Amazon Web Services has launched AWS Elemental MediaConnect Gateway, a new cloud-connected software application to transmit live video between on-premises multicast networks and AWS. Part of AWS Media Services, the company says the new MediaConnect Gateway improves operations in hybrid environments, providing monitoring, security, and management of video feeds from the AWS Management Console. With MediaConnect Gateway, customers can build end-to-end live video contribution and distribution workflows in AWS at scale, seamlessly integrating into their on-premises infrastructure.

AWS will demo the new service at Booth W1701 in the West Hall of the LVCC during the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 16-19.

Typically, delivery of live-video multicast streams between datacenters and the cloud requires investment in specialized third-party hardware and software or resources to develop a custom solution. These solutions can be costly, complex, and difficult to support, and monitoring requires extensive knowledge and investment in vendor-specific tools. MediaConnect Gateway gives customers the ability to view, monitor, and control live video stream transport in on-premises datacenters directly from the AWS Management Console or by using the MediaConnect API.

“Hybrid use-cases are prominent in live video applications among our customers,” said Brian Stein, GM of AWS Elemental. “MediaConnect Gateway gives customers full control over deploying and monitoring their hybrid live video workflows, saving them valuable time and resources so they can instead focus on their core business.”

MediaConnect Gateway can be used primarily for contribution and distribution of live video. For video contribution workflows, a content provider can originate live linear channels on premises and send these feeds to partners around the globe, using MediaConnect Gateway as a bridge between their multicast, on-premises network infrastructure and the cloud. Each MediaConnect Gateway instance can subscribe to one or more multicast groups, where a group represents either a single channel or multiple channels multiplexed together in a multi-program transport stream (MPTS). Once subscribed, MediaConnect Gateway converts the network traffic to unicast, adds encryption, and sends the video to a MediaConnect flow in the cloud. Then a live streaming application is created using the feed, processing and delivering the video to end viewers using AWS Elemental MediaLive, AWS Elemental MediaPackage, and Amazon CloudFront, for example, or another software application.

For video distribution, customers can use MediaConnect Gateway to build sophisticated networks that span hundreds or even thousands of end points on premises. A broadcaster that sends 24/7 live linear content to hundreds of affiliates can use MediaConnect Gateway to seamlessly bridge their on-premises multicast network at both the source and destination locations. The result is a cloud-managed solution with improved operational agility and decreased cost compared to a satellite-based workflow, the company said.

MediaConnect Gateway runs inside Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) Anywhere, a service that allows customers to manage ECS containers on their servers. To get started, customers install the open-source ECS Agent on their VM or bare metal server. Once ECS Anywhere has been installed, customers can download MediaConnect Gateway as a software container. After that, all management of video feeds is handled in the AWS Management Console or using the MediaConnect API. When an on-premises multicast video feed is selected, the video signal is transported as unicast to the cloud using AWS Elemental MediaConnect, a service that combines the dependability of satellite and fiber-optic transport with the user-friendliness of IP-based networks.

Once in MediaConnect, the video can be sent to other AWS Regions, processed using AWS Media Services or other applications, shared with partners and affiliates, and delivered to other on-premises MediaConnect Gateway locations. And with the integration of MediaConnect Gateway into Amazon CloudWatch, customers can monitor the health of feeds without the need to invest in separate tools.

“AWS understands that so much of what broadcasters do starts and ends on premises,” said Dave Evans, Product VP, M2A CONNECT at M2A Media. “We’ve been using MediaConnect since launch, and now MediaConnect Gateway bridges the gap and makes the cloud even more broadcast-friendly. Our customers can contribute live video to the cloud and distribute their premium live content to thousands of endpoints globally, managing everything including receivers all within M2A CONNECT.”

IBC 2019, 13-17 September, Hall 7 Stand A01: Cinegy, the global leader for broadcast playout software on premise, hybrid and in the cloud, will demonstrate the multiple advantages of the inclusion of Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) as well as the 8K capabilities of its entire product range at IBC 2019.

Cinegy Head of Product Management Lewis Kirkaldie said, “SRT is an extra bit of magic that breaks the restrictive chains of having to establish connectivity by plugging in a cable somewhere. Through SRT, the ability to ensure a signal gets to and from where it needs to be is now both feasible and widely available.

“What that means is that with SRT you can locate content, tools, and services wherever your business needs them, be it in the cloud, on rented virtual machines, on-prem, or at remote data centres.”

Cinegy’s view is that the maturity of SRT opens the door to a sizable range of new applications while vastly simplifying existing ones.

“SRT is a massive liberator,” further explained Kirkaldie. “SRT makes system design so much easier. You can design exactly what you want to deliver, with precisely the results you need, irrespective of inputs, outputs, or location. There is no longer any reason to compromise your business goals due to connectivity or bandwidth limitations.”

SRT is baked in to Cinegy software, including the license, which removes any concerns about whether users have the legal right, proper subscription, or adequate bandwidth to deploy the software.

In the case of 8K, Cinegy has optimised its entire product line to be 8K-ready and deployed in the cloud. The new Cinegy Multiviewer, in addition to being 8K capable, has had its already impressive GPU optimisation further improved. This makes the Multiviewer even more powerful and flexible when paired with Cinegy Air PRO Playout and Cinegy Capture PRO Ingest.

The twin benefits of increased scalability and efficiency in Cinegy Air PRO are equally beneficial features for Cinegy Capture PRO. Using the same hardware, both systems are not only capable of capturing 8K in 10-bit at up to 60, but also four channels of UHD/4K.

Cinegy products can process mixed SD, HD, 4K/UHD, and 8K formats - as well as handle HDR - for capture, playout, monitoring, news, editing, or MAM. All of the products displayed at IBC 2019 are available for immediate deployment.

###

About Cinegy
Cinegy develops software solutions for collaborative workflow encompassing IP, capture, editing and playout services tools, integrated into an active archive for full digital asset management. Either SaaS, virtualizable stacks, cloud or on-premises, Cinegy is COTS using standard IT hardware, and non-proprietary storage technology. Cinegy products are reliable, affordable, scalable, easily deployable and intuitive. Cinegy is truly Software Defined Television. Visit www.cinegy.com for more details.

Cinegy PR Contact:
Jennie Marwick-Evans
Manor Marketing
jennie@manormarketing.tv
+44 (0) 7748 636171

Over the last few months, the narrative elements surrounding the needs, concerns and technology plans of media companies have started to converge into common themes. One very clear message is that media companies are struggling with the constant growth in the number of outlets they are required to deliver content to.

While, on the face of it, this growth is a good thing, a very real issue is that each new outlet requires that some portion—often a very large portion—of their back catalog needs to be repurposed in some way to make it suitable for the outlet in question. More and more of an organization’s technology investment is directed at creating a media supply chain that offers greater flexibility in throughput and efficiencies in processing. This doesn’t always directly refer to pricing—the efficiency may present itself in a reduced time to market in provisioning a new outlet for use. For many companies, though not all, the logical solution is to move the media supply chain up into “the cloud” and make use of the well-understood advantages that such architectures promise.

This migration has already taken place for many organizations, and others are in process. This is particularly true for those companies who obtain most, if not all, of their program masters from external production companies. In these scenarios, the original masters are already located “in the cloud,” so the ingest operations and the master storage are actually already in the cloud. Now they need to have the rest of the content supply chain follow the media.

After spending years looking into the relative pros and cons of several supply chain scenarios, we find that there is one simple truth: for any viable solution, you want to put the processing where the media is. If a company’s source material and delivery destination are in the cloud, then it doesn’t make any sense to process the material anywhere but in the cloud. The scalability of cloud processing, along with the idea of consumption pricing for the infrastructure and processing make this a “no-brainer” decision—especially in the mind of the CFO, for whom consumption pricing and the ability to move the expense over to the op-ex budget are like catnip.

But there is subtlety to be considered here: the cost to download the media back to an on-prem system or even over to some other media company (the so-called “egress charges”) if you need to perform some of your media processing “on the ground” can be substantial. Don’t forget that in general, we’re talking about high bandwidth mezzanine files in many cases, which prohibits the use of significant compression on the material. The cost of transfer back to the facility has to be factored into the overall solution’s cost/benefit equation. Again, to be clear, you need to have the processing where the media is.

It's NOT just about transcoding

While it is true that transcoding/packaging of the media is a substantial part of the process of prepping for a new outlet, it is far from the only issue. In any on-premise workflow, graphics are added/removed/altered, dialog is replaced, legislative advisories are added/removed/replaced, promos are inserted, branding snipes (animated graphic elements) are added, and much more. In many cases, these additions and alterations are performed by an automated “bag and tag” edit function running largely autonomously.

What media companies really need is the ability to have all of the tools that they use on-premise to create a property available to them in the cloud—including the workflow automation engine that ties all of these processes together into an efficient, cohesive whole. Transcoding alone simply does not suffice. For example, more and more outlets require IMF packages as the mechanism of delivery. These are not simply transcoded copies of the original master (which may have been made many years ago), but program segments that require significant processing in order to create the multiple components that make up an IMF deliverable. It’s not just transcoding!

It's also not just an application running on a virtual machine

The simplest approach to “cloudifying” a processing solution for many customers is simply to run up a number of virtual machines on some cloud platform and install instances of the monolithic application that they’ve been using on-prem on those machines. While it is indeed a simple way to get started in a cloud-based solution, it fundamentally disallows several of the most favorable aspects of cloud-based compute—on-the-fly scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing.

Such an approach only offers the same method of scalability as the on-prem solution: purchase of sufficient permanent licenses to cover your greatest throughput needs. That is just not tenable in any real-world scenario. An intelligent processing platform must ideally be based on a microservices architecture, so that the individual actions in any workflow can be scaled through standard cloud management means (of course, the automation engine must be “cloud aware” also for this to be achievable).

Do you still need on-premise media processing?

Many discussions on cloud-based media processing seem to be making the point that the only solution moving forward is a 100 percent cloud-based architecture. This is simply not the case. There are a number of scenarios where cloud-based processing—and particularly processing hosted by a public cloud provider—is not preferable or even feasible. There are data ownership provisos in many source agreements that prevent material from being housed on a public cloud platform. There are also some scenarios in which an on-prem platform can actually be more cost effective than a cloud approach—mainly those where the “run rate” business is well known, and there is less need for “bursts” of processing.

For many media organizations, the solution is to go for a hybrid approach—cover the run-rate business, or a significant portion of it, with on-prem processing—but with a “safety blanket” capability to process in the cloud where it makes most sense (process where the source material is), or when the company has a burst of work which cannot be fulfilled with on-prem processing within some pre-determined time constraint.

Many CFOs find this approach to be attractive too, as it makes pretty strong financial sense. Indeed, this is the approach that other industries have adopted as they’ve made the transition to cloud-based processing. The secret here, though, is to ensure that both on-prem and cloud-based workflows can offer all of the same capabilities with no exceptions and hopefully with the same interface. Once again, it’s not only about transcoding. ALL of the processing steps and options need to be available in both scenarios for this approach to be successful.

Solutions where you want them, when you need them

The choice of where the media supply chain should be located is, as previously stated, largely predicated on the location of the media to be processed. This will naturally vary from company to company—and may actually vary within an individual company based on the details of source masters and the company’s strategic and tactical goals for present and future operations. I believe that the hybrid approach is the one that will make sense to many organizations and I would encourage companies to seek solutions with this level of flexibility as they consider the challenges that lie ahead.

Virtualization technology has already arrived in the broad world of smart business where automation and predictability hold the key to monetization. Industries such as telcos, manufacturing, energy, financial services and retail, among others, successfully adopted the cloud some time ago. However, when you look at the broadcast, media and entertainment sector and its vendors, it’s somewhat behind the curve. As a broadcaster, if you aren’t considering or testing cloud technology at this moment in time when other sectors have already made lucrative gains, then your business model is at a high risk of failure.

Long-established vendors in the world of broadcast, while still having a role in specialist functionality, are now joined—and arguably superseded—by a new influx of service providers. On the one hand, there are cloud companies like AWS, Azure and Google; on the other enterprise business management services like Salesforce and SAP.

MOVING FROM CAPEX TO OPEX

Over the last few years, these companies have broadened their feature sets to the point where the line on which one product finishes and another starts, has blurred beyond recognition. These "new" players are introducing completely new ideas when it comes to managing and delivering content, based on processing, connectivity and storage, while at the same time enabling the move towards new business models.

As one of the first companies in the U.K. M&E space to adopt a ‘cloud-first’ strategy and the first AWS certified M&E partner in the U.K., Support Partners are well versed in utilizing these disruptive technologies. As a company, our goal is to help all of our clients migrate parts or all of their infrastructure to the cloud by 2020.

Making the move from CapEx to OpEx is potentially transformative for the business models of content creators and deliverers. The OpEx model allows a direct link between costs and revenues, dynamically scaling on demand to capture those new opportunities. That, in turn, allows you to understand where profitability lies, and therefore concentrate on the more commercially compelling services.

Cloud technology is inherently agile. You can add new services, whether that is 4K Ultra HD production or machine learning for automated logging, simply by spinning up the appropriate microservices in the cloud.

A software-defined network allows you to move to a business-driven operation. Instead of someone in marketing asking for a channel and someone in engineering saying it will take six months to get it online, executives working in enterprise management software like Salesforce will be able to run a what if? exercise and immediately see how financially and operationally viable a new service would be.

[Read: It’s A Very Cloudy Forecast For 2021]

However, for most organizations it is daunting to make the jump to being cloud first, so where is the sweet spot between on-premises hardware and the cloud? Do you hand everything over to AWS, Azure or Google? Or do you use the cloud for its elasticity, stepping in when your on-premise hardware is at full stretch? And, if the latter, how do you know just how much hardware you should have on site so that it will be running close to capacity most of the time?

UNDERSTANDING SCALE

In a traditional broadcast architecture, the experienced system designer would look at a requirement and have a basic understanding of the scale. An installation might have, say, around 400 device ports, so to be safe the architect would specify a 512 x 512 router. Having set the size, the procurement people could talk to a selection of vendors and get the right deal on the right device. This CapEx model means that you can’t easily scale up without more investment or indeed scale down as and when required, plus you are tied to specific vendors.

In a virtualized environment the scale is equally vital when provisioning a system but it is far less readily understood. How many processor cycles do you need to render a 4K animated title sequence? How much storage do you need to edit a 13-part drama? How much additional processing power can you afford to call on in the cloud before you have to say a process will have to wait—and who makes that decision?

The answer: you need to understand the data. Not the content and its metadata, but the usage data. How much storage are you using and for how long? How many processors do you need, how many are in continual use and how many do you call on when a lot is happening?

Now the chances are you already have some cloud contracts or at least are negotiating at this very moment. The IABM/Devoncroft research published earlier this year said that 85 percent of broadcasters think they will be using the cloud in the next two to three years and 28 percent are already using it.

If you already have a cloud contract, did you get a good deal? It can be hard to tell when file transfers are billed by the gigabyte, processing by the minute, and asset management by the terabyte of storage.

This is a multi-dimensional matrix. The cloud provider will have a set of fees, which may include some hefty surcharges if you go over a certain level. The software provider will also have its own licensing model, which will be based on different parameters such as usage, nodes activated, codecs used etc.

The people providing media-specific software used to sell broadcast hardware. They have had to re-engineer their own businesses from a cash flow position where they received 100% of the value of a sale at the point of acceptance, to one where they are maybe hoping to get a recurring license of 20 percent of the value each year for five years. Their natural instincts are to ensure their return by nudging the license fee up; you may find yourself paying 25% a year, with the expectation that you will still be there five years from now. So, how can this be avoided?

AT A GLANCE

The solution is to have a means of monitoring and evaluating all the data and presenting it on a single pane of glass. If you were making something physical – a car, say – then you would want to be able to see the complete supply chain from component to customer on a single dashboard. Why should it be any different for the manufacture of intellectual property, like a television program or a commercial?

The solution surely lies in an integration between the broadcast and management infrastructures. Platforms like Salesforce have the dashboard functionality: you need to integrate it with the media technology to monitor trends, track usage and provide actionable insights.

Taking this approach builds an accurate, trusted dataset, derived from all available sources. Usage is reconciled between on-premise hardware and software services and cloud providers. That, in turn, gives you a real insight into how your transition to virtualisation and the cloud is performing.

More importantly, it allows you to apply predictive data analytics to do the what ifs? for your future plans. If you know accurately what you need in terms of processing, connectivity and storage today, you are in a strong position to make decisions for the future.

You know if you have a good deal today (or not), and you know what you want to achieve when you renegotiate. Armed with predictive data requirements, you are in a much stronger position to compare bids and costs. You are no longer locked into your current vendor for fear of getting a worse deal. You can use predictive analytics to understand how best to apply automation and machine learning, which microservices to spin up, and determine which spot instances are the best value at any particular time.

There is no doubt that the future for media is all about predictive automated workflows, running on software-defined architectures in virtualised environments, on-premise and in the cloud. Provisioning these systems calls for new skill sets and a new way of thinking.

At Support Partners, we have implemented predictive data analytics for one of the world’s biggest production and broadcast companies, but it is applicable to any media company. If you are not capturing your operational data today, you will not know where you are tomorrow. That will be the difference between commercial stability and the risk of failure.

Harry Grinling is the CEO of Support Partners.

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.