August 2013
www.tvbeurope.com
“By the year 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices” — David Price, Ericsson
TVBEurope 13 News & Analysis IBC Technology Booster By George Jarrett
IBC’S BOLD decision to buck the growing fatigue around media- related conferences with a recent two-day Technology Booster aimed at finding new ways to interact with show visitors paid huge dividends, in both the breadth of coverage and debate around two core subject areas. The main IBC conference in
Amsterdam will have to evolve editorially to utilise what was learned in London, and extend the appetite for the experiment to be repeated. The reasoning behind the Technology Booster, and what was learned, was explained by event chairman Professor David Crawford, who said: “We wanted to stage something attractive to people that come to IBC, but are tied up. It grew from there and we decided to hone it a bit more, make it smaller in scope and deeper in technological detail. We wanted it to be interactive, and decided to give it a broader appeal,” he added. “And we have picked from the questions that we need to broaden the appeal of IBC to younger people.”
Floating cloud concepts Providing a view from the top, Bob Harris, CTO at Channel 4, said he expects the offers of
offers out there,” Harris said. These include Amazon’s Elastic
Transcode Service and Microsoft’s Azure platform, which has the advantage of connecting to the top encoder vendors. Harris then said Channel 4 is now moving a lot of its video content outside its firewall – for disc system grunt shortage and firewall capacity reasons; strong DRM is the key factor, and it begins the move to an all-out cloud.
David Crawford takes centre stage: “We wanted [the Technology Booster] to be interactive, and decided to give it a broader appeal”
self-provisioning, pay-as-you-go, and infinite scalability or elasticity. Virtualisation and private clouds do not cut the mustard, so when he talks cloud he means public cloud. After proof of concept
applications in 2008, Channel 4 entered the first European enterprise agreement with Amazon. “In 2011 AWS became our default platform of choice for everything web facing, and we started doing cloud-based analytics,” Harris said. The big thrill was converting
cap/ex to op/ex. When ramping up 50 machines for a show, “the single most important
“The biggest issue for us, because one of the advantages of cloud-based encoding is making it unnecessary to move everything to the cloud, is to use Cloud Bursting,” said Harris. “That means your workflows have got to stand your physical
“When you take away that function of having to build physical platforms, it is amazing how your productivity goes up — by between five and ten times” Bob Harris, C4
thing is having an app that will horizontally scale and horizontally shrink, and this tends towards open source software,” Harris said. “The ability to flex is critically important, and I love the idea of integrating this with my broadcast management systems.”
It takes 15 minutes to fire up 50 machines (lag), and Channel 4’s trust in Amazon sees it of an evening crunching 20 billion rows of log data. “I guess where we are having most fun is moving things like transcoding, so we have been experimenting with lots of
kit and your cloud services. We all know what putting those broadcast workflows together end-to-end is like, so that is going to be a real challenge.” Harris talked about good security that covers both Channel 4 and its content producers’ requirements, and about
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