cloud is IP connectivity. The
expectation is that lower cost Ethernet-based solutions equals
savings. “Add to this the continuation of function integration that
really took off with CIAB (channel-in-a-box), and broadcasters need
fewer connections as systems become more integrated in software,”
says Warman.
In
addition, some broadcasters no longer want to be burdened with
vendor-specific hardware and maintenance, or dealing with proprietary
designs. Overall, IT equipment costs less to operate and manage.
Channel
agility is a key benefit of moving to the cloud. Traditional
broadcast workflows are expensive to build, take time to construct,
and can be complex to operate. A cloud-based approach enables agile
channel deployment since the software, licensing models, available
processing power and connectivity are flexible.
Technologies
like Playbox's CloudAir
were designed to include ad hoc services that may only be needed for
an hour or even less. “New services or channels would therefore
genuinely be up and running in little more time than it takes to
exchange emails or make a phone call,” says company president Don
Ash.
“In
terms of a 24/7 channel starting on the cloud playout model, an
efficient telco should be able to get these live in a matter of hours
or even in a few minutes,” he says. “The most significant costs
of running any programme channel then become, as arguably they always
have been, the overheads of originating, acquiring or refining
content and employing whatever administrative and creative people the
organisation needs.”
The
barriers to adoption
Yet
there are a number of barriers to adoption. “Where there is
hardware which is not yet amortized it won't be reasonable by
economic means to move existing playout to cloud,” says Martin
Schröder, MD and founder PACE Media Development. “There will also
be training costs to handle new technologies and some new equipment
will be necessary on customer's site.”
On
the technical side, Schröder says bandwidth from customer premises
to the public internet can be a limiting option. Some new skills will
be necessary, he says, and there will be a need for a new
monitoring/QC infrastructure, “IP-based instead of SDI.”
He
also identifies a general fear of new technologies; security
concerns; concerns regarding stability and of dependency on a cloud
service provider. Perhaps most importantly there is a psychological
barrier to overcome.
Broadcasters
must tear themselves away from what Veset CEO Igor Krol calls the
“very
conservative paradigm of reliability and security” of linear TV.
“When
it comes to linear playout broadcasters are still stuck in their old
ways, and struggle to think outside the existing ASI/SDI, proprietary
hardware and GPUs paradigm,” he contends. “At best, they try to
squeeze new technologies into old packaging. A glaring example of
such thinking is the constant request to provide SDI over the
internet.”
The
biggest barrier is a lack of knowledge at all levels. The list of new
things to know about touches every part of a playout business.
“Questions
include; What resiliency models at the virtual machine level do you
want to deploy? What are the different cost models in the different
clouds? If you upload an extra three day’s worth of content over a
long public holiday will your business be hit with a huge bill? The
considerations are huge, both financially and technically,”
cautions
Karl Mehring, Director
of Playout & Delivery,
SAM.
“It
is also about understanding that the industry is in flux and that you
have to be constantly re-evaluating and testing new solutions coming
to the market,” says Krol. “The fact that you have tested a
so-called cloud solution twelve months ago does not mean that it
“does not work” for you. Actually, it may not have been a cloud
solution at all.”
Mehring
says he knows of content owners who would “jump at the chance” to
put all their playout solutions into the cloud today, if they could
trust that the level of service would be what they want. “The fact
that these businesses have yet to find a solution they can commit to
today should indicate what they believe the state of the industry is
at today,” he advises.
“Not
all vendors are equally capable is a nice way to put it,” suggests
Jan Weigner, MD and co-owner, Cinegy. “This may create customer
skepticism.”
Cinegy
and other vendors which have built a business based on software
running in data centres tend to take issue with competitors which
have remodelled their hardware product into IP.
“At
the moment, the majority of hardware vendors have been marketing
remotely accessed traditional playout hardware servers as 'cloud
playout solutions', in some cases with additional layers of web-based
consoles,” claims
Krol.
“The architecture suggests that you place the manufacturer’s
hardware in a remote data centre and operate playout remotely via the
internet.
“In
reality, such an approach has little to do with cloud philosophy, and
cannot be called a cloud solution,” he says. “Such solutions have
no elasticity because computing resources of such specialised playout
hardware cannot be dynamically managed. Ultimately, users have to
bear the high cost of acquiring and operating traditional hardware.”
Realistic
expectations
Disaster
recovery is the logical, cautious approach for broadcasters (Qatari
broadcaster Al Rayaan and ITV have explored cloud playout DR proof of
concept).
“Once
the realization sets in that you can just launch another couple dozen
channels in a matter of minutes to try, for example, to go
hyper-local, people will do it,” says Weigner. “The
competition among service providers will heat up as theoretically
anyone with a credit card can be one at any moment. Is that a
realistic threat? Probably not. But in reality customer relations,
service quality, trust earned and ultimately price are the deciding
factors.
“The
cost of the actual playout engine – physical or virtual – is only
one factor of the total cost of playing out a channel. But by going
virtual and being IP-based I can 'virtualize' my staff and my
operations centre can be anywhere where I have an internet
connection. Cloud-based playout means that a broadcaster or service
provider can run operations from anywhere on the planet - wherever
the staff is most affordable.”
It
is hard to argue with such a forceful personality as Weigner, and
when it comes to Cinegy technology his claims may be justified. The
fact remains, though, that few primetime channels are likely to be
published from the cloud in the immediate term.
“As
an industry we need to start being completely honest about what is
achievable today,” cautions Mehring. “Some vendors appear to be
raising expectations of what is possible today to unrealistic levels.
Fortunately many customers have now worked this out, but it is a
disruptive influence in the industry at a time of such change. The
truth is we are at the early stages of our industry's
transformation.”
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