SAN FRANCISCO—CNBC’s new Steuart Tower studio in San Francisco may not be the biggest or most expensive studio revamp the network has ever taken on, but what it may lack in scale the 1 Market Studio makes up for in technical innovation, especially when it comes to minimizing latency, and appealing design.

“We launched a show a couple of months ago called ‘Tech Check,’ and being a tech show we felt we really had to have a real, legitimate presence out there [in San Francisco],” says Steve Fastook, senior vice president of operations and engineering at CNBC. 

The business-news cable network chose to expand its existing San Francisco bureau, originally built about a decade ago, transforming a rather simple Flash Studio into an attractive space taking full advantage of its seventh-floor view of the Bay Bridge and an appealing set design by John Casey Production Design. 

Lowering Latency
It’s the exception rather than the rule for a full production crew to run shows from 1 Market Studio. Rather, most of the network’s production assets and production control technology reside in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., at CNBC headquarters, says Fastook. So, reducing latency between the 1 Market Studio location and New Jersey was essential.

CNBC upgraded its bandwidth between the locations from 1Gb/s to 10Gb/s and installed Cisco IP video gateways supporting Hitless Merge and Evertz JPEG 2000 encoders and decoders. “We went from a roundtrip before we did the project of about a second and a half to now a roundtrip of a quarter of a second,” he says.

From a production point of view, the nearly non-existent latency brings a natural feel to the on-camera give and take between contributors. “[With] cross talks, you don’t even know they’re not in the same room. That’s huge for us because it’s natural conversation,” says Fastook. “What we wanted to be able to have was cross talks between anchors in New York, New Jersey and San Francisco.”

However, what happens on screen is only a part of the story. Off camera, the ultra-low latency means operators in Englewood Cliffs can control the three Vinten robotic heads supporting the new 4K-upgradeable Sony box cameras with Canon lenses at 1 Market Studio as if they were in the studio.  

“That’s sort of the theme we’ve been taking. If you’re doing a show and it’s coming from a particular location, you grab the cameras at that location and you can control them like you are there,” he explains. “With the connectivity being so upgraded, that control is fluid.”  

In a similar fashion, the low latency helps to enable CNBC to run audio remotely from Englewood Cliffs. CNBC installed Calrec audio boards and the Calrec RP1 remote-controlled processing engine. 

“If you acquire a microphone in Englewood Cliffs that’s out in the studio, it’s the same as acquiring a microphone in San Francisco. All of the mix-minus and everything else can be assigned and followed,” says Fastook, who notes the approach made it unnecessary to add another audio operator.

“Everything comes back homerun through this RP1. You could look at your board and see four inputs from the studio mics in New Jersey, two from the stock exchange, two from the NASDAQ and three from San Francisco, and it really makes no difference. That really enabled three- and four-party conversations to really be as real as possible.” 

The new studio’s lighting system, like the lighting systems in all CNBC remote locations, is controllable from Englewood Cliffs. Fastook relied on CNBC ENG crew members to design and install the setup, which consists of LED fixtures, including Rosco studio lighting and large Litepanels LED studio lights.

Using LED fixtures was important because Steuart Tower is an office building. “Our ceiling height is a little bit higher than normal office space, but there’s no great height, and the air conditioning is really designed for office space, so the LED lighting was critical,” says Fastook.

While remote operation is integral to the 1 Market Studio workflow, local robotic camera, lighting and audio control are also available when needed, he adds. 

The redesigned space also relies on an electronic shade system on every window. Used throughout the day and prominently featured during “TechCheck,” which premiered in April, the space is subjected to the sun as it traverses the sky. 

“The sun comes up in the corner of the building, and it sets on the other side of the building,” says Fastook, “and we’re on through the whole horizon of the day.” 

Working with Broadcast Blinds, CNBC installed electronic shades on every window—whether they’re fully behind scenery or partially blocked by scenery. As the sun moves, the ND filters used as shades can be dialed in and out depending on the time of day.

COVID And The Studio
Like so many other things in broadcasting and society at large, expanding 1 Market Studio was not immune to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the case of the studio, however, its impact was both positive and negative. 

Typically renovating the small bureau to a 2,500-square-foot remote studio complete with a custom set would have required Fastook and crew to restrict their work to overnights and long weekends, making sure the space was ready to use when the broadcast schedule resumed every day. That start-and-stop approach would have required two months to complete this studio upgrade. However, COVID changed the equation, he says.

“Because of COVID, the bureau had been closed. We were able to go in and do everything we needed to do, and the whole project was completed in over a little less than three weeks, including the set, which took at least a week,” he says.

However, the new studio was not exempt from supply chain problems—particularly chip shortages—that are plaguing the economy during this stage of the pandemic. While Fastook made his completion deadline for the project, the job was “pushed to the limit,” he says.

“It really was a little bit less about the broadcast equipment, and a little a little bit more about the traditional switch gear—mostly Cisco-type stuff—that really got hit by the chip shortage,” says Fastook, who attributes getting the job done on time to being in the queue for equipment “pretty early in the process,” ensuring a place near the front of the line when the crunch began to ease.

Engineering for the studio renovation, which Fastook estimates cost between $150,000 and $200,000, was done by CNBC engineers, and the actual work was completed by an implementation team from NBCU.

While production from the renovated space supports CNBC’s 1080i HD needs today, the three Sony box cameras selected for the studio are 4K-capable, preparing 1 Market Studio for the future.

“We’re getting to the point where the amortization of those cameras may fall into our 4K transition—although I don’t know what that is, we haven’t really decided,” says Fastook. “It’s really more driven by the desire for it to be 4K than the content. This isn’t sports—that’s a whole different thing.”

But as the rest of world adopts 4K, there will come a point where transitioning to 4K may be unavoidable. When that day comes, 1 Market Studio will be ready.

SAN JOSE, Calif.—Like multinational organizations everywhere, Cisco Television started 2020 with one set of goals and expectations in mind, and then woke up to a harsh reality when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Almost overnight, we had to transition from producing major, high-profile, in-person events to an almost completely remote operation. Here’s the rundown on how we’ve accomplished that and the enabling technologies that have come into play.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Nested within the Cisco sales and marketing ecosystem, Cisco Television provides video production, creative services, engineering and connectivity for the company’s internal and external meetings and events. With main studios and control rooms based at Cisco’s main campus in San Jose, Calif., we also operate from four other geolocations: Research Triangle Park, N.C.; Bedfont Lakes, U.K.; Bangalore, India; and Singapore.

Globally, Cisco Television produces about 1,500 broadcasts a year including around 250 external productions—ranging from our Cisco Live tradeshow, Cisco Partner Summit and Impact national sales meeting to product launches, webinars and events such as those for the Cisco STEM program.

Cisco is already well-known for its technologies and product lines enabling collaboration and remote workflows. Two great examples are the Webex video conferencing platform and the TelePresence SX80 product line, which works almost like an extremely low-latency “satellite in a box” for video collaboration. Another important element is our Primestream infrastructure, which includes comprehensive ingest, automated master control playout, and the Xchange media asset management platform.

At our San Jose hub, we operate with 18 record and 16 playback channels in Primestream. The Xchange MAM acts as a “single source of truth” for our entire operation—providing a centralized archive for all content produced by each Cisco region and giving our teams at the other four geolocations immediate access to the assets they need.

Pre-pandemic, Cisco TV was already using these tools to produce around 20% of its shows either as partially or fully remote events, including a mix of on-premises and off-premises presenters. When COVID hit in early March (California was one of the  rst states to go into quarantine), we were therefore well-prepared to transition to an almost 100% remote operation.

THE CURRENT SETUP

Within a week of pivoting to our new COVID reality, we jumped right in with a weekly, 90-minute “COVID Check-in” presented by Cisco executives to employees worldwide. These early presentations were very basic, but as we have continued to build out our remote studios, our shows have become more elaborate, incorporating elements like PowerPoint graphics, lower thirds, and roll-on videos. We’re now able to leverage our TelePresence SX80 units to include multiple presenters on separate outputs of the same box, enabling back-and-forth interaction like banter and Q&A sessions.

We are now operating nine virtual studios and six control rooms that run shows concurrently. The remote setup is powered by the TelePresence SX80s, Blackmagic ATEM live production switchers, and the Primestream master control playout and Xchange MAM based on-premises in San Jose. For a typical show, the full complement of staff—TD, producer, technical manager, Primestream operator, graphics operator and audio engineer—all work and collaborate remotely.

Reaching this capability was relatively easy; it involved making sure the remote Primestream operators could easily access the on-prem control points, providing an easy means for remote editors to perform ProRes editing, and making a minimal capital purchase of additional ATEM systems. As we mentioned, the single source of truth already in place and powered by the Xchange MAM made it easy to expand our remote capabilities as needed.

REMOTE WORKFLOWS FOR THE LONG HAUL

More than six months since the onset of the pandemic, we’ve produced more than 1,000 shows remotely—and we just wrapped the 2020 edition of the Cisco Impact national sales meeting. Over the course of three days, our teams played out more than 180 pieces of content to an audience of 22,000 people.

Impact was a ringing success, but it begs the question: Do we see ourselves staying with mostly remote work ows even after the danger of COVID has passed? In the short term, our company has adopted a shelter-in-place policy until June 2021 and possibly longer. In the longer term, we do see a return to in-person events like Impact and Cisco Live, because there’s no getting around the fact that these events are more effective when people can meet face to face.

One thing is certain: as a video operation, we’ve all learned just how much is possible with remote workflows and how little actually needs to be done on-premises. It’s valuable insight, accelerated and sharpened by a short-term, acute need. Cisco has always been a very video-centric company, with top-level leadership committed to connecting over video. That commitment, coupled with our mature technologies and product offerings for seamless collaboration, means our remote capabilities will continue to grow and evolve into the future.

John Williamson is a senior manager at Cisco TV for the Global Engineering Worldwide Sales and Marketing Team. For more information, visit www.cisco.com.

For more information, visit www.primestream.com. 

SAN JOSE & REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—Cisco has announced a partnership with Qwilt and Digital Alpha (DA) to offer a new caching service that the companies claim will address the growing demand for high resolution convent over IP. The first customer of this “as a service” offering is BT, the U.K.’s leading telecommunications and network provider. Qwilt is a provider of edge cloud and open caching software technology for ISPs and DA is an investment firm specializing in digital infrastructure technology development.  

The new “Open Caching” service is an open architecture developed and endorsed by the Streaming Video Alliance that aggregates the content delivery infrastructure inside service provider networks into a global CDN with APIs for content publishers and is designed to help service providers easily deploy an edge CDN footprint, offering more control over content flows. It also provides more capacity and consistency in content delivery and performance assurance, the companies said. 

The increase in 4K (and soon 8K) content supporting AR/VR applications across multiple devices over wired and wireless connections is driving the demand for more network capacity, with interview video traffic expected to comprise 82% of all (consumer) internet traffic by 2022 (up form 73% in 2017), according to Cisco’s VNI.

The partnership combines Qwilt’s content delivery platform based on Open Caching, with Cisco’s edge compute and networking infrastructure to deliver the solution as-a-service to service providers of all sizes worldwide. BT, in partnership with Qwilt, Cisco and DA, has deployed this solution to add multiple terabits per second of capacity to meet its growing demand in 2020 and beyond. 

More than 50 global service providers, technology vendors and content publishers have already endorsed Open Caching, according to the companies. 

“At BT we connect for good and streaming video has never been more important than in today’s challenging times,” said Neil McRae, chief architect, managing director for Architecture and Technology Strategy at BT. “Our mission at BT is to ensure our customers have the best experience every time and with record levels of streaming we needed to disrupt the status quo. Qwilt’s pioneering open caching platform together with Cisco’s cloud infrastructure gives BT the first 5G MEC capability in the U.K. to deliver premium quality video and on demand services.”

“Streaming video may be the killer app for the internet, but it doesn’t have to KILL the internet,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and GM, Mass Scale Infrastructure Group, Cisco. “With streaming video expected to represent north of 80% of traffic flowing through service provider networks in the coming years, content delivery is the first of potentially many services they can deploy from within to monetize their edge footprint in the 5G era. Marking this milestone together with Qwilt and Digital Alpha to enable edge cloud services for service providers, we can change the economics of the internet for the future, partnering with customers like BT to help them manage video traffic more effectively.” 

As Cisco’s annual global internet traffic reports have shown in recent years, video is the No. 1 driver of explosive usage growth.

And with the emergence of 4K-UltraHD, the trend is only accelerating.

According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, the amount of traffic crossing the global internet will increase by 153% to around 356 exabytes a month by 2022, with video accounting for 82% of traffic.

By 2022, Cisco estimates that nearly two-thirds (62%) of connected flat panel TVs will support 4K. By that time, the far denser data requirements of 4K-UltraHD resolution will account for 2% of global internet traffic.

Of course, traffic growth will also be driven by the proliferation of internet of things. Also by 2022, Cisco predicts that machine-to-machine modules will be located on 51% of global devices, with their connections accounting for 6% of global IP traffic.

Now matter what’s driving the growth, the spike in internet usage is startling. More traffic will cross the internet in 2022, Cisco predicts, than in the entire span of 1984-2016 combined. And in five years, 60% of the world’s population will be using the internet.

“The size and complexity of the internet continues to grow in ways that many could not have imagined. Since we first started the VNI Forecast in 2005, traffic has increased 56-fold, amassing a 36 percent CAGR with more people, devices and applications accessing IP networks,” said Jonathan Davidson, senior VP and general manager, Service Provider Business, Cisco. “Global service providers are focused on transforming their networks to better manage and route traffic, while delivering premium experiences. Our ongoing research helps us gain and share valuable insights into technology and architectural transitions our customers must make to succeed.”

LONDON—Cisco’s Service Provider Video Software Solutions (SPVSS) group has been rebranded Synamedia following the completion of its acquisition by equity investment group Permira.

The new company—which Cisco sold to Permira—holds a global portfolio of 590 patents, encompassing Cisco’s Infinite Video Platform, cloud digital video recording, video processing, video security and client software. Synamedia’s global team provides end-to-end video services to customers spanning advisory, delivery, implementation, training, system integration and customer support.

The company boasts a workforce of thousands located primarily in the US, UK, Israel, India, Belgium, China and Canada.

Customers include 200 pay-TV and media customers includes AT&T, Astro, beIN, Bharti Airtel, Charter, China DTH, Comcast, Cox, Disney, Foxtel, Get, Liberty Global, Oi, OSN, Rogers, Sky, Shaw, Tata Sky, Verizon, Viasat and Vodafone.

“While we are in a golden age of TV, our customers face challenges including the rising cost of content, soaring piracy levels, and the impact of large OTT challengers on the market. As an independent entity focused on this sector, we will help our customers optimize their current infrastructure and capitalize on OTT and IP distribution to expand consumer choice and convenience, secure their income and generate new revenue streams,” said Yves Padrines, CEO of Synamedia.

Industry veteran Dave Longaker has been tapped senior vice president and general manager, Americas. Longaker spent two years as Chief Revenue Officer for Rovi/TiVo, where he played a key role in merging TiVo with Rovi.

Permira Funds advisor Dr Abe Peled is chairman of the company.

After repurchasing Cisco’s Service Provider Video Software Solutions business for $1 billion in May, private equity firm Permira today announced a new name for the company, Synamedia, and said it has plans to introduce its executive team and roll out its strategy at the upcoming IBC show in Amsterdam.

Permira said its deal will close in the first half of Cisco’s 2019 fiscal year (we’re currently in the first quarter). According to the private equity firm, "Syna" means "together" in Greek, “reflecting Synamedia's ambition to bring together broadcast and OTT media services and enable clients to deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

The company will be led by Chairman Abe Peled, who was chief executive of NDS back in 2012, when Cisco acquired it for $5 billion and used it as the foundation to force it s Service Provider Software Solutions business. Yves Padrines, current VP of global service provider EMEA for Cisco, will serve as CEO.

Last month, Yvette Kanouff, the head of Cisco's Service Provider business, announced that she is leaving to start her "third career chapter.”

According to Permira, Synamedia will focus on empowering “telcos, media and pay-TV providers to optimize their current infrastructure and capitalize on OTT distribution to expand consumer choice and convenience, secure their revenue streams, and develop new offerings.”

At IBC, the company will be demoing enhancements to its VideoGuard anti-piracy service, a renewed investment into Evo middleware product, and a cloud DVR solution. Other demos will focus on Multicast Adaptive Big Rate streaming and broadcast-equivalent streaming latency.

"Synamedia enters the market at a time when the TV landscape is being redrawn,” Peled said in a statement. “Building on a 30-year heritage in the pay-TV industry, a market leadership position, and an unrivaled reputation for innovation, we will hit the ground running as a private, independent entity committed to help customers boost engagement and revenues by capitalizing on the myriad opportunities that IP distribution and cloud-based services bring.”

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DENVER—Colorado Public Television has a great history of technology innovation. We’ve produced multiple Emmy Award-winning shows and were one of the first digital TV stations on the air.

This year we decided to expand master control automation, video servers, storage and branding and invited all major vendors in for demonstrations. Aveco stood out dramatically in software features—with many of their most impressive capabilities not found in any other system.

For one, Aveco has equipment-pool facility management that dynamically assigns resources based on need. For example, in scheduled ingest, a video server port is assigned automatically, the route is locked and, when completed, resources return to the pool. In playout, if a primary video server fails, the 1:1 backup goes instantly to air, but now a new backup can automatically be built.

Our senior staff member who approves media needs to go between edit suites. Whenever a promo approval is required, he selects the media and Aveco automatically assigns a Harmonic output, path-find through the router and delivers video to his room’s monitor. Facility management is invaluable in the large national TV networks Aveco runs—but it’s also very helpful for smaller stations.

SOPHISTICATED MAM

Aveco’s Media Asset Management includes workflow rules that reviews the on-air schedule to determine the priority of transcoding in our Rhozet/Harmonic. When a promo or program arrives late, it’s instantly moved to the top of the processing list.

Aveco’s MAM has sophisticated video search, so operators can easily search-and-replace clips. It can automatically output CableLabs VOD specs and streaming media; we’re not using this yet but we can see how easy and inexpensive it is to grow.

Aveco automatically brings in media from the archive to the on-air video server according to on-air playlist schedules. It also implements our policies of where and when to store media, including checking space on storage subsystems; when they reach fullness-thresholds, it automatically begins using the next available system. This intelligent storage management includes purging rules based on media types, future reruns, etc.

There’s almost no limit to how efficient media operations can mature using Aveco’s workflow manager.

We’ve used Harmonic/Omneon video servers for years and we’ve seen how fully Aveco implements every nuance of the Harmonic APIs. We’re very happy to make a major upgrade to the new Harmonic Spectrum X under Aveco control.

In traffic, Aveco was the industry’s first MCR automation to implement BXF 5.0, and, more impressively, it had dynamic traffic interfacing over 20 years ago, long before BXF. Dynamic traffic interfacing makes it easy to handle changes.

The Aveco-traffic interface also allows dynamic “coming up tonight,” “coming up next” promos in real-time on-air through Aveco controlling the Harmonic Spectrum X branding overlays of graphics-video-audio. This greatly reduces editing time in the repetitive tasks of compositing regular promos, letting editors work on higher value content.

Aveco uses QNX, a real-time operating system common in Cisco switches, Boeing aircraft, etc. Software clients are on Windows, Mac and Linux, with all three OS clients operating simultaneously—locally and remotely. QNX has never had even one virus or worm. It’s POSIX-compliant and easily supported and looks like Linux. Access is only by a software client. Having a safe, reliable core will be increasingly important as the industry moves further into IP.

Aveco has a truly remarkable platform; we’re proud to work with them and would welcome any broadcaster to come visit us in Denver. We’d be happy to show you what we determined is the current state-of-the-art in master control automation.

Mark Seewald is a 35-year broadcast technologist at Colorado Public TV (14 years), DirecTV and other companies. Mark can be reached atmseewald@cpt12.org.

For more information, please visitwww.aveco.comor call 818-292-1489.

Editor’s Note: Welcome to Future’s third edition of Need to Know, a series exploring complex topics like blockchain, 5G and artificial intelligence — and how they apply to each industry served by our websites and magazines.

“We keep building new things on old infrastructure that never seems to get fixed.”

Chris Wysopal is a hacker who was quoted in a Washington Post column about the state of internet security (or perhaps we should call it insecurity). In May Wysopal — also known by his hacker name Weld Pond — joined several others in a return visit to Capitol Hill, where 20 years earlier they’d testified in a congressional hearing about the insecurities of software and networks.

Their 1998 appearance helped put the issue of cybersecurity on the national stage. A central part of their 2018 message is that digital security isn’t much better today.

COSTLY AND DANGEROUS

Malicious cyber activity cost the U.S. economy between $57 billion and $109 billion in 2016, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisors. Cyber threats are ever-evolving, and the sophistication of adversaries keeps growing. But, according to the White House report, the private sector may, for any number of reasons, be tempted to underinvest in cybersecurity.

National security officials echo the concern.

“Our daily life, economic vitality and national security depend on a stable, safe and resilient cyberspace,” says the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in explaining why it devotes a large web resource to the topic.

The department this spring released a strategy hoping to help reduce vulnerabilities, build resilience, counter malicious actors and make the ecosystem more secure. It identifies 16 “critical infrastructure” sectors where a loss of networks would have a debilitating effect on the country. But even trying to define the sectors demonstrates how broadly the subject touches every corner of American life; they range from commercial facilities and manufacturing to the communications sector and health care.

Homeland Security took particular note of a growing concern about the threat of “wide-scale or high-consequence events” that could cause harm or disrupt services on which the economy and millions of people depend. “Sophisticated cyber actors and nation-states exploit vulnerabilities to steal information and money and are developing capabilities to disrupt, destroy or threaten the delivery of essential services.”

How might your own business be whacked? A threat can come via denial of service attacks; destruction of data and property; disruption of business, perhaps for ransom; and the theft of your proprietary data, intellectual property and financial and strategic information. Reports of data breaches and cyber attacks are everyday news. Lewis Morgan on the IT Governance Blog curated more than 60 such stories in the month of May and counted the total of breached records that month at more than 17 million — “actually quite low when compared with previous months.”

In 2018, virtually every major and minor business or organization relies on the global, interdependent IT ecosystem. The degree to which leaders take the subject seriously could, in the long term, determine the survival of those enterprises.

To learn what trends businesses should be watching, we turned to several sources approaching the topic from various angles.

THREATS IN BURSTS

In its 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report, Cisco said malware is definitely becoming more vicious and harder to combat. “We now face everything from network-based ransomware worms to devastating wiper malware,” the company stated. “At the same time, adversaries are getting more adept at creating malware that can evade traditional sandboxing.”

While encryption can enhance security and is used by roughly half of global web traffic, Cisco continued, encryption provides bad actors with a powerful tool to hide command-and-control activity. “Those actors then have more time to inflict damage.”

Artificial intelligence may help. “Encryption also reduces visibility. More enterprises are therefore turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence. With these capabilities, they can spot unusual patterns in large volumes of encrypted web traffic. Security teams can then investigate further.”

Cisco made note of several other trends and findings:

• Short, pernicious “burst attacks” are growing in complexity, frequency and duration. “In one study, 42% of the organizations experienced this type of DDoS [distributed denial of service] attack in 2017. In most cases, the recurring bursts lasted only a few minutes.”
• Many new domains are tied to spam campaigns. “Most of the malicious domains we analyzed, about 60%, were associated with spam campaigns,” Cisco reported.
• Security is seen as a key benefit of hosting networks in the cloud. “The use of on-premises and public cloud infrastructure is growing. Security is the most common benefit of hosting networks in the cloud, the security personnel respondents say.”
• One bad insider can be a big threat, and a few rogue users can have a huge impact. “Just 0.5% of users were flagged for suspicious downloads. On average, those suspicious users were each responsible for 5,200 document downloads.”
• It’s not just your IT assets that are at risk. Expect more attacks on operational technology as well as the internet of things. “Thirty-one percent of security professionals said their organizations have already experienced cyber attacks on OT infrastructure.”
• The multivendor environment affects risk. “Nearly half of the security risk that organizations face stems from having multiple security vendors and products.”

IOT RANSOMWARE

Another observer taking stock is Aidan Simister, the global SVP for Lepide Software. Writing in a post on the CSO website, he too predicts artificial intelligence will take a bigger role. But while AI may help the good guys, he notes, hackers too can use it to launch more sophisticated cyber-attacks. Further, new strains of malware can work around “sandbox” defensive techniques, waiting until they are outside the sandbox before executing their malicious code.

Meanwhile, Simister agrees that the “internet of things” could become more of a target for ransomware, with hackers targeting power grids, factory lines, smart cars or home appliances to demand payment. Many businesses, Simister predicted, will not comply with the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation on data protection and privacy (the thing you’ve been getting all those emails about). He predicts some companies will choose to ignore it, accepting the risk.

We’re also likely to see a growing number of companies adopt multi-factor authentication in response to data breaches involving weak, stolen or default passwords.

He expects that more sophisticated security strategies may find wider adoption. These may include the use of “remote browsers”; deception technologies that imitate a company’s critical assets; systems to spot and identify suspicious behavior; better network traffic analysis; and “real-time change auditing solutions” that do things like detect abuses of user privileges or suspicious activity in files and folders.

But Simister too sees the risk of more attacks backed by hostile governments; in response he predicts more efforts to train staff and to develop international sharing of information.

PRIVACY PARADOX

One change in mindset visible in the market is a deemphasis on the idea of “perimeter security.” “You are not safe behind the perimeter, because the perimeter itself no longer exists,” Akamai argues on its website. “Today’s world is cloud- and mobile-driven, and the traditional moat-and-castle approach to enterprise security is no longer applicable for modern business practices.”

With applications hosted in various places and a workforce on the move, the company argues, there is no longer a delineation between inside and outside the network. “As a result, seemingly every week there are new reports about high-profile data breaches and cyberattacks.”

Akamai Chief Technology Officer Charlie Gero argues in favor of what he calls zero trust security architecture. “Companies must evolve to a ‘never trust, always verify’ zero trust model to secure against the wide variety of threats that exist and are constantly evolving,” Akamai states.

Looking at the consumer economy more broadly, cybersecurity is only likely to become more crucial thanks to ongoing developments in areas as diverse as cryptocurrency, interactive smart speakers and mobile payments.

For example, a major trend toward platform personalization — whether it be on Facebook or Spotify, Wave or NextDoor — raises the privacy stakes. Venture capitalist Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins notes the massive amount of personalized data that people have put into such platforms.

That data, she said in remarks at the Code 2018 conference, improves engagement and leads to better experiences for consumers — but it also helps creates what she calls a privacy paradox: “Internet companies are making low-price services better in part from user data. Internet users are increasing their time on internet services based on perceived value. Regulators want to ensure data is not used improperly, and not all regulators think about this in the same way.”

Regulatory considerations are thus a big, uncertain element in this picture.

THE WEAK HUMAN LINK

IT expert Wayne Pecena, who works in the broadcast and education sectors, says security should be an ongoing process. Yet that at many business, unfortunately, it tends to be treated as a one-time, set-it-up-and-forget-it event.

Pecena is assistant director information technology of educational broadcast services at Texas A&M University and director of engineering for KAMU Public Radio and Television; he says cybersecurity never has an end.

“It is a continuous process of monitoring, evaluation, analysis and prevention as the threat landscape is always in a state of change and evolution,” he said. “I would also not lose sight of the past, as ransomware, phishing [and] distributed denial of service will likely continue at an accelerated pace. As cloud services and applications continue to expand, I would also keep the cloud cybercrime landscape or Cybersecurity-as-a-Service on my radar.”

In Pecena’s experience, most organizations do spend plenty of time and money in protecting their IT environment, but often the simplest areas can be overlooked while the focus is on higher-tech matters. “Social engineering remains one of the largest threats to an organization, and the human factor remains a weak link. The internet of things movement brings challenges, as most of these types of devices lack any real internal security capability and instead rely on external protection means.”

He also finds “crypto-mining” a fascinating area of concern as computing resources are hijacked for someone’s bitcoin mining applications. “Not necessarily destructive — like DDoS or ransomware — to an organization, [but] host computing resources can be [affected] such that legitimate application use is impacted. Malicious mining scripts can easily be picked up from a casual website visit, and this opens a new area for antivirus protection software.”

Pecena said for him this recalls the days of desktop computers being unknowingly hijacked to serve music or distribute porn. Those well-meaning hackers who returned to Washington recently hoped to draw attention once again to the issue of digital security. At least one pushed for government to play a larger role. But another said companies also need to take advantage of the tools and knowledge that are already available.

It was Robert Mueller — yes, that one — who is credited with saying back in 2012 that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked and those that will be hacked. Today that wisdom is often updated to read: “There are two types of companies: Those that know they’ve been hacked, and those that don’t know that they’ve been hacked.”

Manage accordingly.

SOURCES AND MORE READING

Derek Hawkins, The Washington Post, “Hackers: Internet Security Threats From 20 Years Ago Persist”

Department of Homeland Security, “Cybersecurity Strategy”

Adam Simister, “7 Cybersecurity Trends to Watch Out for in 2018”

Cisco “2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report”

Mary Meeker, Kleiner Perkins, “Internet Trends 2018

White House Council of Economic Advisors, “The Cost of Malicious Cyber Activity to the U.S. Economy”

Charlie Gero, Akamai, “Moving Beyond Perimeter Security”

MORE RESOURCES

Who can deny the impact of cloud computing over the past five years? Just during 2017 Amazon’s AWS revenue grew 45 percent, a very healthy rate for a 12-year-old business. AWS is not alone; Microsoft Azure revenue grew 98 percent year-over-year in 2017. Why should broadcasters and professional media types care?

The media industry has been digging in, leveraging the cloud’s growth, access, cost, agility and reliability across a wide range of workflows. At one end of the use spectrum is OTT streaming (think Netflix) that is 100 percent cloud dependent, and at the other end live HD event productions (e.g. sports, studio) that minimally use the cloud, public or private.

As access points and related bandwidth to the cloud increase, all media operations will have a cloud component; the advantages are too good to bypass. Is there a crystal ball handy to provide some insights into cloud evolution over the next few years?

The “Cisco Global Cloud Index 2016–2021” (published 1/2018) can help. The Index looks ahead to forecast the state of both the public and private cloud up to 2021.

CLOUD FUTURES—FOUR ASPECTS

Let’s consider four areas that have special bearing on media systems. First, is public cloud-projected utilization. According to the “Index,” “By 2021, 73 percent of cloud workloads and compute instances will be in public cloud data centers, up from 58 percent in 2016 (CAGR of 27.5 percent from 2016 to 2021).”

The remaining 27 percent is divided as 21 percent private and only 6 percent (and fading) traditional data center. Note, a private cloud is built using the design principles of public, although not to the same scale and usually operated by the enterprise that owns it.

Public has gained respect from media operators over the past several years. In my column ‘“Deadliest Catch’ Lands in the Cloud,” I reviewed the move to Amazon’s cloud by Discovery Networks for program ingest and playout of all their U.S. domestic channels. 

This is proof positive that the cloud has been accepted by large, respected media enterprises for prime-time broadcasting. According to John Honeycutt, chief technology officer at Discovery, “Discovery’s business is more dynamic than ever. To distribute content on every screen and launch new and innovative products, the ability to scale our technical operation [in the cloud] is critical.”

A second area of interest is the ongoing move to software as a service (SaaS). When possible, don’t install and maintain software applications (e.g. scheduling, media asset management, creative tools, etc.). Rather, let the SaaS provider do the hard work of providing servers/apps, worldwide availability, scale and performance.

All SaaS apps can be accessed via browsers and allow for pay-as-you-go accounting and painless updates/upgrades. When shopping for new media applications, consider the SaaS model and eschew the installed model if possible. Apps that consume huge amounts of media data (e.g. some creative editing tools) are not SaaS-friendly in 2018. However, it’s easy to imagine nearly all media apps being cloud-centric in the future.

Fig. 1 indicates the SaaS public cloud delivery model will be 73 percent of all “cloud-installed workloads and compute instances” in 2021. Typically, each SaaS app delivery replaces, in some manner, an end-user-installed application (e.g. an EXE installed program on a PC or server). SaaS is making a big dent in how users install and access applications. For media-specific applications, many vendors offer browser-based apps either on-premise and/or cloud-based.

The third area of focus is security. From the “Index,” “Cloud workloads and compute instances are expected to nearly triple (grow 2.7-fold) from 2016 to 2021, whereas traditional data center workloads and compute instances are expected to see a global decline, at a negative 5 percent CAGR from 2016 to 2021.” Also, private cloud growth will be about 2.5x slower than public from 2016 to 2021.

A major reason for the growth of public over private/traditional is the increased confidence of users. Security was a huge obstacle to public cloud adoption just a few years ago. Today, savvy users appreciate the comment from research organization Gartner (2018), “Through 2022, at least 95 percent of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.”

Human error occurs whether using an in-house server or one from the cloud. Bottom line, security is a shared responsibility; part user, part cloud vendor.

The fourth area is cloud services adoption. Increasingly, enterprise systems have communications between an on-premise app/process and cloud processes using APIs. For example, say daily you need to modify an existing promo video (talk show) and update a section with new “appearing guest names.” Of course, a human editor can fire up an Avid or Adobe editor and get it done. With repetitive, templated tasks such as this, a software process could make the edit sans a human editor. How can this be done using the cloud?

There are two aspects to this. One is the client-side program (e.g. Python script) to orchestrate the edit, and the second part is the cloud-side process to do the edit. The cloud-side offers a service API that a simple Python program invokes to do the heavy lifting.

Imagine the sequence. A client-side program receives the “guest names.” It calls the cloud service API to insert the names into the promo video and out pops the new, edited file ready for broadcast.

As an example, consider the editing-services API from OpenShot. OpenShot provides a cloud service API enabling a variety of A/V edits (e.g. resizing, trimming, compositing, audio processing and much more). They offer a one-click launch of an Amazon AWS editing-services instance to kick things off. Try it and learn this facet of cloud services.

For another example see cloud.google.com/video-intelligence, with an API for indexing/searching video content. Media processing API’s are very cool.

FINAL WORDS

There is no stopping media apps and processes migrating to the public cloud. Look for ways to leverage the benefits. At the NAB Show/IBC, ask vendors what they are doing in this area to support the workflows you care about.

Finally, I have been writing Cloudspotter’s Journal for the past 6+ years, from inception. I have enjoyed researching and writing each article. However, it’s time to hang up my spurs as a columnist. Fortunately, longtime friend and fellow TV Technology columnist Karl Paulsen will take over the reins of Cloudspotter’s Journal. Thanks to editors Tom Butts and Terry Scutt for providing me with helpful guidance along the way. 

NEVADA CITY, CA--Alistair Butler has been appointed Chief Sales Officer at Telestream, a provider of live and on-demand file-based media streaming, delivery and management technologies. In this leadership position, Butler is tasked with re-organizing and coordinating sales efforts between the company’s two main business units: Media Production and Workflow and Video Quality Monitoring and Analytics.

According to Telestream CEO Scott Puopolo, the company’s move to a single, unified sales management team will enable its two business units to bring the benefits of its entire portfolio to customers to better improve their business performance.

“As we move into a new era of OTT video distribution, our customers look to Telestream for expertise in previously disparate areas of video production and distribution,” Puopolo said. “Alistair has demonstrated an ability to orchestrate teams with diverse backgrounds and skill sets, which means our customers can expect even more comprehensive support from Telestream in achieving their video delivery and business goals.”

[Read: Telestream Sets New Business Structure, Adds New Execs] 

Prior to joining Telestream, Butler served as head of Cisco Systems’ Service Provider Services business in the Americas, orienting the organization around high growth segments and increasing offshore and portfolio capabilities. Prior to that, he held sales leadership roles at Cisco Systems, where he demonstrated a track record of growth and value creation in competitive global markets. His career began at Motorola in the U.K.

Butler holds an MA in Organizational Change Leadership from Columbia University, and a BSc in Information Technology and Geology from the University of Leicester, UK.

Cisco has confirmed it has sold its Service Provider Video Software Solutions business to global private equity firm Permira Funds.

Permira says it intends to create a new, rebranded company focused on developing and delivering video solutions for the pay-TV industry.

The new company will include Cisco's Infinite Video Platform, cloud digital video recording, video processing, video security, video middleware, and services groups.

Permira Funds advisor Dr Abe Peled will serve as chairman of the company.

[Read: Cisco Goes For Broke Over Pay TV With NDS Takeover]

Cisco will retain the video and media technology related to its core business in networking, multi-cloud, security, data, and collaboration.

According to Peled, the new company will "have the scale, technology innovation, and world-class team to deliver outstanding go-to-market execution, customer engagement, and new end-user experiences."

"Cisco has built a profitable business in the video space with innovations to capitalize on IP distribution and cloud-based services," Peled said. "These combined assets provide a significant new opportunity for the new company."

The transaction is expected to close in Cisco's Q1 2019, subject to any regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

Here’s another example of the blurring boundaries between “enterprise IT” functions and broadcast engineering: Security. Not so long ago, the IT side of the typical TV broadcaster handled Internet-facing security necessities, like email and firewalls, while the engineering side shored up distribution-related security, usually over dedicated links. Those links were plumbed in Internet Protocol (IP) but didn’t traverse the “big Internet,” so they were, in essence, cordoned off.

These days, securing the attack surfaces of broadcast and media providers is necessarily a collaboration between IT and engineering, increasingly buttressed by top-down mandates to do whatever it takes to keep the bad guys off the digital premises. Just ask TV5Monde, in France, which suffered a massive hack in April of 2015 that took down 12 of its 12 channels overnight. Like so many hacks, the bad guys had gained entry a few months earlier, maneuvering in the background to find the weak spots.

“The real-time nature of broadcast television doesn’t lend itself well to today’s time-to-detect metrics,” which can average 100 days, said Michael Korten, cyber security practice leader for Cisco. “Everyone knows the stresses that come from ads not airing, regardless of the reason.” To use a worst-case example, Super Bowl ads cost around $170,000 per second.

Korten’s group, and in particular Cisco’s Talos division –a team of nearly 300 cyber security experts– live for this stuff. They are scheduled to deliver a full readout of the latest trends during the 2018 NAB Show in Las Vegas. This will happen in the Connected Media IP Theater (which is in the South Hall, Upper Level of LVCC) on Monday, April 9, from noon to 1 p.m. They deliberately won’t compile their report until much closer to the date, so as to capture what happens between now and then. But here’s a short list of best practices and general observations they’ll likely cover:

1. You can’t protect what you can’t see –visibility is job No. 1.

 The prevailing wisdom over the last two or so decades was to buy hardware to secure different types of “perimeters” –the so-called “see a problem, buy a box” solution. Each hole gets plugged with a new thumb, which is fine, until you run out of thumbs. Plus, broadcast and media companies typically average 40 to 50 individual security products. But if the firewall can’t “see” the web security product –and so on down the chain– the entirety of the threat surface can’t easily be visualized, let alone pre-emptively protected.

2. Add “time-to-detect” to your vital metrics.

 According to the Talos folks, the average time-to-detect for enterprise companies (meaning beyond the media/broadcast sector) is 100 days. That’s a little over three months! How to get that vital metric down from months to hours is one of the things they’ll explain during the NAB keynote.

3. Know your attack entrances (which are anywhere there are end points).

 E-mail is a threat surface for its potential to disseminate malicious links. Web searches can be a threat surface because of rogue DNS addresses that redirect to unsafe places. Memory sticks, remote and unsecured (non-VPN) network access, cloud handoff points, connected devices, orphaned or neglected websites –all need to be sussed out, continuously.

4. Attacks increase with each new innovation.

 Whether it’s a new cloud platform, mobile offering or device, if it’s new, digital and “on-net” from production to distribution, it’s probably already being deconstructed somewhere for undesired access. Innovation cuts both ways –the intended uses and the unintended consequences. (This is why security people constantly talk about how security needs to be considered from the get-go of any new product or service and not bolted on at the end.)

5. Have a “before, during and after” plan, and check it frequently. 

Improved visibility across all potential threat surfaces is step one; gaining control after a breach is step two. “The first thing people want to know, after a breach, is scope –can we contain it?” said Cisco’s Korten. “The second thing they want to know is: how bad is it? How much damage, what does remediation look like?” That’s why it’s a good idea to know what levers to pull once the alarms have sounded. (Sometimes, it’s a matter of even having levers to pull.) That means a security blueprint with perimeter detection and a “cloud firewall” designed for real-time threat management and automation. Overall mission: Stay ahead of the hack.

The grim reality about broadcast TV and security is this: Attackers have unlimited opportunities to get where they want to go. They’ll keep trying and trying and trying. We’re likely see more evidence of this, even in the short run-up to the 2018 NAB Show. If this is a topic near and dear to your day-to-day, it might make sense to check out the Talos presentation and the rest of its security portfolio while you’re in Vegas.

This is the third in a six-part blog series preceding the 2018 NAB Show. Click here to read more about what broadcasters will be talking about at this year's show. 

About the Author: Leslie Ellis is a respected “technology translator,” known in cable and telecom circles for her award-winning, 20+ year “Translation Please” column in Multichannel News. She took on this Cisco-sponsored pre-NAB series to point out common and frustrating obstacles, for anyone on the sliding transition toward “being more Internet-like.” It is less of a comprehensive representation of available options and more a glimpse into what’s worrisome, on a day-to-day basis for engineers and IT people who work in media and entertainment.

SAN JOSE, CALIF.—NBC Olympics will use Cisco to provide IP video contribution and distribution solutions as well as networking and security solutions for its production of Winter Olympics from PyeongChang, South Korea, the company announced.

Cisco technology will enable an IP and compute environment that meets the demands of live and file-based content production, the company said in a press release. It will also provide data center network security solutions and collaboration solutions to connect remote and onsite production teams.

Some of the Cisco products include: 

• Network routing and switching via the Cisco carrier-class ASR9000 and Cisco Nexus portfolio;
• Wireless and POE-enabled (power over Ethernet) switching infrastructure;
• Virtual Private Network (VPN) services via Cisco ASA firewalls;
• Cisco Digital Content Manager (DCM) for broadcast transport of IP video using Hitless Merge Technology;
• Next-generation Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and robust network security with the Cisco Firepower platform and Stealthwatch solution;
• Cisco collaboration solutions including Cisco Telepresence, Cisco Spark and Spark Board technology

 More information can be found on the Cisco website.

NEWBURY, ENGLAND—In the effort to help make the transition to IP, Snell Advanced Media and Cisco have announced a new collaboration that will create an integrated IP networking system.

This new partnership will see SAM design-in Cisco technology with professional services as part of its IP systems, like integration of Cisco’s Fabric for Media platform. SAM will also include the Cisco Nexus 9000 series switchers and Data Centre Network Manager software-defined networking platform as part of its IP global go-to-market strategy.

SAM’s IP product portfolio includes baseband conversion to/from IP, standards conversion and signal processing, production switchers, live replay and multiviewers.

SAM demonstrated some of its IP solutions with Cisco integrated technology at IBC 2017.

MONTREAL—As part of an ongoing partnership, Grass Valley and Cisco are offering a new product bundle that features Cisco Switches that is available directly from Grass Valley. The Cisco Nexus 9200 and 9300 kits now provide the integrated commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) IP network infrastructure, licenses and support required for all GV IP-enabled products, ensuring compatibility with GV’s IP Broadcast Data Center systems.

When the Cisco IP fabric is combined with GV’s IP-enabled cameras, servers, production switchers and other gear, it provides a tested system for reliable audio, video and ancillary data flows over an IP network. The initial stage of this new agreement allows GV to integrate COTS IP network switches into its gear for creating zero-drop, non-blocking multicast networks for media.

In addition, GV has announced it will be reselling Data Center Network Management, which unifies and automates Cisco Nexus infrastructure for data center management across Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches. The DCNM server provides close control and monitoring of the IP fabric and will handle complex scenarios, while also providing an interface to the GV Convergent control system for overarching transparent control of a hybrid SDI/IP network.

SANTA CLARA & SAN JOSE, CALIF.—You’re telling me what?That the media facility of the future rests on a programmable chip? That an app is my access point into the brain of the facility? And that facility-control can be manipulated and managed through a mobile device?

That reality seems a stretch—especially for those living and working in a thriving, humming engineering backroom with racks of SDI gear stretching from floor to ceiling.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF FUTURE

It’s not impossible to imagine a time when physical facilities built around proprietary hardware and SDI no longer look like a wise long-term investment. And the cost of constantly upgrading a facility with proprietary technology running powerful, bandwidth-demanding systems like HDR and Ultra HD may not be sustainable over the long term.

“This is [in part] driving a migration away from SDI and proprietary hardware toward IP-based technology running on commercial off-the-shelf hardware and increasingly at data centers both on and off premises, also known as the cloud,” says Deborah McAdams, executive editor of TV Technology magazine.

“The promise of this technology is a type of operation that expands and contracts on demand and has pay-as-you-go workflow functions. A type of elastic virtual media facility, if you will,” she says.

While the app-running-a-facility reality is not yet viable, the companies Intel and Cisco have joined forces specifically to court broadcasters on this idea. The goal is to offer a glimpse of what might be possible under the umbrella of virtualized technology.

“We would like to provide all the transport that SDI currently is providing to the industry—from attaching acquisition devices to backhaul, use in studios, use in media production facilities—we’d like to provide all that underlying transport,” says Cisco’s David Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect. “Then we’d also build this out as IP datacenters where it’s a combination of networking, storage and compute.”

A roadmap for broadcasters who are considering the benefits of an IP-based open solution.

The combination of Cisco and Intel computing and networking platforms will meet the strict requirements set by the media and broadcast industry when it comes to processing and delivering video, these companies say.

A Cisco/Intel platform could take advantage of benefits like server volume economics, virtualization technology and scalable cloud platforms to help broadcasters meet the growing demand for more video.

IS IP TRANSITION A NECESSARY EVOLUTION?

TV Technology’s McAdams asks how broadcasters might approach the new age of virtualized video infrastructure. Frankly, McAdams asks, is it necessary?

“It’s absolutely necessary to do in a cost-effective way,” Intel’s Sandra Rivera, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Network Platforms Group, says. “Big iron [fixed-function devices] have done the job for which they were deployed quite effectively. The problem is that so much of that hardware is underutilized; not every single box in that delivery chain is used 100 percent of the time.

“The idea behind network virtualization is that you are actually instantiating a lot of those capabilities in software as virtual machines. When you do that, you’re able to then share those computing networks and storage resources across a broad variety of applications and get much better utilization of that asset,” she says.

Developing this new IP environment will also open up new opportunities for other companies looking to improve media and broadcast workflows in the future, Cisco’s Ward says.

LAS VEGAS—The unofficial ribbon cutting ceremony for Cisco’s new Infinite Video Platform Labs took place at CES 2017 in Las Vegas, but the new community is designed to have a global impact.

IVP Labs looks to define the future of the consumer video experience by allowing participating customers to test new features with users before making them generally available. Customers and end users can provide feedback in the development of these features, as well as the IVP roadmap. IVP Labs will use IVP’s development approach, built-in A-B testing capabilities, and a modular microservice-based architecture.

Cisco has also announced that YES, an Israel-based provider of multichannel television via satellite, as one of the first customers for IVP Labs. Cisco and YES are displaying a feature that delivers personalized user interfaces that was designed and tested through IVP Labs at CES.

Rajeev Raman, senior director of product and strategy, service provider video software, at Cisco says that the IVP Labs is releasing new features about every two weeks and that its aim is “to create a community in which our customers—and their customers—can directly contribute to shape the IVP roadmap and help define the future of video.

Click on the Image to Enlarge

The days are dwindling when a media production/broadcast company can ignore the public cloud for apps, processing and storage. The Cisco Global Cloud Index 2014–2019 predicts that 48 percent of all enterprise workloads will execute in the public cloud in 2019. How can system designers take advantage of this unstoppable trend? This article outlines the basics of the hybrid cloud media system.

First, what is a hybrid cloud? The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the hybrid cloud as follows:

The cloud infrastructure is a composition of two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability (e.g., cloud bursting for load balancing between clouds).

Hybrid clouds permit, say, a local media enterprise to divide up workloads with a public cloud. This way, existing, private, sunk cost, infrastructures can interface with public cloud services as needed. An example is use of the public cloud to archive video files while other media workflow aspects are done privately. Over time, more and more workloads (e.g. apps, transcoding, MAM, ingest, QC) may be moved to the cloud as desired until, in some cases, the local system is minimized. This way a holistic media infrastructure can be built with workloads divvied up across the system in a seamless manner that meets security and performance needs.

LOCAL AND SECURE

This is the beauty of the hybrid approach. Don’t want to store your crown jewels in the public cloud? No problem. Keep them safe and sound locally. Hybrid workflows can be designed to function with just about any local/cloud partitioning of media, processing, storage and control.

Here are some of the benefits of the hybrid cloud approach:

• Start small, scale to cloud according to workflow needs;

• Fewer desktop-installed apps; run Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) apps;

• Faster time to market for new products (business agility);

• Geo-diverse networked operations;

• Support for legacy product integration;

• Support for small, medium and large systems;

• Leverage virtualized cloud services; storage, processing, security, reliability, pay-as-you-go accounting (OpEx not CapEx accounting), and

• Rich APIs for customization as needed.

Even a few of these benefits can be sufficient reason to include the cloud in your workflow. However, for some, using any public cloud services is a “no go” because of security. Is this wise thinking?

There are many aspects to cloud security and multitenancy is near the top of the list. This is where a given user shares cloud resources (compute, storage, networking) with other mostly unknown users.

However, “There’s been no correlation between security failure and the degree of multitenancy,” said Jay Heiser, vice president of research for Gartner, at the Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in June 2016. Gartner predicts that by 2018, increased security will displace cost savings and agility as the primary driver to move to public cloud. In the near future trusted public clouds will become the most secure place to store valuable digital assets. The tide is turning.

EXAMPLE HYBRID CLOUD MEDIA SYSTEM

Fig. 1: The diagram shows a generic hybrid cloud media system. The upper portion illustrates the local/private media center (PMC). The cloud portion (PCMS) contains services for storage, processing and app execution. (Figure concept: Prime Focus Technologies, CLEAR Software Suite. Download the white paper at tinyurl.com/PFT-CLEAR.)

Fig. 1 shows a generic hybrid cloud media system. The upper portion illustrates the local/private media center (PMC). The cloud portion (PCMS) contains services for storage, processing and app execution. There may be several PMCs that “share” the same cloud services and common cloud database for files and metadata. This encourages geo-diverse workflows. Also, the PCMS may, in fact, be a “multicloud” composed of several different public clouds, each offering a specific service that the others do not.

The PMC may be a broadcast operations center with apps, storage and workflow services/processes. Cloud-based software products are provided by traditional AV vendors and others with a cloud services product model (see for example aws.amazon.com/marketplace).

On the left of the figure are the providers of content, both live and file-based. On the right are a myriad of distributors and playout partners. Playout could be implemented at the PMC, of course.

Connectivity between the PMC and the cloud may be via the public internet or a private connection such as Metro Ethernet or a service such as Amazon Direct Connect (aws.amazon.com/directconnect).

Cloud connectivity choices and performance are only improving. Once connectivity is established, it is used to support three main types of communications between the PMC and the PCMS; one for apps, one for file/stream transport and one for services control. Of course there are other communication types such as monitoring, system configuration and provisioning, but these are outside of the scope of this article.

A summary of the three media-related types follows:

• SaaS apps executing in the cloud with a web browser user interface (e.g. aviary.com). The days of desktop-installed apps are fading. Sure there are good reasons for performance heavy apps such as real-time AV editing to be installed, but most media workflow apps can be SaaS-based.

• AV file/stream I/O: In the hybrid model, there will be file and stream transport between the PMC and the PCMS. Some sort of “edge appliance” may assist in security and data acceleration.

• Workflow services: This is key to the success of the hybrid model. Legacy PMC products may be controlled from a cloud controller. For example, PMC files can be checked locally for quality and standards compliance (QC), but control is from cloud orchestration. So legacy PMC systems can be integrated into a hybrid system without rip-and-replace tactic. As legacy is phased out, migrating to a cloud-based equivalent is an option.

Reduced hybrid versions are possible with, say, only some SaaS or only some cloud storage implemented. There are many variations of the hybrid model. This article just scratched the surface of this important area.

To learn more, visit:

• azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services

• www.primefocustechnologies.comwww.deluxemediacloud.comwww.sonymcs.com

•www.ooyala.com/nativ

•www.aframe.com

• www.tedial.com, and others.

There are many broadcasters taking advantage of the hybrid model today, so become familiar with its benefits and tradeoffs.

Al Kovalick is the founder of Media Systems consulting in Silicon Valley. He is the author of “Video Systems in an IT Environment (2nd ed).” He is a frequent speaker at industry events and a SMPTE Fellow. For a complete bio and contact information, visitwww.theAVITbook.com.

Cisco’s Samira Panah explains how Cisco Media Blueprint accelerates the creation and delivery of immersive content, and how Cisco is helping its customers transform their infrastructure and applications.

NILES, ILL.—In an effort to be able to utilize more of the Internet of Everything, Shure Incorporated has announced that it has joined the Cisco Solution Partner Program. As a member, Shure can now unite with Cisco to deliver integrated systems to joint customers that capture value in the IoE.

Microflex Wireless

Specifically for Shure customers, this will allow them to integrate the Microflex Wireless microphone into the Cisco infrastructure. The Microflex and Cisco systems work in small conference rooms, mobile carts, divisible space and multipurpose room types.

As part of the Solution Partner program, Shure provides a complementary product offering and has collaborated with Cisco to meet the needs of joint customers.

Shure is a provider of microphone and audio electronics based in Niles, Ill.

PARISAND SAN JOSE, CALIF.—After years of wrangling with investors about the future of its set top business, Cisco has announced that it is selling the division to Technicolor for $600 million in stock and cash. The deal will make Paris-based Technicolor one of the world’s largest providers of set-top boxes (also referred to as “gateways” or “customer premises equipment”), with a market share of 15 percent.

Under the terms of the agreement, upon the closing of the transaction, Cisco will receive approximately €413 million ($450 million) in cash and approximately €137 million ($150 million) in newly issued Technicolor shares, subject to certain adjustments provided for in the agreement. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year or by the first quarter of 2016.

With this acquisition, Technicolor will be shipping more than 60 million devices annually, with an installed base of 290 million set-top boxes and 185 million gateways in more than 100 countries. It is expected to generate €3 billion (approx. $3.3 billion) of pro-forma revenues in 2014, doubling Technicolor’s revenues in the Connected Home segment. Technicolor and Cisco will form a “strategic partnership” to develop and deliver new devices that will extend the two company’s platforms into additional communications devices based on IoT (Internet of Things) technology.

“The strategic relevance of video to every consumer, business, city and country around the world is only growing, and the market is moving rapidly," said John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco. “This is the right time and we have the right company in Technicolor to drive the future of the CPE business to deliver what our customers and partners need, today and into the future. At Cisco, we are prioritizing our investments to deliver on our strategy of video in the cloud, and will partner with Technicolor to position the CPE business and employees for future success.”

Technicolor’s acquisition is the latest move in an industry that has seen new entrants come and go in recent years. The market has experienced a decrease in set-top box shipments amid growing interest in cord cutting and OTT services such as Apple TV and Roku, as well as a decline in pay-TV subscriptions worldwide. Ten years ago, Cisco entered the business with the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta, but in recent years, investors and others have complained that the division was not a good fit with Cisco's core business. Three years ago, Google acquired Motorola’s set-top box business after buying Motorola Mobility Holdings. Shortly thereafter, it sold off the STB division to ARRIS Group for $2.35 billion. In May, ARRIS Group acquired European set-top box maker Pace for $2.1 billion, making it the largest provider of pay-TV boxes in the world.