feature live news and sport
Many broadcast experts believe that live sports and news programming have driven much of the broadcast production innovation we see today. The demand for high-quality, low latency video delivered at maximum speed, accelerated ongoing advancements in digital workflows enjoyed by many broadcast sectors. Now the sheer volume of content - thanks to the wide array of newer digital outlets - in new and more complex formats, is increasing requirements and straining broadcasters’ network capacities and resources. In short, data has never been so large, complex and challenging to transport, store and manage effectively. Francois Quereuil, director of marketing at Aspera, reports.
The cloud for live sports: from blue-sky to real world
or the past several years, cloud computing has been like a carrot dangling just beyond reach - promising to dramatically improve the transport and management of large amounts of data while streamlining workflows and increasing collaboration but not quite delivering. The virtually unlimited, on-demand increases in transfer, storage, compute and bandwidth that the cloud could enable, plus the clear cost benefits, are undeniable. But the inherent challenges of leveraging the cloud have proven prohibitive. As contribution broadcasting requires
F
The hurdles that
shackled cloud adoption are gone.
highly secure, high-quality and controllable transport and processing, cloud adoption remained a blue-sky notion and a huge leap for broadcasters. But now, an ultra high- speed transport protocol makes use of the cloud a reality, overcoming the significant technical bottlenecks of the past: transfer performance over the WAN, HTTP throughput within remote infrastructures and the size limitations of cloud object stores chief among them. The cloud has finally come of age for professional broadcast. The high-speed transport that provides the backbone for cloud- based digital workflows is based on a
proprietary technology entirely different from conventional, TCP-based file transfer modes such as FTP and HTTP, which don’t offer nearly the same speed or protection over long distances. With this transport technology and integrated cloud- enabled software, it’s possible to move, distribute, synchronise and exchange big data, from any source to any destination. Organisations can transfer files of any size to and from cloud platforms - such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure - at full line speed and independent of distance and network conditions. With digital supply chains now spanning the globe and the complexity associated with transferring ever-larger file sizes over longer distances increasing exponentially, digital media companies, particularly in sports and news, are taking notice.
Use of the cloud also eliminates the risk of upfront IT investments and the often enormous resources required to deploy traditional data centres. Cloud models also enable companies to pay only for the capacity they use, allowing the ability to scale out and back as required. This flexibility is critical to the nature of broadcasters in particular, where bursts of activity and
24 l ibe l november/december 2012 l
www.ibeweb.com
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