22 Friday 13.09.13 theibcdaily Modularity maximises efficiency
Advances in modularity can increase operational efficiency and reduce costs contends Brick Eksten, president and chief executive officer, Digital Rapids
Maximise efficiency. Reduce costs. Respond quickly to new opportunities and changing trends. These goals have always been fundamental to managing any type of business, but never have they been as important in the media and entertainment industry as they are today. Whether you view the rapid
adoption of multiscreen viewing and the move to IP-based content delivery thus far as revolutionary or evolutionary, it’s clear that we’re still only in the early stages of these shifts. Business models and
consumer viewing habits continue to evolve, while new technologies emerge and technical fragmentation continues even as standardisation efforts progress. HEVC, 4K Ultra-HD, MPEG-DASH and cloud processing are just the latest hot topics in the continuum of change. Every new video-capable
device type, technical standard or business opportunity may force media enterprises to adapt their operations. How do they evolve their businesses to
take on new challenges? And how do they assimilate new technologies without throwing away their investment – not only financial, but also in integration effort, training and more – in what they have already built? Our approach to addressing
all of these considerations starts with a new take on modular software. Of course modularity is far from a new concept, but typical modular software approaches have limited the benefits that could be achieved. ‘Modules’ have often simply
been hidden features within bulky software applications that get turned on and off through licensing. Adding brand new functionality to such deployments typically requires a full upgrade of the application software – a major, disruptive undertaking for deployments of even moderate scale. In other cases, ‘modules’ are
actually discrete applications that are orchestrated to interoperate like software ‘black boxes’. Such solutions add costly processing time as content moves through
multiple stages of the workflow. Maintaining or upgrading the separate applications is also costly and scaling such solutions is difficult, requiring coordination across the entire system with a deep IT understanding of the deployment. Our approach to solving
these problems is a platform we call Kayak. Kayak is designed to overcome these limitations and maximise efficiency by taking modularity to a new level, moving from applications to dynamically built ‘engines’. In Kayak all operational
functions are truly modular ‘components’, including everything from low-level technical functions like compression cores to high- level tools which automate decision-making based on metadata and attributes discovered as content is processed. Using visual design tools with a whiteboarding paradigm, users choose precisely which components are used in their workflows and combine them however they prefer, providing unsurpassed
Sharing knowledge widely
For some years now IBC has collaborated with IET, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, to ensure that the most important and ground- breaking papers reach the widest possible audience. IET, one of the IBC partner organisations, publishes an annual special edition of its journal which includes a number of IBC Technical Papers.
The IET publishes the papers alongside selected relevant articles from the IET’s own
flagship publication, ‘Electronic Letters’. It means that interested businesses, academic institutions and individuals, including IET members, have a single source of the most important thinking on broadcasting and media technology. Now established as an annual publication, it is growing in recognition as a key source of reference information on the state of the art. The IBC contributions are selected by the Technical
Papers Committee, which peer reviews every paper presented at the conference. This includes the winner of this year’s IBC Conference Prize, Mike Knee of Snell. His paper is entitled ‘New-generation scalable motion processing from mobile to 4K and beyond’, and it proposes a clever way of combining algorithms to achieve maximum quality and compression efficiency across a huge range of resolutions. You can find out more about
control over technology costs and deployment. Rather than pre-installing
bulky applications for even simple tasks, Kayak Engines are built on-the-fly using only necessary components as custom workflows are assigned to computing resources on-premises or in the cloud. The functionality of any computing host can change dynamically based on job needs, optimising resource utilisation. And as components
represent discrete technologies they can be updated independently, with the updates automatically deployed upon the components’ next use. The operational costs and impact of software upgrades, maintenance and deployment are minimised. Integrating new technologies
is as easy as adding them to the component catalogue and the user selecting them for their workflows. This enables users to adapt to market changes and tackle new opportunities faster, more easily and with less operational
Opinion
Brick Eksten: ‘A new take on modular software’
disruption. The advanced modularity also helps us as a vendor to bring new or improved capabilities to our customers without being bound to the typical lengthy release cycles of monolithic upgrades. Visitors to our stand at IBC
can see how the efficiencies of this advanced modularity are realised in the Kayak-powered solutions we’re showcasing, including the Digital Rapids Transcode Manager software for file-based media processing workflows and the StreamZ Live ‘EX’ series of live and linear encoders. We look forward to sharing with you how our solutions can help you achieve your goals. 7.F33
A key source of reference information
the work of the IET, its significance as an IBC partner, and buy copies of the
publication at the IBC Partnership Village, stand 8.F51 in the Park Foyer outside Hall 8.
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