Google has spent $30 billion on building out its cloud services and is now pitching it to media, a market which Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft Azure have had largely to themselves to date.
http://www.csimagazine.com/csi/Google-pitches-its-Cloud-services-to-media.php
“For us, cloud is about scale and there is no limit to what media can do,” explained Jeff Kember, Technical Director Media, Office of the CTO, Google Cloud, at IBC. “We have an end to end production workflow from camera raw and debayering through image recognition, editing and on to archive and disaster recovery.”
This is all decentralised. You can shoot in one location and locate editorial in another.
“It provided its cloud rendering service for facility MPC in London and the shooting stage in LA for creation of The Jungle Book. “VFX companies are using Google for simulation and beginning to expand their entire production workflow into the cloud. Ultimatley, digital intermediate colour correction will go this way too. If you have just released a 2K version of a show and need to do a 4K version you can pull this data from the cloud in minutes, perform all the DI, master the HDR and use Google to distribute.”
Google’s end to end cloud platform includes Daydeam VR. Kember said one advantage is being able to upload the footage and have Google stitch it together in just a few hours rather than a week which is normal.
All of this is built on a global network which numbers 100 POPs with more fibre being laid. “We are aggressively increasing our network so video is available, instantly and globally,” he said.
He made much of Google’s ability to apply machine learning to data in the cloud. For example, it has a research application allowing production teams to automatically generate highlights reels from uploaded rushes – potentially shortcutting the bespoke systems of Avid or EVS.
“Our goal is not to replace human editors but to make the process more automated,” said Kember of what he called ‘intelligent clipping’.
The company’s ML capability is powered by TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) which differ from GPUs and CPUs in being about software code written onto hardware. “TPUs are very expensive to make and you can’t go back and modify the code but what you get is an order of magnitude of speed over a GPUs. You get results back really quickly. Broadcast workflows can be tuned to TPUs. No-one else has this performance globally.”
He added that Google would not and does not train its own AI’s on data or content uploaded to its cloud – unless you ask it to. “The data is yours to keep but you can partner with us to improve our machine learning models.”
Perhaps the implication there is that by doing so the Google cloud comes a little cheaper.
Tom Griffiths, Director of Broadcast at ITV explained that the broadcaster’s migration to the cloud is happening but not in any wholesale shift from on-prem workflows.
“We are in the middle of migrating planning and business systems to the cloud,” he said.
“One of the key things for us about cloud is agility. We are not anti-capex that is not real driver – it’s about being able to spin up infrastructure and to simplify our current infrastructure. That means we can deploy software faster. It’s as much about us finding the right way to unpick the applications at the heart of our business and not just replace like for like but find the right way to proceed.”
In terms of on-demand publishing ITV has largely migrated to running in the cloud. Live production for ITV is further away “but we are looking at opportunities there,” he said. “We are looking at how to do traditional live playout. We have no doubt cloud can do it but there are some technical challenges to overcome.”
ITV works with AWS. Griffiths said the cost of operations had reduced. “Adding new syndication partners used to take months. Some deals were before not worth doing because it didn’t match value of the contract. Now it does.”
His advice to broadcasters planning a move to cloud: to think about the content journey and how to avoid multiple trips between on-premises and cloud; to look beyond just hosting to how you can operate differently and to retrain or bring in new engineering skillsets.
“It’s not all possible yet – but it’s just a matter of time,” he said.
Fox is also using cloud to simplify content distribution – again with AWS. “Traditionally we used on-prem solutions with a individual pipeline for each of our syndication partners,” explained Thomas Edwards, VP Engineering & Development. “That’s not scalable for us in terms of infrastructure so what we’re doing is creating a mezzanine asset and package of metadata such as licencing and putting that into AWS from which our syndication partners draw. That has reduced our cost of operation.”
Fox has been a proponent of uncompressed IP for ultra-low latency production but said Thomas “this is not very virtualised or software yet - but that is the goal.”
He pointed out that Fox was already using a ton of cloud apps for internal work. “We use Quip for document collaboration, Slack for chat, Dropbox for file sharing, Zoom for video conferencing and Reach Engine for video content management such as stringers for Fox Sports.”
It is also working with SDVI to orchestrate file based workflows. “It is easy to reach out to cloud and start automating functions like transcode, QC, normalisation and captioning. The old manual processes need to go away.”
It does this today for Nat Geographic and is just about to ramp it up to Fox Networks and FX using Signiant and Aspera to transfer between Fox service centres and a private cloud.
“We’ve had to work with software companies to cloud-enable their software,” Edwards said. “We are saying that we now need these companies to offer a ‘pay as you go’ business model for the amount of time we are using their process. They need to react to this.”
Fox has over 200 affiliates and has to find a way to get this content to digital MPVDs like Sling. It does this by aggregating broadcast affiliate live OTT streams with policy-based content via Harmonic VOS and AWS. “Content from local stations is merged with content from national studios and with contractural restrictions and ad insertion markers.”
Both ITV and Fox executives denied there was any longer a security issue with cloud. Edwards said: “Any cloud provider has got better security than your physical security. There are no dongles or USBs plugging into a drive for a start. You have to be cautious and ensure you have security measures but there’s no need to worry unnecessarily about virtual systems.”
Cost was an interesting issue. Edwards said he felt that bandwidth cost may be negotiable. “Talk to your cloud provider,” he urged. “Cloud providers are used to dealing with enterprise customers but not media companies. They are recognising that the pricing set for enterprise is too high for media and you may be able to work something out.”
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