MALMO, Sweden—Broadcast microservices specialist nxtedition has enhanced its consolidated production and playout platform with nxt|cloud, a complete deployment of nxtedition running in the public cloud.

Prior to nxt|cloud, playout in nxtedition relied on the switching, layering and real-time rendering capabilities of CasparCG using COTS hardware. However, nxtedition has now developed a fully containerized, Linux version of CasparCG that provides the same playout functions and quality as a scalable, elastic and secure microservice in the cloud, the company said. 

The solution is built entirely in JavaScript, meaning it can take advantage of all web technology developments. Its developers previously were deploy involved with development of CasparCG, the open-source broadcast graphics platform, the company said.

The nxtedition cloud solution provides for ingest and transcode through asset management and archiving to delivery to multiple platforms. It automatically repackages stories for social media. The virtualized architecture allows systems to be built to match individual workflow needs, it said.

Centralizing content enables users to be faster and more productive repurposing content for broadcast, OTT, digital, social, podcasts and radio, it said.

“With nxt|cloud, we can offer an identical experience in the cloud: the same quality, the same functionality, the same user experience, the same responsiveness,” said Adam Leah, creative director at nxtedition. 

“That includes sophisticated added-value features like localization. We can, for example, take in a single live sports feed over SRT and split into, say, eight identical CasparCG channels, but sending each channel a separate commentary audio and graphics feed in different languages—all driven by the timestamped metadata authoring and the layering in nxtedition.”

More information is available on the company’s website.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—Microservices is a rapidly evolving area of the media industry, and SMPTE is using its new Public Committee Draft (Public CD) documents to make the first two candidate standards available to implementers now, for free.

(The documents can be accessed here.) 

Public CDs give media technology suppliers an early look at near-complete standards, as well as an opportunity to provide feedback, which is vital to the quality and utility of the final, approved standard. In addition to accelerating the standards review process, Public CDs enable implementation right now based on the future standard.

Now available for evaluation, the two Public CDs focused on microservices are SMPTE ST 2125 IMF Registration Service API and SMPTE ST 2126 Microservice Status Reporting and Logging. 

ST 2125 provides a standardized way to interact with Interoperable Master Format (IMF) packages, which have revolutionized media versioning and repurposing by enabling far more efficient management of multiple files via metadata. Using ST 2125 offers a mechanism for registering media files you’ve made, finding the media files you need, deleting registration entries that are stable, and updating those that need updating.

In practical terms, this means a media processing device could say to a MAM, “Hey, I've just made this IMF package, and it has these five assets. These five assets have these IDs. And these assets are stored over here.” Or a client might say, “Hey, I need to process some assets. Here are the IDs of the assets I need to process. Where can I go find them?” The possibilities are many, and ST 2125 provides you with a simple and standardized way to do all of this.

The other new microservices standard, ST 2126, specifies a standardized framework for status reporting and logging for media microservices. Reporting and logging are fundamental to enabling multivendor and multiplatform deployments of microservices, and ST 2126 ensures that all of your microservices utilize a common approach to reporting on what worked (and didn’t) when they were asked to perform a task.

SMPTE moved forward with these two Public CDs because they meet two key criteria: they stand to make a significant impact for the industry, and they can become complete standards in a reasonable amount of time. In the case of ST 2125, the focus on IMF makes the standard interesting to pretty much any company involved in file-based workflows. SMPTE also happens to have a great deal of resident expertise on IMF, as it’s a favorite format of SMPTE Standards Vice President Bruce Devlin.

ST 2126 ticks these two boxes as well, but in a totally different way. Just as they did with ST 2125, members of the Open Services Alliance (OSA did the bulk of early work on ST 2126 before formally bringing it to SMPTE). The OSA identified status reporting and logging as a top issue when trying to stitch together microservices from different vendors. Allowing users to bypass challenges associated with managing multiple proprietary reporting methodologies, the ST 2126 standard helps to simplify dramatically the orchestration of the many microservices found within complex media workflows. In short, it ensures all microservices are reporting in a common language.

Like any SMPTE standard, Public CDs incorporate everything needed to implement the standard. They also are held to the same high expectations as other SMPTE standards. What’s different — and so important to their speedy and successful ratification as standards — is that SMPTE takes a relatively brief pause during this process to gather any input that external reviewers and implementers are willing to offer.

Although ST 2125 and ST 2126 already have undergone close scrutiny by both the OSA and SMPTE’s TC-34CS Media Microservices Drafting Group, the goal with the Public CD comment period is to get these standards right prior to publication. From initial contribution by OSA to SMPTE to Public CD publication took only a few months, demonstrating that this model of moving candidate standards along on a shorter timeline can work well. Given the increasing importance of microservices to the industry, SMPTE is working to keep up this brisk pace.

That’s why SMPTE is seeking feedback from the user community right now. Anyone is welcome to download the standards documents — again, they are free — to try them out. This is the best time to comment on any aspect, large or small, of ST 2125 or ST 2126 that should be modified. If changes suggested by implementers help to clarify the documents, correct errors, or otherwise benefit the industry as a whole, they likely will be included in the final draft and incorporated in the published standard.

ST 2125 and ST 2126 stand to play a vital role in enabling effective use of microservices, and OSA is currently working on further standards to address the most pressing challenges in building and orchestrating media workflows built on microservices. Exciting advances are in the works!

If you have questions about downloading, evaluating, or submitting feedback on ST 2125 or ST 2126, contact SMPTE for more information.

Chris Lennon is SMPTE's Standards Director. 

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y.—SMPTE and the Open Services Alliance (OSA) announced publication of two Committee Draft documents aimed at advancing standardization of microservices for media.

The public documents, available as free downloads for an implementer wishing to build initial implementation, include SMPTE ST 2125, which documents a standardized IMF Registration API, and SMPTE ST 2126, which standardizes status reporting and logging for media microservices. They are also available for public review and feedback, the organizations said.

"Work began on this API within the OSA about six months ago. A focused project group agreed on an approach and quickly produced a document to SMPTE, who then continued the rapid pace of getting a draft into the hands of implementers," said Chris Lennon, OSA founder and executive director and CEO of MediAnswers. 

"Utilizing SMPTE's new public Committee Draft (CD) process, the contribution from the OSA underwent a thorough but accelerated review by SMPTE's Media Microservices Drafting Group, reporting to the 34CS Technology Committee, which is focused on media systems, control and services. We expect this to be the first of many opportunities for collaboration," said Lennon.

SMPTE ST 2126 followed a similar path from the OSA through SMPTE. It focuses on the challenge of implementing multivendor, multicloud, microservice-based solutions that lack a standardized, common means to report success or failure of execution. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and European Broadcasting Union (EBU) provided OSA with input.

According to SMPTE, public CD process is lightweight and nimble, allows public comment—not simply comments from the SMPTE standards community—relies on easy-to-follow rules and makes it easier for trade bodies to work with SMPTE.

More information is available on the SMPTE website.

The rapid evolution of the media industry means broadcasters and content producers are striving to deliver more content, rich viewing experiences, stunning images and access across all screens. As a result, we have a situation whereas in some instances, broadcasters’ revenues are growing more slowly than their costs. Against this background, the big question facing all broadcasters today is how to create more first-class content more efficiently.

Timescales to market are also compressing; from conception to launch for new services is now weeks or a few months, compared to the years it would have taken in the past. Services today must also evolve very rapidly to keep pace with their core audience demands and need to be able to spin-down as fast as they are spun up.

On an operational level, a vast amount of content is now being produced, ingested and managed. Entrenched models and traditional broadcast architectures can no longer be relied on to take on the challenges of this new mediascape that requires high levels of scalability and adaptability.

LOOKING BEYOND VIRTUALIZATION

The media industry needs technology and commercial models that can support highly nimble operations and today, vendors must deliver platforms that can be deployed at speed and rapidly evolved. Looking ahead, broadcasters are going to need to be more agile than they’ve ever been, delivering services that can stay ahead of the shifting needs of the consumers.

The move from CAPEX to OPEX and workflows virtualized on commodity hardware are steps in the right direction, giving broadcasters the flexibility to add and pay for additional capability and capacity as needed. 

A cloud-native, or microservices, approach is the next logical evolution to the virtualized software-based approach, enabling broadcasters to make the necessary step change. Microservices separate processes into smaller, more autonomous functions, allowing multiple services to be combined to deliver specific applications in an ultra-agile way.

Not only do microservices add greater degrees of inherent flexibility to existing IT infrastructure, they deliver the inherent nimbleness and flexibility needed to shape successful media businesses for the future. This approach also opens up new ways to build, maintain and operate services and provides the capacity to scale these services—up or down—in a very compressed time frame. 

LIVE HARNESSES THE TRUE POWER OF MICROSERVICES

While new technologies always create a buzz, the challenge for the broadcast industry is not to get sidetracked into replicating old workflows or business models; shoehorning an existing approach into a new paradigm means you miss all the benefits that new technology brings. It’s critical to look at where these technologies can make the biggest impact. For example, while playout is technically the easiest thing to implement in a cloud environment, it’s typically a 24/7 service, running with very high utilization of the underlying infrastructure. This doesn’t make the best use of the nimbleness that microservices deliver. 

Live production—and particularly live sports—is where the power of microservices has the potential to really come into its own. Furthermore, they are willing to pay for this type of content—PWC estimates that over 90% of sports fans subscribe to services for access to live games. 

Rapidly spinning up temporary, subscription services like a pay-per-view event or targeted, seasonal sports packages—all New England Patriots games for instance—fast and cost effectively is hugely valuable to broadcasters. Leveraging microservices, capabilities can be fired up just before a game then be turned off after the final post-game analysis wraps up. In short, you are only paying while the infrastructure is in use.

As the technology matures, we can expect microservices to be central to delivering transitory, live services, where very “bursty” capacity is needed. On a technical level, live is undoubtedly more challenging to do due to the time constraints, but it’s certainly solvable and we’ll see solutions hitting the market this year. 

THE ROLE OF VENDORS

The onus is now on the vendor community to develop applications that use microservices, rather than taking our existing products and reshaping them for the changing market. While broadcasters have a real need for solutions that underpin new business and operational models, our customers tell us they want technology adoption to be largely hidden from them. The applications and operation should be familiar and work as they need to.  

As customers face real-time pressure and need to rapidly change business models, we, as technology providers, need to create technology to facilitate that for them. Just as broadcasters will have to rapidly conceptualize and deliver new services, vendors have to increase innovation velocity, delivering fast iterations of microservices architectures, that help customers to keep running successful, agile businesses.

The internet has really shaken up the broadcast industry, shaping the way consumers access content and throwing down the gauntlet to traditional broadcast models. While this has presented a challenge for the vendor community, at the same time it’s provided the solution. Here at Grass Valley, we can now put our unique intellectual property and expertise in media and live production on internet platforms. Furthermore, we can now leverage technologies that allow us to exploit our intellectual properties in a way that just wasn’t possible before. 

We’re seeing long-held beliefs about what a broadcast facility looks like, or how content is created and delivered, really opening the industry up to new possibilities. Our customers need partners that can understand the shifting dynamic and deliver solutions—regardless of technology—that allow them to adapt and scale at speed.

Neil Maycock is senior vice president, strategic marketing and playout for Grass Valley.

As buzzwords go, “microservices” is big right now, so let’s take a step back to try and understand why, starting with what the term actually means.

A microservice architecture comprises a collection of services where each one is focussed on a single business function, is self-contained and lightweight. Being independent, microservices can be maintained and developed as required without having to re-compile and debug an entire application. However, there is still a debate on how small the business function must be to constitute the service being “micro.” By contrast, traditional “monolithic” software can be a modular application, but packaged and deployed as a single entity, or monolith.

While microservices-based software development can offer clear benefits in many applications, as usual, there are also drawbacks. Simply claiming that a product is microservices-based is meaningless if the benefits this approach delivers are not used for the job at hand. So, we’ve been asking what the relevance is to playout. And the answers are interesting.

It is a fact that microservices can make it easier to scale functionality. Let’s say between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. when there is hardly any activity, you could theoretically have a single microservice managing a system within your facility, and then scale it up to maybe 10 instances to support the peak load later in the day. And it goes without saying that it is easier to scale a small application than a large one that encompasses a lot of functionality. Similarly, if there is a failure with one of those instances, a new one is very easy to spin up.

Scaling requires additional hardware (compute and memory) being available to run the extra instances on, so for an installation with a fixed amount of hardware there could be less benefit. This is where the cloud comes in to provide more flexible compute, allowing the hardware and cost to be reduced during quieter periods and expanded on demand. Of course, you don’t only need extra compute, but there is also a requirement for some intelligence to know when to scale each part of the system. This can mean the complexity of your system increases, and you will need the correct tools to manage this.

It’s easy to see how, for example, a microservices-based MAM system would improve servicing a queue of workflow tasks that fluctuates based on the demand. However, with a playout system you are not generally expecting massive variations in load, and your peak is relatively easy to predict. Let’s not forget that at the heart of your playout solution sits a video processing engine for 24/7 real-time playback, and this is not a small—let alone “micro”—application. And if you’re looking to handle 4K video frames at high data rates, you are likely to see performance issues and increased complexity when splitting each component out into its own process.

Rather than fixating on the latest buzzword, let’s shift the debate to what will really deliver the resilience, efficiency and sustainability you need. For playout this means a system that is centrally monitored and self-healing, with open APIs, modularity and proper versioning of software that is correctly deployed. The system must interface well with third parties, and where required, must incorporate dedicated video processing hardware that delivers focussed functionality with reduced overhead on the underlying host system.

Perhaps a better approach, therefore, is to deploy an architecture that uses the appropriate tools for the specific job in hand. Some of these may be microservices, but where it counts, a modular, or even monolithic, application may be the best approach to deliver the reliability and speed the task demands.

Taking a look into the future, beyond microservices, it would theoretically be possible to deploy a serverless architecture, which would take the granularity down to the level of individual functions and no longer require the broadcaster to manage hardware. Let’s say you wanted to do a playlist import on a cloud-native system, you would pay just to run that one function of that import. That’s a single API call to run a single job, which happens fast and it costs micro-cents. You could even go down as far as paying tiny sums for individual validations of the playlist. Even running thousands of these would be relatively cheap compared to having a box sitting there all the time. The question is, how much variability in cost is desirable? How easy is it to budget and forecast for this? And can you really predict to this level what your usage will be? Food for thought! A word of warning though, you may find yourself locked in to a specific cloud provider as some of the larger public cloud providers have proprietary interfaces for serverless technologies.

While the microservices approach offers some tangible benefits, it’s not a panacea for every challenge in playout. Here at Pebble we would argue that the closer a module is to doing the actual playout, the "bigger" the service should be. Equally, the closer we are to the management and automation logic, the greater the relevance of more lightweight and modular services. In this service-based architecture, all services are appropriately scaled for the task they are responsible for. They are connected by an open API, which supports independent versioning, easy deployment and ultimate flexibility, whether virtual or physical, cloud or on-premise.

It can be easy to get lost in the “nano/micro/macro” debate, but in the end you as the broadcaster need to understand the goals you want to achieve with your system and ensure the vendors you work with can provide a solution that meets these, no matter what system architecture they use.

Stuart Wood is a product owner at Pebble Beach Systems.

AMSTERDAMS–In advance of the 2018 IBC Show starting later this week at the RAI in Amsterdam, Imagine Communications says its Versio microservices-based playout solution has become “the platform of choice for global media companies at every stage of the transition to next-generation technology.” In the last three months alone, Imagine says customers worldwide have used Versio to put more than 100 channels on air.

Combined with the company’s Zenium microservices platform, the Versio playout solution has gone from “pioneering to proven,” according to Steve Reynolds, president of Playout and Networking at Imagine Communications.

“Imagine was a very early advocate for cloud-native and microservices-based innovation, and it took time for the industry to understand and accept this significant technology shift,” he said. “Time and time again, we have shown that no other system provides the flexibility or the time to market advantage of Versio.”

At IBC2018, Imagine will demonstrate a complete Versio-based playout and media workflow platform spanning from ingest, prep and playout to automation, graphics, master control and branding. The company will also showcase various transition scenarios that allow customers to gradually layer in new features and capabilities that the Versio playout engine offers—and migrate from traditional to next-generation playout operations at a pace that works for their operation, whether in a traditional broadcast center, a data center, or private or public cloud.

Over the past year, Imagine says Versio has been deployed by media companies around the world in multiple applications including Atresmedia, a Spanish commercial broadcaster that complemented its existing Versio integrated playout installation with a Versio-based disaster recovery playout center; Jawapostv, an Indonesian news broadcaster that chose Versio for the upgrade of its master control room for HD playout operations; and Dubai’s Abu Dhabi Media, which used Versio as the foundation for a full upgrade of its central technical facility, which currently supports playout of 15 HD channels, but is future-proofed to incorporate IP connectivity.

[Read: IBC2018 Preview: Transforming Theory To Application]

France Télévision used Versio to undertake the first large-scale hybrid SDI/IP playout implementation in the country as part of an upgrade of its master control functionality for France Ô, which provides television services for the nation’s overseas territories. In addition, French operator Médias du Sud chose Versio to support the “VIA” initiative that formed the basis of the first national grouping of local TV stations in France. Médias du SUD/VIA plans to eventually extend to cover 30 stations, all driven from the same central playout data center.

In Thailand, True Visions, a leading cable and satellite operator in the country deployed Versio—in a playout architecture that took just four weeks to set up—to deliver the FIFA World Cup in 4K Ultra HD to its subscribers. The deployment represented what Imagine says is “the first Ultra HD channel in Southeast Asia.”

In the U.S. Sinclair Broadcast Group is using Versio in a fully virtualized public environment for its KidsClick Diginet, using the public cloud to distribute the channel’s children’s programming in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment to affiliates across the country.

“The scalability and customization capabilities that the public cloud approach offers is unlike anything we could do using a traditional, on-premises model,” said Del Parks, CTO, SBG. “And since we’re only delivering this programming for a few hours a day, the flexibility of originating in the public cloud is a far superior alternative to purchasing traditional equipment that would sit idle for many hours at a time.”

Imagine Communications will be in Stand #4.01 at the Amtrium in the RAI.