22 TVBEurope
www.tvbeurope.com July2012
Enabling the cloud for large-scale broadcast workflows with high-speed transport
Bhavik Vyas, director of Cloud Services, Aspera
disaster recovery; and data and content distribution. Aspera can assist with storage and its expertise is in moving, managing, processing and distributing files. “We’re all about getting files from A to B. When it comes to the Cloud invariably you’re far away from where that cloud infrastructure is because it’s all about consolidating the infrastructure, putting your data there. The biggest challenge is getting it in and out. It’s all about these core building blocks.” The Aspera Orchestrator
product allows users to create graphical workflow models for moving and processing files. In addition to Orchestrator’s core workflow engine, there is an open, plug-in architecture to support third-party products along with a lot of other standard processing functions To illustrate the workflow in
“IT’S NOT always cheaper to go to the Cloud,” said Bhavik Vyas, director of Cloud Services, Aspera. “A lot of it is to meet demand. If you use it cleverly you can hopefully get competitive advantage and/or efficiency within your business processes.” The company specialises in
file delivery and movement, with the transport layer being its speciality. Explaining what the Cloud is, Vyas separates it into infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service and software as a service. Concentrating on IaaS,
he focused on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the largest and well known infrastructure as a service. “You do get the ability to simply use what you need when you need it and then turn it off. It’s that access to matching demand and actual consumption when needed that becomes very compelling. That’s what IaaS is trying to do. It’s raw hardware available on demand.” AWS offers a variety of
resources from storage to database services. Amazon’s
storage product is S3, which now holds 762 billion objects, representing a year-over-year growth of 192%. Why is cloud computing so compelling, Vyas asked? He explained that the illusion of infinite computing resources frees you to do what you want
use, Vyas discussed a cloud case study on a major European football tournament that has just ended. Aspera’s fasp technology was used to move files across the WAN. Content came in to the International Broadcast Centre, the system detected the arrival of content and staged the content for processing. The processed HD data was
moved by fasp to Amazon S3 cloud storage. Once the data was in the Cloud, a low-res proxy was transferred to websites for playout and selection. This was then made available to broadcasters to
“Infrastructure as a service is popular because you do get the ability to simply use what you need when you need it and then turn it off Bhavik Vyas, Aspera
when you want to do it providing you can get access to it. The elimination of an upfront commitment allows you to balance your business model and your economics internally. The ability to pay for what you use also becomes very economically viable and attractive. So what can you do with the Cloud? It enables data processing and content creation; storage for archive and
browse, preview and purchase the HD content. “On top of this is a complex CRM to track assets. This is the way we’ve used the Cloud to service the immediate needs of post match highlights or current match highlights to a wide variety of recipients such that they’re not constrained when they actually download it,” he explained. – Melanie Dayasena-Lowe
Integrated playout at Encompass Digital Media
JAMES CROSSLAND, EMEA CTO for Encompass Digital Media, explained that his company provides a global connected playout service for multiple clients. It processes more than 20,000 hours of television every day and is content and format agnostic; delivering live and pre-recorded material to multiple platforms. One of its European sites is in a central London location, an expensive piece of real estate that Encompass was keen to make the most of. That gave it the opportunity to create a new playout infrastructure as part of the process of moving it to another part of the building, but it also set the parameter that the systems should be as compact as possible to minimise the footprint. The same core infrastructure should support linear broadcasting, Video on Demand and OTT, and it
should meet the varying requirements of Encompass’ clients, some of which are mature in that they provide file-based content and rich metadata, while some are less so. Obviously there is the need to support any format and any codec. Wherever possible, rules-based validation should check schedules and content to minimise the human intervention. Crossland and his colleagues defined the requirements for a new playout platform under four broad headings: flexibility — the need to respond quickly to business opportunities, whether that is new channels, new platforms or both; extensibility — the ability to add new functionality, platforms and devices as they appear; maintainability — keeping as much as possible in the box because every integration is a point of failure;
James Crossland, Encompass (left) with Gary Negus, Stephanie Genin and Harold Vermeulen, Grass Valley
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52