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42 TVBEurope Cloud for Broadcast


professional media. The cloud is the natural option when trying to move media from the field to the newsroom.” Telestream’s Duval believes


that cloud technology is particularly well-suited to developing new applications for viewers. “Development teams can stand up infrastructure in minutes to develop prototypes, test ideas and deploy rollouts. This saves weeks in project schedules that were previously spent on justifying, requesting, ordering, assembling and installing,” he explains.


Going with the flow Will moving to the cloud require new workflows?


“It is easier to set up with new


workflows in the cloud, because you can benefit from existing services” from cloud and third- party providers, says Schreurs. If you already have workflows you want to stick to, you might be better utilising, or adding to, existing equipment, he says. “Adoption of any new technologies almost certainly offers the potential to identify new efficiencies. Even if a broadcaster has previously worked to optimise its file-based workflows it should re-evaluate the workflows when adopting cloud,” says Maycock. “The dynamics of network performance and processing could substantially change what’s optimal.” “Historically, broadcast


Climer: “The cloud allows our customers to spin up infrastructure immediately, and shut it down when they are done”


creation was a serial process: make your edits and then pass them on to the next person to make their changes. Now we want to have concurrent workflows — to achieve this we need open systems that can communicate,” says Roberts.


“I have discovered in my cloud


projects that every assumption and preconceived notion I have about the availability of resources, the relative performance of computers, components and networks and how those pieces fit together must necessarily be re-evaluated,” says Duval. “Resources like CPUs and GPUs that in other implementations are scarce and fixed, suddenly are freely available and scalable. The


biggest problem is the pure physical size of data. We use a lot more data than you think.”


Where’s the potential? If your CFO’s eyes light up at the thought of saving money using the cloud, he might be blinded to some of the other benefits. “It’s not about incremental


cost savings or financial efficiency, although those are great benefits,” insists Duval.


“The cloud allows your organisation to be distributed and built on talent, not location”


Bill Roberts, Adobe


I/O that we are accustomed to measuring in gigabytes per second is back to megabytes per second. So it’s not that things don’t exist, but their relative size and performance has to be evaluated for each project.” “If you want to leverage it,


you’ve got to approach it holistically and look at the entire thing,” agrees Burton. “The


“Proper application of cloud technology enables organisations to provide services and applications that are either impossible or impossibly expensive to deploy any other way. For example, it can be applied to scaling infrastructure and process on-demand clips for events like the Olympics that require large infrastructure


investment, in far off places, every two years.”


“Cloud solutions shouldn’t


only be selected to save money, though that may well be the driving force behind many decisions,” adds Peto. “No one saves their way to


profitability and growth,” adds Wymbs. “What the cloud can do is lower the barrier to entry for customers embarking on new multiscreen and TV Everywhere services. It eliminates the need for a large up-front capital investment required to start a new project or business initiative.” What Elemental Cloud users, such as the BBC, appreciate most is flexibility. The main BBC One evening news hour splits into 19 separate local broadcasts, and the cloud allows it to spin up transcoding instances just before the news hour ends, lowering the time from live-to-online to about 20 minutes compared to eight to ten hours previously with local transcoders. “It's about eliminating the need (and potential for re-work) for physical media and transport,”


www.tvbeurope.com February 2014


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