26 TVBEurope Wrap-Up Delivering the practical
As was widely expected, a great deal of heat and noise at NAB this year was generated by 4K video. At best, though, this has benefits for a small handful of productions that will benefit from the extra resolution in post. Dick Hobbs argues that the real business is being done elsewhere — and that the revolutions may not be so glamorous but are just as fascinating
RICHARD SCOTT of Harris told me, “The big market worldwide is still looking at putting basic services out for minimum cost. What CEOs are talking about is enterprise asset management, monetising assets and revenue generation.” 4K may be the next glamour product (although virtually all the demonstrations I saw looked hideous), but the real emphasis was on adopting technology to help broadcasters survive in a radically new business environment. Both Telestream and Avid made the point that quality counts, with Avid quoting research it commissioned from Ovum suggesting that for 65% of consumers, image and sound quality is the number one factor, and 68% will watch commercials if they are perceived as good quality. Telestream’s research shows a direct correlation between video quality and revenue: people will watch more if it is good quality. And Avid and Harris also made the point that there is a talent crisis in the industry, both for creative and technical staff — and we need to adopt technology to take away the dull and repetitive to allow what talent we can recruit to be most productive.
Mark Pougnet at Front Porch Digital said that finally he is seeing a real shift in broadcast procurement from capital expenditure to operational expenditure. “It is emotional,” he said, “but the business case is compelling.” The company used NAB to launch Lynx, its cloud implementation of content storage management, which it said was currently being piloted by three well-known users, yet to be announced. One of the key applications
for Lynx is seen to be disaster recovery. This is a software as a service offering, a true cloud product, which means that Front Porch Digital is having to enter into tough negotiations with hardware providers themselves over how they fund the data centres on behalf of their clients. Perhaps the biggest
announcement in the cloud was the launch of Sony Media Cloud Services, a new business that has no less a person than Naomi Climer at its head. She made the point that one reason to set it up as a separate business was so it could act like a start-up, attracting the best dynamic design talent and harnessing their enthusiasm.
The challenge for broadcast cloud implementations remains the fact that we are dealing with big data: video involves very large files. Connectivity and acceleration providers Signiant and Aspera launched enhancements, and service provider Aframe continues to innovate. But for many, when they talk about the cloud what they really mean is virtualisation: running software products on an in-house data centre, which might at a stretch be regarded as a ‘private cloud’.
As easy as Dropbox
A company new to me, Epoch is run by some very bright mathematicians. Essentially they use any and all computers in your facility to create a virtual data centre that in turn can be used for virtualisation of processes. The system uses stochastic optimisation to continually reconfigure the network to complete the work faster, reacting virtually instantly to other calls on an individual processor by moving the work elsewhere. The system calculates for speed of delivery, deciding
engineers to tailor their capabilities. The example I was quoted was that if only about 10% of jobs need standards conversion, have one floating licence in a 10 node transcode farm. Graphics specialist Vizrt
talked about Media Grid, which used the NVidia floating licence system to allow up to 16 concurrent users on one private cloud processor. It means the full creative power of Vizrt can be available from a simple client
www.tvbeurope.com May 2013
on Mac, Linux or Windows, or it can automatically create multiple streams from a single process, for instance to change the branding on outputs for different platforms. Adobe is increasingly seen as a partner for professional
Who needs the glamour of 4K when there are two seismic shifts in infrastructure: Axon showing the end of SDI and Quantel with the internet of frames
The service is called Ci
(pronounced “see”), which Sony describes as “a ‘one-cloud’ solution to collect, produce and archive high value content on a global scale.” My understanding is that its core architecture is Amazon Web Services rather than a dedicated cloud.
whether to use few or many processors, or even send it to a cloud service, factoring in the time taken to transfer data and tasks. It is achieved by simply loading a small piece of software on any computer (Mac or PC) then, in a phrase I heard many times at NAB, “it is as easy as Dropbox”. Beta trials start in May, and this looks like one to watch.
Naomi Climer: Sony describes Ci as “a ‘one-cloud’ solution to collect, produce and archive high value content on a global scale”
Snell On Demand was a new launch, with Alchemist On Demand the first product. This takes the long-established frame rate converter and implements it in a scalable form, from a single PC to a large render farm. It was also showing a technology demonstration of playout virtualisation, taking the channel in a box concept and moving it to the corporate data centre. AmberFin offers floating software licences to allow
broadcast systems. Pebble Beach showed a really neat idea for its playout automation: rundowns and coming next graphic sequences automatically created in After Effects derived from the playlist. Because the sequences are rendered in advance then transferred to the playout server, multiple channels need only a single PC and a €50 a month licence for After Effects — remarkable value. EVS was also showing Adobe
integration, this time linking Premiere Pro editing with the EVS IPDirector production management tools. It allows for quick drag and drop transfers from EVS servers to Adobe editing, reducing the number of (relatively expensive) IPDirector workstations needed to create edited packages quickly. Also showing a new alliance with EVS was Forbidden
Content on Avid Interplay networks can now be managed from anywhere
Technologies, allowing its well- established ForScene cloud editing system to access content on EVS networks for remote editing. Luc Doneux of EVS said “We watched with interest as ForScene was used by sports broadcasters in 2012 to enhance their coverage of the major sporting events of the summer. The time has come to allow our clients to benefit from the cost advantages and flexibility of cloud-based workflows.” The third piece of alliance
news from EVS was with Centralparq from Infostrada, a new business growing out of Park Post in the Netherlands, and catching a lot of attention. Centralparq is a new cloud approach to the first stages of asset management and ingest, which is already in use in the UK as well as the Netherlands. As well as EVS, Quantel also announced compatibility with the system, and with the MediaDoQ ingest device and network. On its own booth Quantel
gave a strong emphasis to what it calls “the internet of frames”, and the suggestion that our current move to file-based data structures is a mis-step. This is such an important debate that we will return to it in the next issue of TVBEurope.
Photo: Jake Young
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