For broadcasters and streamers, a migration to the cloud is no longer a simple technical upgrade. The era of merely replicating on-premise infrastructure in a virtual environment — the so-called lift and shift — is over.

The most successful organizations are embracing the journey as a fundamental operational and creative transformation, requiring a phased approach that addresses architectural resilience, cultural change and the accelerated adoption of new technologies like AI.

The initial hurdle for many is realizing that the journey to the cloud is less about IT infrastructure and more about people.

“Cloud migration isn’t just a technical decision. It’s a creative and operational one,” Sami Aziz, executive producer and founder of Pale Blue Originals and former head of live broadcasts at NASA, said.

“The organizations that navigate the move to cloud best treat it like a production: a phased approach, very clear communication, investment in training and intentional standardization across tools.”

Any move to the cloud comes with challenges, including managing real-time media workflows that demand low latency and high reliability.

“To tackle this, it’s important to ensure workflows are consistent to reduce training time and use real-time monitoring tools to keep an eye on network and media performance,” said Bryan Bedford, director of consumer industries and business solutions at Cisco Systems.

“Automation and orchestration can simplify operations and help scale efficiently. Plus, collaborating with vendors and adopting open standards ensures everything works well together.”

Reliability Concerns

Reliability, especially for real-time media workflows that demand low latency, remains a constant challenge. Organizations must design their systems to survive multiple problems, from public internet performance issues to data center and region outages.

Mike Pilone, enterprise architect at National Public Radio, suggested that any system deployed in the cloud has to “utilize multiple regions to ensure they can survive an interruption. Using multiple cloud providers can give you an additional layer of availability as well as flexibility if a provider is no longer attractive due to service or pricing changes.”

Content protection and ownership in a cloud-first world are also new challenges facing content owners, especially with the need to protect their assets and set clear parameters in case a platform goes down.

“Most broadcasters don’t ask these questions until something goes wrong,” Aziz said. “Redundancy and contracts with clear data ownership language are two critical starting points. Security should also be treated as an ongoing operational priority, not just a one-time setup. The same care you would apply to protecting a finished master should apply to every stage of your cloud pipeline.”

The growth of AI is also linked to the move beyond a basic cloud deployment. Most AI tools, such as automated captioning, content tagging and quality control, are cloud-based. AI models are resource-intensive operations that may only be practical in a shared computing environment such as the cloud.

“As we see more AI adoption in various use cases, we can expect to see greater use of the cloud to provide the core models and compute,” said Jon Cyphers, senior manager of product and support, distribution at NPR.

AI is transforming how broadcasters operate in the cloud, Bedford agreed, helping to automate and optimize media production and delivery, making workflows more efficient and reducing manual errors.

“Combining AI with cloud and edge computing opens up exciting possibilities like personalized content delivery and intelligent network orchestration,” he said.

“This integration helps broadcasters stay competitive by enhancing efficiency and creating new ways to engage audiences.”

According to Aziz, organizations that have already started migrating to the cloud will be able to adopt and adapt to AI incrementally, with human judgment still a large part of the workflow.

“Organizations still anchored to legacy systems will have a harder time making the leap all at once,” he said. “We’re all watching how quickly AI is evolving. The honest truth is, it’s moving faster than any of us can set editorial and ethical standards, and that’s a conversation our entire industry needs to be having.”

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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.

When I was asked to review what had happened in television media over the past decade, the breadth and depth of changes in this industry reminded me of the changes I saw in my daughter as she moved from an adorable, wide-eyed 10-year- old to a more sophisticated young woman attending college and plotting out the course of her life. This analogy is further enhanced as I spend time with my 14-year-old grandson and try to comprehend the tumultuous times and “interesting” choices he makes as he navigates through adolescence. So let me welcome you to the end of the adolescent years of the first century of 2000 millennium. But where to start?

DIGITAL TELEVISION

While digital OTA technically began in the first decade of this century in the United States and a few other countries, it is really in this decade that we have seen terrestrial digital television become the primary standard and analog television service cease operation. The conversion to digital has enabled some very obvious benefits when it comes to the quality and quantity of services offered. Widescreen HD has become the baseline standard for content delivered to home receivers with pristine quality. Multicasts abound as even at my own Iowa Public Television we broadcast four independent program streams, two in high definition and two in standard definition, all with surround sound enabled, descriptive audio and closed captioning. I would venture the majority of OTA television platforms are now multicasts offering as wide a variety of content choices for over-the-air consumers as they may find in the basic subscription of the available MVPD’s.

But digital is not without its more subtle challenges. There are those who viewed the transition from analog to digital as a journey from one location to another location. However, digital was never a destination on a map but a continuum whose ultimate end is still beyond the perceivable horizon. I think the recognition of this fact by everyone involved in this industry is crucial because we have started on the path and we are accelerating. Case in point—NEXTGEN TV.

In 2009 as we joyfully shut off our aging analog transmitters, some here at Iowa Public Television were approaching 30 years old—how many of us were thinking that in 10 years we’d be contemplating shutting off our 15-year-old digital television transmitters? Not to mention convincing the entire viewing population to purchase new televisions because their “old sets” can’t receive the new OTA services. I’m not a big fan of quoting Moore’s Law because I believe the under-lying principle is an unsustainable growth pattern. However, I do believe there are corollaries that should be added if we are going to use it. One of these corollaries is that nothing digital is ever finished.

INFINITE CHANNEL UNIVERSE

While the internet certainly isn’t a product of the last decade, some of what it has enabled is. The internet has transitioned from an optional service to a utility, not unlike power and water. Technology has increased the speed and capacity of internet connectivity, both wired and wireless to enable a plethora of new over-the-top, streaming and on-demand services to be added to the over-the-air and MVPD subscription-based services available. The 500 channel universe that John Malone envisioned in the 1990s has morphed into an infinite selection.

Let’s not overlook another change, probably the most significant one of all: Mobility! I started my career as talent working in radio and back then we knew that the audience was mobile. I was never a good enough disc jockey to land one of the coveted drive time slots on the air but we knew that the vast majority of our audience was listening to us while they were on the go in their cars or laying on the beach on the weekends. The audience was taking the receiver with them and with an audio service it was pretty easy. Video services obviously presented a real challenge since one of the traditional driving forces in consumer television sales is increasing screen size and that the belief that the audience will opt to wait and watch content when they have access to the larger fixed screen.

In many cases however convenience trumps quality and just as people will skip going to see a movie in a theater and wait for it to come out on Netflix, they will likewise watch content on their smartphones while riding and sometimes even driving rather than wait to get home. The industry as a whole now has to come to grips with creating content that will be, not may be consumed on whatever device is most convenient for the audience. In my opinion, this nomadic consumption model is probably one of the most significant changes in our industry—not only bringing challenges to creating content but also new competition as wireless providers evolved, bringing 4G to market in the early part of this decade and the promise of 5G in the next decade.

COMMODITY CONTENT

Looking internally at the industry, the angst of the adolescence analogy still holds up as we adjust our business models, workflows and long-range plans to create content for audiences that have little knowledge or loyalty to the scheduled appointment, channel-based infrastructure of the past. An important concept to grasp is that the vast majority of consumption of preproduced content is still basically streaming in real time. What has fundamentally changed is that the scheduling of the stream has migrated from the content distributor to the content consumer.

Add to this environment the challenge of the ease of distribution and the growth of user-generated content. We saw this in its infancy when shows that took funny, cute and/or embarrassing home movies from VHS tapes and created hit television programs watched by mass audiences. Commoditized technology now allows anyone to purchase a 4K camera for under $100. While there are still “hit” shows based on user generated content easily found with a Google search, there are actually talented story tellers creating compelling content and making it available for free or by donation. This commoditization of the very content being created presents a whole raft of trials for the industry.

My friend and colleague Fred Baumgartner, director of NextGen TV Implication at ONEMedia once suggested I read the book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen. It is a book I have actually read a few times because I want to be reminded that my mindset needs to be open to all possibilities.

One of the fundamental takeaways from the book is that when dealing with disruptive technologies, you cannot use the same metrics for success that are used to measure the success of the existing technology. The proof of that in our industry is apparent when you look at who is driving the market and who is struggling to survive. Companies that were barely blips on the radar of content creation and distribution at the beginning of this decade like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (FAANG) are now the big dogs and the long established leaders are consolidating to try and stay relevant.

VIRTUALLY EVERYWHERE

Digital’s entrance into the world of television began decades ago with the first time-base correctors, character generators and still store that allowed analog tape to replace film chains, paper graphics superimposed over video and 35mm slide projectors. Analog tape became digital tape, character generators became graphic systems and still stores became clip stores.

So the transition was from proprietary, on-premise analog hardware running no software to proprietary, on-premise digital hardware running proprietary software to commodity off-the-shelf (COTS), on-premise digital hardware running proprietary software (exhale). They still require the content creators to make a significant investment in hardware that has a significantly shorter useful life and software that is never finished and undergoing constant updates and improvements. Improvements that while increasing the capabilities of the system are simultaneously accelerating the end of life of the very systems they run on.

Enter the cloud and virtualization. The cloud is basically remote hardware and virtualization is running software on that remote hardware. Initially the low hanging fruit in virtualization was storage. Who didn’t love the idea of having their content available to them from anywhere they were at any time they want as long as they had an internet connection?

Initially concerns about security moderated the charge forward including some well publicized hacks at the major film studios. However, we are currently seeing some significant improvements is securing access and making the idea of more permanent cloud storage pick up speed.

At IBC, MovieLabs discussed their 10- year vision for the future of production, post production and creative technologies. One of the key elements is that their pristine content is in the cloud and the applications and software they use work on the content in the virtualized space. So clearly some of the largest creators of content are committed to the concept of virtualized workflows.

My colleague Chris Lennon, CEO of MediAnswers has been talking about microservices for awhile. Microservices for me is somewhat reminiscent of my early days writing programs where the computers had limited memory and the largest program you could execute was 64 kilobits. Pathetically small by modern standards, it required us to write code efficiently to fit the program into the space available and we also had to learn to modularize our programs to allow for seamlessly running a module and then using the results to execute the next module and so on.

This is how complex programs were designed. The commoditization of memory allowed for programs to grow in size so that they were a single large complex of code rather than separate modules. A microservice architecture harkens us back to the original modular programming and therefore allows some modules to run on user equipment and other modules to run on virtualized equipment.

While this is a complex arrangement, if properly managed and executed it brings some of the most astounding and compelling tools into the hands of anyone who wants to use them in a “pay by the drink” arrangement. Chris and other colleagues at SMPTE are in the process of putting together a working group to develop the standards and recommended practices for the development and application of microservices.

THE ENEMY OF GOOD

One of the other key concepts that I picked up for “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is that within a business there is often the push to develop the quality of the product or service far past the expectations and pocketbooks of the end users.

In some ways I think we are seeing this in the home television display marketplace where 4K and 8K television displays are being marketed as the next big thing. I had a conversation with another friend and colleague about this, discussing the shift in what content creators were looking for and what manufacturers were working on, with John Ive, director of Strategic Insight for the International Association of Broadcast Manufacturers.

“With technology I’m noticing that content image quality is maturing with small incremental improvements because we’ve reached the limits of perception,” he said. “So now more money is spent on the management of content and the business processes with image quality and content increasingly taken for granted.”

To an engineer or scientist who may believe that every improvement is worth the resource investment, this may sound a little like heresy but in the real world “good enough” is a valid metric that determination is made by the end user. The technologies needed to create and distribute content are mature and while they will improve and become even more affordable, that simply means that the sea of content will grow.

To be successful will require a focus on making content discoverable and available and this is why as the adolescent decade of this century comes to an end we are seeing a focus on business processes and content management.

So let’s raise a glass to a decade of change and upheaval. I hope that in 2029, I am asked and still capable of writing another decade in review. I wonder if I’ll even be able to recognize the business.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

The phrase “the future is now” can be no more reflective than when you consider the merging of the cloud with IP and virtualization. This Cloudspotter’s Journal looks at changes that are reachable and already on the horizon. The merging of IP (in various flavors) with virtualization, and their machines, are creating a new environment that yields suitability for cloud production, continuity playout or consolidation of operational resources.

With the continuing maturity of the latest IP standards for high bit rate—professional media on a managed network—comes the question “Could this be applicable to ‘the cloud’?” If so, just how would you sandwich 1.5 to 12 gigabits per second onto a public highway in an efficient and productive way? Today, this is likely an unsubstantiated perception; yet, there is certainly an assumption given that everything else is headed in that direction, so why not IP?

Such an assumption might be valid if you had an unlimited budget and you were physically parked next to Azure in Redmond with direct-to-cloud fiber connectivity that didn’t need to go any further. Even with that “pipe dream” the security issues and egress management alone would likely put a halt to that nonsense in a heartbeat. Pipe dreams aside, alternatives for high bit rate data movement and manipulation still need to be realized.

CLOUD ORIGINS

What if the cloud went back to what it originally started as? The actual cloud symbol—that puffy squashed circle-like icon—was just a representation of “the network” on a diagram (Fig. 1). The network could, at the time, be described as anything from a short-connected Ethernet segment with files moving on it to a full datacenter or anything in between. It might have been a campus-like topology infrastructure where resources were easily shared; that is, doled out, when or as needed and then reconfigured to serve other purposes once that “compute cycle” effort was completed.

Then consider how a “shared resource” model, as in a datacenter, would be analogous to the cloud. A shared resource model, when appropriately configured, is a cloud; with on-premise cloud versions functioning like a datacenter. Pools of resources are allocated as needed with a central management and monitoring platform overseeing operational functionality (sometimes called “orchestration”). How the services are efficiently and effectively abstracted from the resource pool becomes the challenge.

The “co-lo” (co-located) facility is similar, but they are not generally “on-prem located.” In this model, a datacenter-like structure houses several screened-off areas (i.e., private “cages”) where customers place their own equipment and connect it to the internet or a similar network topology (Fig. 2). Sometimes the co-lo equipment cages are managed independently and sometimes not. The co-lo is usually connected at a main internet point, whose point-of-presence (POP) is usually very close or actually co-located in the facility.

Nonetheless, the co-lo concept appears a bit like a cloud, without the customary sharing of resources found in a dedicated pooled resource environment.

Co-lo datacenters usually service many customers. However, they only become a true “cloud” if the individual sets of components (from the individual customers in their own cages) can leverage one another, pooling their collective resources into a managed, coherent system of compute resources. This doesn’t happen very often, unless it is a campus research center where the cages are interconnected to/from a central processing core that can allocate and then reallocate their functionality to serve varying purposes.

Co-lo models have been applied to broadcast operations, such as in Jacksonville, Fla., where a datacenter approach first served Florida Public Broadcasters and then later added customers from outside the Florida region. This was known in its early days as “centralcasting” and was adapted to yield the “hub-and-spoke” concept for consolidation of television station playout and content ingest. The model was extended to differing formats, but it is essentially a cloud-like central facility, which sometimes shares its resources in a virtual environment and sometimes houses discrete components assigned to specific distant station markets but managed (i.e., controlled) from a single location.

SHARING THE RESOURCES

Shared-resource private-cloud functionality, as found in current and emerging environments, seems better served when the physical architecture of the supporting components (switches, servers and compute topologies) is virtualized to support multiple functions depending upon the day-part needs for that playout region, city or operations center. Such capabilities, promoted by broadcast equipment manufacturers as products that were once built into application-specific and dedicated functionality (e.g., an up/down/cross converter, graphics generating device, render engine) are moved away from purpose-built hardware to software-based products landed on universal “pizza-box” servers.

As FPGAs and other compute devices (such as GPUs and multi-core CPUs) evolve technically, manufacturers are likely to move further away from single purpose black boxes to a shared services model on COTS equipment. Manufacturers already recognize the capability to port functionality into a series of blade processor servers, or such. This model is becoming more viable to end user’s applications (Fig. #3), where a server ‘pool’ is repurposed depending upon facility needs).

For traditional facilities, where the hardware gets only about a 25-35 percent average utilization factor, the concept is to move from a ‘dedicated’ (per device) model to a ‘shared’ (i.e., pooled) environment. The model is now considered virtualized, with the devices (the bare metal COTS servers) becoming multifunctional through a software defined architecture. In the ‘cloud-like’ model, the functionality of a pool of shared compute engines, for example, can be spun up to transcode for a portion of the day and then spundown, reconfigured (in software) and spun-back-up to do another function perhaps as a format converter or MAM processing engine at another time. As more content is generated in a single cloud, the model then expands to provide services to multiple channels (distribution points) and thus, the cost-per-channel goes down considerably.

FULL FUNCTION FLEXIBILITY

Media organizations are now starting to head in the direction of cloud-flexibility and in mixed locations such as on-prem, hybrid and private or public cloud. While in the past, functions were optimized for compressed workflows (e.g., DNxHD, XDCam, AVI formats), the capabilities of high-speed NICs and faster processors have enabled workflows in full resolution, uncompressed formats. Some systems now coming online are utilizing the recent SMPTE ST 2110 IP studio production standards for formats from HD (1.5 Gbps) to UHD (4K) at upwards of 12 Gbps.

Returning to an earlier discussion, a cloud utilization model now makes practical sense whereby owners can create an on-premises, cloud-like architecture that supports full bandwidth (HD/3G or UHD) and can serve many entities locally and afar. Here processing is done in full bandwidth and then distributed (as completed work) in a compressed format suitable for air or CDN/distribution. This spares each local facility from building up services that take up expensive real estate, yet only get used a fraction of the time.

Extending these capabilities to full-spectrum, high-quality production capabilities that support end-to-end services is gaining momentum on a global scale. Remote (REMI or “at home”) productions are now carrying out field production needs that once required a fully equipped mobile (outside) broadcast unit and a crew of dozens to produce sports and entertainment. Outfitting the datacenter to share large sets of servers in a network topology can now raise the utilization factor manyfold, while reducing the overall capital expenditures (and labor costs) that were once required at every station or venue location.

Virtualized environments, whether on-prem or in the cloud, make a lot of sense as facilities consolidate locations and share their resources. Deploying in a virtualized world requires a few more additional learning curves: applications in SMPTE ST 2110 as networked IP, virtual machines (VM), and not to be left out, security. That will be the broadcast engineer/network technician’s future, and that future is now!

Karl Paulsen is CTO at Diversified and a SMPTE Fellow. He is a frequent contributor to TV Technology, focusing on emerging technologies and workflows for the industry. Contact Karl atkpaulsen@diversifiedus.com.

NEW YORK—Fixed-purpose hardware-defined processing and delivery solutions have been standard in the world of video production for decades. However, these legacy systems, which require a large number of components and can be costly to deploy and maintain, have given way to more cost-effective software-based solutions that provide numerous benefits in video production that weren’t available with those dedicated hardware solutions.

“Virtual playout is becoming one of the enablers for broadcasters and content producers to do something that they were not really able to do before, which is to start launching hyper-specialized channels, so that they can have dedicated or targeted audiences they can address more easily, and can then start to monetize these new, more granular types or segments of the audience,” said Kevin Savina, director of product strategy at Dalet.

This move towards virtualization in the industry has spawned a new buzzword, “orchestration;” and it could be said that there are a symphony of opportunities that it now presents. However, to take advantage of what virtualization offers, there are actually two types of this orchestration that need to put in place.

“The first is a technical one, which is to orchestrate the appearance and provisioning of these virtual playout solutions,” added Savina. “And the other, which is the one that we are playing more of a role in, is to orchestrate the production process and the content preparation process to feed in these new types of channels that are suddenly appearing.”

On a more basic level orchestration also explains the lifecycle management of the workload that one would want to operate.

“Workloads need to be designed in terms of the functions needed and the topology of content flows between them and captured to a representation that’s readable by humans and computers,” said John R. Naylor, director of product security for Ross Video. “From a vendor’s perspective, at minimum we provide an API for virtualized products that enable them to be plugged into the workload’s topology.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF ORCHESTRATION

Today, even the term “virtualization” itself remains very much another industry buzzword—one that to some is now part of the industry’s migration to the cloud.

“At Harmonic we’re typically thinking of the cloud when we’re talking about virtualization,” said Andy Warman, director of playout solutions at the company. “However, the private and public cloud deployment has been changing over time and this is why this discussion of orchestration is important as it is necessary for multichannel deployment. Orchestration is far more significant than ever as it can take the function of the cloud with an effectively limitless pool of resources.”

It is allowing for greater customization in terms of how content can be delivered.

“With the advent of virtualization we have the ability to deploy systems quickly, and start up new channels as customers need these such as for live events,” said Karl Mehring, director of product management for playout at Grass Valley.

The issue in the short term is how virtualization will fit with legacy systems, even with the benefits it offers broadcasters and production houses.

“Not every customer has the ability to rebuild their production environment,” said Steve Reynolds, president of Imagine Communications, whose Virtualized Master Control solution that provides the ability to consolidate, streamline and create consistent workflows across teams. “We’re seeing that some will rely on a hybrid solution that includes an SDI-based infrastructure in the studio, while some customers have moved to virtualization in control and playout.”

To facilitate such a solution, Reynolds said some clients are creating so-called “islands of SDI functionality,” where content is then transferred to an IP environment in the same facility. “We see this as an integration layer where the old world and new world can talk together.”

MAKING THE TRANSITION

The biggest challenge in virtualization appears to be the ongoing transition the industry faces with the move from legacy systems. This requires more collaboration between vendor and customer, according to Daniel Robinson, Head of R&D at Pebble Beach Systems.

“Broadcasters can see where they want to go, but frequently have no idea how to get there when discussing virtualized and IP evolution,” he said. “The secret to our success, and the reason we have over 100 virtualized channels on the air today is that we partner with our customers and take a collaborative approach to ensure we meet their needs at a pace which suits them. It’s a unique strength that we’re very proud of.”

Going from SDI to IP will also require flexibility and openness to change. 

“The hard point of the transition will depend on how integrated a user is with the old-style broadcast infrastructure,” said Savina. “Moving forward, broadcasters also need to think in terms of multiple outputs that include linear streams, and if you don’t have the right tools upstream you could find yourself in deep trouble.”

However, this isn’t the first time the industry has faced a transition and while this one will end up being less about hardware, broadcasters and production facilities should be prepared for this brave new world.

“There are good examples with the move we’ve seen from tape to tapeless workflows,” said Warman. “We went through a very similar type of transition, and while we’re still not quite all the way with the transition to virtualization we’re making good progress.”

This move to virtualization is also providing new ways to do the same job.

“We are seeing less obvious solutions such as Software as a Service [SaaSs], and this provides the latest technology and also frees up the end user from inconvenient maintenance and upgrade cycles, and allows the user to focus on content delivery instead of software upgrades,” added Warman.

Another advantage is that the cloud offers the ability for users to experiment without a major investment in completely new hardware.

“It is easier to update software than a hardware board,” said Mehring. “That gives you the flexibility in how you modify your services.”

KEEPING IT SECURE

The move to virtualization introduces other challenges—including the fact that “content” and “data” will be increasingly interchangeable terms. And where there is data there is the risk of a breach.

“Cybersecurity is a huge concern for anyone in this industry, especially as the move to solutions that aren’t housed in four walls of a broadcaster,” said Bea Alonso, director of product marketing at Dalet. “It is difficult to keep up with the number of threats, but we should remember there was no security on the old VTRs.”

The industry will need to realize the nature of potential threats, but also take advantage of the available countermeasures. Security is about defending three principles: availability, integrity and confidentiality, according to Naylor.

“This priority order is the reverse of how government agencies and the military usually put them but is what’s appropriate for commercial operations,” he said. “The loss of confidential information is prevented using standard controls similar to those in place in a traditional broadcast infrastructure. The only twist that virtualization possibly adds is when your workload is but one of multiple tenants on a physical host which theoretically opens it up to attack from co-hosted bad actors.”

Broadcasters are not facing cyber threats alone—and in fact are actually late comers at least in terms of needing cybersecurity. Thus there are plenty of examples of how it has been done right in other industries.

“Because we are moving to standard IP technology and standard IP platforms we can draw from industries that are much wider than broadcast industry,” said Reynolds. “We can look at others, and by no means are a first mover so we have the advantage to draw upon experts and best practices.”

FUTURE PROOFING PRODUCTION

The final consideration to virtualization is the advantages that it could offer to content creators at all levels. This could be the final significant transition, in part because it is more future proof than legacy hardware. This is notable as the industry underwent only minor updates in the early days of video production from the early days of television until the late 1990s with the beginning of the transition from standard definition to HD.

Since then the industry has—in essence—experienced one transition after another, but virtualization could result in the end of such major transitions.

“Our upgrade path is much more streamlined than ever before,” said Reynolds. “We had the move from 1080 to 4K, and we can look at that as a blueprint for future moves. With HD to 4K you replaced a couple of components but you didn’t have to significantly replace everything in the workflow, just a few codecs. It resulted in a much more streamlined way to make a transition and that is what we can expect going forward. We will then move from a ‘revolution’ change and back to a more traditional ‘evolution.’”

Of course getting to that point will still require some effort however.

We’re at the point where users are getting over learning about the technology and finally putting it to use,” said Mehring. “We’re not at the end, but this is the end of the beginning.”

IBC2019, 13-17 September, Stand 7.A05:Pixel Power has today announced it will be adding uncompressed IP playout capability, based on the SMPTE ST 2110 family of standards, to its already well established StreamMaster playout technology. The development comes as a natural progression of incorporating new standards within its software defined technology platforms: StreamMaster Media Processing and Gallium Workflow Orchestration. Like all StreamMaster and Gallium functionality, SMTPE ST 2110 will be supported as software solutions whether on-premise or virtualized in a data centre.

“While we believe SMPTE ST 2110 is certainly the right long term direction, there is still mileage in standards such as ST 2022-6, since broadcasters like the similarity to existing SDI architectures,” said James Gilbert, CEO, Pixel Power. “Our new generation of playout and delivery products, including automation, graphics and branding are based on the StreamMaster Media Processing technology platform that can be easily updated using only software. The flexibility of IP-based, software defined playout and automation platforms are really showing their worth – that’s why we are currently deploying them with major national broadcasters around the globe.”

The SMPTE ST 2110 Professional Media Over Managed IP Networks suite of standards is a major contributing factor in the movement towards one common IP-based connectivity protocol for the professional media industries. The foundation for the SMPTE ST 2110 standards is Video Services Forum (VSF) Technical Recommendation for Transport of Uncompressed Elementary Stream Media Over IP (TR-03). The SMPTE ST 2110 standards suite specifies the carriage, synchronization and description of separate elementary essence streams over IP for realtime production, playout, and other professional media applications.

Pixel Power has a history of breaking new ground and was responsible thirty years ago for taking broadcasters into the world of PC-based graphics systems as they rapidly grew their channel count. As a first to market with live virtualized playout in the cloud in 2015, Pixel Power also took the first steps in showing broadcasters the power and convenience of workflows based on IP transport streams and application virtualization. At IBC2019, Pixel Power will show how broadcasters can benefit from moving to fully software defined solutions for production, playout, automation, branding and graphics.

Pixel Power can be found at IBC2019 (Amsterdam, 13 – 17 September) in its regular position in Hall 7, Stand 7.A05.

###

About Pixel Power
Pixel Power provides innovative graphics production and integrated playout delivery systems for broadcasters, outside broadcast truck companies, playout facilities, post production houses, venues and sports complexes. Our award-winning branding and promotions systems, graphics-enabled master control switchers and sophisticated switchable graphics production systems allow producers to deliver dynamic live and pre-recorded content for any SD, HD, 4k, mobile, online or interactive application.

Pixel Power has 30 years’ experience of engineering prowess and dedication to customer support that has made it the industry’s first choice in graphics, branding and playout. With more than 2500 installations worldwide, customers including market-leading broadcasters such as Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, Disney, Discovery, Ericsson, ESPN, Sky, ViaSat and WDR.

With corporate headquarters in Cambridge, UK, and with regional offices in Grass Valley, California and Dubai, UAE, Pixel Power has a global organisation and is supported by a well-trained and focussed distributor network.

Pixel Power can be contacted online at www.pixelpower.com.

Pixel Power contact:
Name: Ciaran Doran
Title: Exec VP
Email: cdoran@pixelpower.com
Tel: +44 7775 581301

PR Contact:
Name: Jennie Marwick-Evans
Company: Manor Marketing
Email: jennie@manormarketing.tv
Tel: +44 7748 636171

Part 2

While the International CES 2019 was top of mind for Mark Aitken, president of ONE Media LLC and vice president of Advanced Technology at Sinclair Broadcast Group (as discussed in part 1 of this Q&A), far more is happening with regards to broadcast standards and ATSC 3.0.

In part two of this interview, Aitken reveals Sinclair’s plan to rollout ATSC 3.0 in 26 markets in 2019, where Sinclair’s Dallas SFN rollout stands, why 3.0 naysayers will soon see they are off target, the effect multistandard TV exciters and receivers may have on the future of standards and his thoughts on the announcement that ATSC President Mark Richer will soon retire.

(An edited transcript.)

TV TECHNOLOGY:ENENSYS/TeamCast and Comark recently announced they were showing a DTV exciter with support for both 3.0 and DVB-T2 waveforms at BES Expo 2019, India.

At CES, ONE Media rolled out its new multi-standard DTV tuner chipsets with support for at least a dozen standards, including 3.0.

It seems to me that multistandard TV exciters and receivers may usher in a new era in which TV standards become something different than they traditionally have been. In other words, it’s hard to see how TV standards in the future will serve as mechanisms to protect markets, regions, economic interests and even competing political systems. What do you think?

MARK AITKEN: I am sure that I have said Broadcast Market Exchange, BMX, to you on more than one occasion.

We started seven or eight years ago –before we even entered the ATSC process for this standard. We started putting out some white papers and articles about the notion of a Broadcast Market Exchange.

Part of that was looking at what was going on in the spectrum sharing worldview and a lot of that came out of the foundational work even before there was CBRS (citizens band radio service).

CBRS is different spectrum, but it’s all about spectrum sharing and providing spectrum access. So, the Broadcast Market Exchange we envisioned tied together broadcast stations on a virtual basis to create a national network.

That in fact to a large degree was the reason we worked with Nexstar to start Spectrum Co. And Spectrum Co is involved in a lot of conversations right now based on our own commitment to build out [ATSC 3.0] in 26 markets this year and finding other partners in those markets.

That’s all backdrop. The point is we had this thing called the Broadcast Market Exchange that envisioned this world of virtualization. The very same world that is at the heart of 5G –not a bunch of hardware, but in fact cloud-based, virtualized functions.

Well on the other side of the world in India, one of the things that attracted me to Saankhya is that they shared a very, very similar view and about four years ago wrote a series of white papers–and there will be another one coming out shortly—on something called a cognitive radio access network.

Cognitive is now being morphed into AI because everybody believes they know what AI means.

To your point, imagine a network where you have software-defined radios, software-defined receivers. You have a network that when you apply AI has a cognitive ability to determine based upon a set of requirements of how best to deliver a wireless set of packets.

If you can describe the attributes of various technologies, you suddenly have a network that can on its own define unique waveforms to deliver [data] in the most effective and efficient way.

The short word for this is AI-RAN [AI Radio Access Network] where you deploy a network with the ability to shape waveforms and radios that can conform to those waveforms. You can begin to envision a world in 10 years, perhaps less, where you don’t even have a standard per se of a fixed set of waveforms. But in fact you have a network that is capable of producing its own waveforms on a flexible, desirable basis.

I would add that I think that becomes almost essential in a future world where you are looking for security at all levels.

Imagine the ability on a data-frame-by-data-frame basis to convey that data with a slightly different waveform based on a 128-bit or 256-bit encoding scheme.

Suddenly not only are you encoding data, but you are effectively encoding waveforms and obviating the need for a fixed standard.

TVT:So this would be a whole new level of security.

MA: Exactly. You could define your own unique waveform. You are not going to hard code that into a chip because it’s your unique waveform. It’s your own modulation, your own coding scheme. The only thing that is common is this bootstrap.

TVT:Probably from its inception, there have been 3.0 naysayers. Some, given the dearth of 3.0 TVs at this year’s CES, say the Next-Gen TV standard is 'DOA.' Clearly, you don’t see it that way. How would you respond to the naysayers?

MA: I’ve not gone to two CES shows in a row where the theme and the thrust of the show on the outward side wasn’t about something new.

CES is always about something new, and this year, surprisingly or not, it wasn’t just one thing. On the surface, you certainly had 5G, 8K and autonomous vehicles. But all of those things, if you think about it, come back to a flexible means to convey any and all of that.

And so, while there was not a big stage for ATSC 3 television devices, ATSC 3 fits into all of those devices.

And I think if you talked to the manufacturers there are a couple of reasons they haven’t launched new ATSC 3 product lines. One of them is technical, and one of them is market.

On the technical side, it is the issue of content protection. You know the ability to ensure that content [remains safe], creating a high enough bar that you haven’t got easy theft, easy access and therefore easy distribution of an all-IP piece of content.

We are a long ways down that road, and I think in a couple of months there will be an announcement of industry alignment and cohesion around a content protection solution.

And I would venture and say it will be supported by the consumer electronics industry, broadcasters and the MVPDs. If you don’t have that, you’re not going to sell ATSC 3 sets into a marketplace.

Probably the more important piece–and I fully understand this from a product manufacturer’s perspective—where are the 3.0 signals? Where is the content?

We are answering that with an absolute public commitment to launch 26 markets by the end of this year.

When we start launching those markets and there is a clear set of objectives for where those markets are and how the content is going to be protected–when all those things come together—the problem is not a technical problem, it’s the realities of a new market, making sure the new market is alive.

TVT:Have you announced Sinclair’s 26 ATSC 3.0 rollout markets for this year?

MA: We have not publicly stated those yet. We have internally as of today, and we will externally two weeks hence.

We know the 26 markets in which we need nobody to participate to create channel shares and offload channels from one to another to clear a channel for 3.0.

But we have also engaged ourselves in discussions through Spectrum Co. We actually have more than 26 markets. I can tell you that we have commitments from a number of broadcasters to participate in a large number of markets. We have one broadcaster that will be working with us in five markets –somebody outside of Spectrum Co.

I think you will see a public announcement of those markets in a couple of weeks.

TVT:Where does the Sinclair SFN deployment in Dallas stand?

MA: It will light up March 1 at all sites. Actually, I just reminded myself I have to check with legal on this one. The holdup on this one is the MVPD notification process, and the FCC is a stickler on making sure we run out the 120 days. That is why it is March.

But I am saying that with a smile because I don’t know how this partial government shutdown impacts that. I am certainly hopeful that the government will be back to being as dysfunctional as it can be by then.

TVT:Sinclair has announced its STIRR OTT service. It seems like this might be a good learning experience and springboard for launching many aspects of an over-the-air IP-based broadcast service like ATSC 3.0. Is that the case?

MA: There is nothing that we are doing that is not focused on the 3.0 future. So, there is a whole lot of learning that comes out of these things.

So, yeah, STIRR is local-advertiser-supported. It has a lot of the moving pieces that end up being connected to 3.0.

When you think of 3.0, you think of broadcast and broadband. OTT sits right alongside of OTA, and while the ad tech might be slightly different between OTT and OTA because OTT is unicast, a one-to-one relationship with folks, there is a lot of technical convergence between the two.

TVT:Finally, the Advanced Television Systems Committee announced that its president, Mark Richer, would soon be retiring. I know you and Mark have a long history–I believe going back to the early DTV days at Comark. What are your thoughts?

MA: I could almost say I love Mark like a brother, and it’s not as though we haven’t had our differences. We have.

When we are together we have this little routine that we go through that we are the “Co-Marks.” Mark ran the Comark Digital Services Group. That is what he was hired in to do at Comark. It was me and the president at the time who brought him in.

We’ve remained very close. We’ve always had the utmost respect for each other, and very recently I had the pleasure of spending a lot of time together with him in India. We went to the Taj Mahal together.

The industry will miss him. The industry will come to understand that leading an organization that demands consensus is a very trying job. It takes a lot of skill and a lot of talent to try to maintain congeniality in the face of confrontation. It takes a lot of effort to intercede and provide a calming effect and bring aggrieved parties together.

A lot of this is finding the common ground as opposed to highlighting the differences. Mark has affected a lot of people in a very positive way, and he made it look really easy, but I can assure you it was a most difficult job that he was a champion of.

For a comprehensive list of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.

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.

MUNICH, GERMANY—Rohde & Schwarz today announced the acquisition of Pixel Powel Ltd., a step in its plan to expand its position as a leading source of broadcast playout solutions.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Pixel Power CEO James Gilbert and CTO Nick Wright will remain in their current roles.

Pixel Power’s product lineup includes broadcast graphics, master control and integrated playout systems for use by linear TV broadcasters and playout facilities delivering mobile, online and OTT video-on-demand content.

While playout, branding and master control technology complement R&S’s existing product portfolio, it’s Pixel Power’s development in recent years of IP-based solutions that virtualize those functions in a public or private cloud that seems to have motivated the acquisition.

"We've introduced more software-based IP products that can be virtualized, and that's really caught the imagination of the market. That starts to paint a picture of why an organization like Pixel Power became attractive to a company like Rohde & Schwarz," said Ciarán Doran, Pixel Power EVP global sales and marketing to Jenny Priestley, a reporter with sister publication TVBEurope.com.

According to R&S, its acquisition means existing Pixel Power customers can be confident an established, highly stable technology group stands behind the company, an essential element of forging long-term partnerships and protecting the investment of customers in Pixel Power products.

"With the acquisition of Pixel Power we are significantly expanding our Broadcast & Media portfolio with new and exciting solutions,” said Cornelius Heinemann, R&S head of transmitter and amplifier systems, file-based media solutions. “Together we can combine the software-defined technologies and virtualized environments to offer customers the very real benefits that they provide in broadcast playout and VOD markets."

With the purchase, R&S has renamed the company Pixel Power Ltd. – A Rohde & Schwarz Company. 

IROQUOIS, Ontario — Ross Video this week announced a forthcoming user interface release that improves dynamic, intuitive control over virtual productions.

The new version, UX 4.0, will update the Ross Video UX Xperience, a control center application that users can customize with an intuitive touchscreen graphical user interface. It integrates seamlessly with tracking systems, key products and real-time 3-D rendering engines, including Ross Video’s Xpression and Frontier, the company said.

[Read: Ross Updates Acuity Switcher With 12G Single-Link Connectivity]

“UX 4.0 is building on the success of previous UX versions,” said Gideon Ferber, director of marketing product management for Ross Virtual Solutions. “We’ve added tools to make the production smarter and more dynamic while keeping operation as straightforward and user-friendly as ever.”

The new release enhances the functionality and connectivity of various components, including UX Track, UX Server, workflow capabilities and tracking and mounts. Ross also is adding a new Visual Logic feature and an Unreal4 plug-in with UX 4.0.

The Visual Logic feature is a new quadrant that lets users create sophisticated behaviors by dragging and dropping parameters on a canvas and connecting them in a visual, node-based way. While no previous coding experience is needed to use Visual Logic, the feature offers an extensive set of tools to create intricate behaviors, the company said.

The Unreal plug-in gives users a means of feeding data as strings, integers, floats, vectors, drive animations and meshes from UX into the blueprint layer of the Unreal engine, it added.

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LAS VEGAS—Virtualized video playout streams operating in the cloud; the integration of many station automation systems into one easy-to-manage platform, and having the flexibility to spin new channels up and down as needed… these are just some of the trends influencing station automation products today, and that vendors will be addressing in their booths at the NAB Show.

CENTRAL CONTROL

Sam Peterson, vice president of production management at Bitcentral, said that along with virtualization, other trends driving station automation including centralization and simplification.

Although locating station automation facilities in centralized locations, creating them as “virtual” facilities in the cloud, and making all of them simple to operate may seem like very different trends, they all come from a common broadcaster need. “What is driving those trends is our customers’ requirement to run multiple outputs from more efficient operations centers,” Peterson said. “This is particularly true for customers who are running multiple linear channels.”

To address these trends, at the show, Bitcentral will showcase CentralControl, its master control/station automation platform that provides a suite of modular user interfaces and tools for ingest, media management, and playout. Bitcentral recently did a major CentralControl installation for a Latin American broadcaster, and will be sharing details of the technical solution at the NAB Show.

THE IP FACTOR

IP signal delivery, cloud, and integration of playout facilities are the automation trends ENCO Systems is focusing on right now, according to Ken Frommert, company president. “Video over IP is the big buzzword in the industry right now,” he said. “We’ve implemented that within our automation system to meet the growing demand.”

Dave Turner, executive vice president for ENCO added that video over IP “is a much easier transport mechanism” and that it “lends itself to implementing virtualized content management and playout in the cloud, which is a huge trend in broadcasting due to its lower cost of operation.”

[Read: The Benefits Of Virtualization]

With its integration of automatic ingest, media asset management, graphics, and playout automation together into one platform, ENCO Systems’ MOM (Media Operations Manager) automated playout system will be front and center at the company’s booth. “We’ll be showing how it integrates with different production systems made by Broadcast Pix, Grass Valley, NewTek, Ross Video, and Sony,” said Turner.

ON PREM AND IN-CLOUD PLAYOUT

Shawn Maynard, senior vice president/GM for Florical Systems sees two divergent trends in station automation.

On one hand, cloud-based station automation is catching on. “Whether on or off-premises, we’re seeing a lot of interest in virtualized playout systems operating in the cloud,” he said. On the other hand, “I’m seeing a resurgence of traditional playout centers using best-of-breed equipment. When it comes to individual local stations, rather than a network, they just don’t see the cloud as a viable playout option at this point.”

Florical System will focus on virtualized playout at their NAB Show booth. “Our main feature this year is our new FéniX integrated playout option—powered by Harmonic Technologies,” Maynard said. Florical Systems will also showcase its Acuitas channel-in-a-box IT-based playout package that can be deployed on COTS hardware. “For the first time, we’ll be showing Acuitas operating over SAN architecture,” he said.

MAKING MOBILE CONTENT DELIVERY AFFORDABLE

Grass Valley is seeing a growing emphasis on pushing broadcast content to mobile users, according to Chuck Garfield, the company’s director of product management for the News division. “Unfortunately, the ad dollars are not following this area of digital content growth,” he noted. “So the revenue that is generated of this is a small part of any station’s revenue stream; say just 25 percent of the total.”

In this context, station operators need to find economical ways to fund and operate second and third channels. “The budget isn’t there to fund standard linear control room equipment,” Garfield said. This is where virtualized and cloud-based station automation solutions need to step up.

Grass Valley has been tackling this issue through what it calls “automated production control.” At the NAB Show, the company will demonstrate “Event Builder,” the first stage of an APC application designed to reduce the complexity of live broadcast production by up to 50 percent.

“Event Builder is designed for a non-technical, lower-cost staff member to call up a basic Grass Valley Ignite library to produce live programming,” said Garfield. “This is part of our efforts to create lower cost station operations for broadcasters; of which station automation is just a part.”

With the recent acquisition of Snell Advanced Media, Garfield said Grass Valley is “excited” by the opportunities to blend the SAM line of production equipment into Ignite. “We will demonstrate Ignite control of the Kula video switcher, and already have plans in place to add Kahuna control to our APC portfolio,” he said.

NEW MEDIA WORKFLOWS

For Imagine Communications, their customers are concentrating on new media workflows, according to Chuck Kocsis, the company’s senior product manager for automation.

“We’re also helping our broadcast customers define their business cases for data center-based playout and cloud-based playout,” he said. Such changes help stations launch short-term pop-up channels for special occasions/opportunities at minimal cost, and facilitate disaster recovery.

At its booth, Imagine will feature the Versio Platform integrated playout solution, which supports data center-based and cloud-based content playout. The company will also show xG Schedule, which it says is the industry’s first cloud-based planning and scheduling system for linear, on-demand and digital platforms.

Read: The Opportunities For Virtualized Playout]

“One of the major questions we will be able to answer is how customers can transition from their current station operations—whether automated or not—to our streamlined Versio and xG Schedule platforms to become more efficient, flexible, and cost-effective in their operations,” Kocsis said. “We want to help broadcasters decide what they need to do to automate their stations, identify their comfort level in affecting change, and help them achieve it as painlessly as possible.”

BOTH ENDS OF THE SPECTRUM

Ross Video is seeing “a push this year for automation at both ends of the spectrum,” said Mike Paquin, marketing product manager for control and automation for the company.

“A decade ago, automation was all about making operational savings and improving the efficiency of existing productions,” he said. “Now, our customers are looking for ways to add content for new distribution channels cost-effectively at a time when video resolution quality is jumping up to 4K on TVs, computers and even smartphones.”

At the NAB Show, Paquin says Ross will demonstrate “end-to-end solutions for large national and network level productions—with all the production horsepower required—featuring our flagship Acuity production switcher, Inception social media management and OverDrive Premium.”

The company will also showcase OverDrive+Graphite, which combines automation and production tools that provide the same levels of production quality and consistency “as the larger offerings, but at a price and compact size that ideally meets the needs of smaller productions like seconds screen, breaking news, or smaller markets” Paquin said.

THE REPACK IMPACT

The ongoing channel repack that resulted from the recent spectrum auctions is prompting broadcasters to focus on reducing capital and operations expenditures, without sacrificing functionality, according to Rush Beesley, president of RUSHWORKS. These changes are leading broadcasters to re-evaluate their spending plans, he noted.

Adding to their confusion is OTT, which “presents an ever-rotating kaleidoscope of possibilities, and the attendant uncertainties of how to monetize alternative media delivery platforms,” Beesley said. “So spending less on products and minimizing human resources is key to economic survival in station automation.”

RUSHWORKS will address this uncertainty by showcasing its A-LIST BROADCAST Automation and Streaming System. “It supports up to four channels in a chassis, and provides all the functionality that traditional broadcasters need at a fraction of the cost of ‘big iron’ systems,” said Beesley. A-LIST interfaces with virtually all video routing switchers and third-party traffic and billing systems; provides detailed as-run logs for reconciliation, integrates with most current EAS systems, and can be run remotely from virtually any location, as long as there is Internet connectivity.”

RUSHWORKS will also unveil the A-LIST Streamster, a tiny desktop appliance that includes most of the features of the A-LIST BROADCAST configuration, according to Beesley. However, with the emphasis on IP/OTT mediacasting, there are no baseband inputs or outputs. The A-lIST Streamster has six USB 3.1 ports and Gigabit Ethernet.

EFFICIENCY IS KEY

Sony’s take on station automation is in line with the trends it sees driving the broadcast marketplace.

“Broadcasters are looking for more efficiency across the entire enterprise, as their operations become more consolidated and they look to move away from the traditional ‘heavy iron’ approach often associated with many on-premise solutions,” said Ali E. Amoli, director of product management & solutions development at Sony Professional Solutions Americas. “We’re seeing more interest in virtualized data centers and master control in the cloud, especially for disaster recovery. Customers have come to us and said this is a real need, especially in light of all the recent natural disasters and flooding that disrupted local stations’ broadcasting.”

At the 2017 NAB Show, Sony announced the acquisition of station automation developer Crispin Corp., a company it had been collaborating with on deployment of the “Public Media Management” platform at Boston PBS station WGBH. The fruits of this acquisition, and how it meets the demand for more efficient operations, will be seen at the 2018 show, when Sony Electronics exhibits its own station automation solution.

“Sony’s solution uses a combination of Crispin Loading Dock and RapidPlayX in the cloud, Sony wireless streaming camcorders, our Ci Cloud Platform and virtual switching technology,” said Amoli. “We can take streams directly from the cameras in the field, files directly from Ci, do graphics overlays and switching, automate play-out and exchange information with traffic systems. With Sony’s Master Control in the Cloud for DR, we can get a station’s programming on air and distributed when they are unable to operate locally.”

NEW YORK—Virtualization first emerged in the 1960s and was based on the model of creating a computing environment where independent applications and/or services could appear to utilize the same server when in actuality it was more of a timeshare-based solution. Today the virtualization of servers and networks as cloud-based solutions allows broadcasters to take advantage of new automation systems, content channels and distribution.

More importantly this can all be done in a purely software environment as well, but there are still challenges that lay ahead.

Ian Fletcher, CTO, Grass Valley

“One of the first challenges is to simply determine what virtualization is, as it can mean different things to different people,” said Ian Fletcher, CTO for Grass Valley in Montreal. “One part of it is an IP-based solution running on a VMware system, which has been in place for more than 10 years.”

In the past decade it has become apparent that software-based applications have advantages over traditional hardware systems, but it is important for broadcasters to have the right architecture in place to support this shift to virtualization.

“Some are still learning this, and we are in an interesting time when economics are forcing broadcasters to think differently,” added Fletcher. “We are still in the transition of software-based playout, and as a result many users may skip a generation and go straight to the cloud.”

Then there are those who are taking a slower transition, and may not be ready to jump to a cloud-based solution. In the near term this could have advantages.

“It probably has not escaped anyone’s attention that the majority of hardware-based playout solutions are, in fact, software solutions running on vendor-provided hardware,” said Andrew Warman, director of production and playout strategy and market development at Harmonic in San Jose, Calif. “This works well because the vendor gains agility from developing features in software that can quickly be tested and rolled out, running on a predefined hardware platform that guarantees a fixed level of performance. The end user gets a known quality with quantifiable capabilities that can be deployed and will perform to a set level of performance for years to come.”

This move to virtualization, whether virtual machines, software running on bare metal and/or private or public cloud could also enable the use of software for a similar level of agility, decoupled from the hardware.

“This means that broadcasters and content creators can choose if they want control over the hardware or absolve themselves entirely of the management and maintenance of it,” Warman added.

ADDRESSING DEMAND AND RESOURCES
Virtualization could further create an elastic relationship between demand and resources by enabling media companies to instantly provision the resources to accommodate spikes in workload. Media companies could then re-provision those resources to meet a new demand, before de-provisioning to save on costs.

Brick Eksten, chief product officer for playout, networking and distribution, Imagine Communications

“Severing dependency of purpose-built hardware creates the opportunity for tremendous benefits in the areas of agility, flexibility and cost-efficiencies across the entire media creation and delivery chain,” explained Brick Eksten, chief product officer for playout, networking and distribution at Imagine Communications in Dallas. “A few of the obvious and immediate advantages of running software on commercial-off-the-shelf [COTS] equipment, in addition to tapping into the economies of scale and continuous improvements in processing power of the IT industry, are the ability to precisely match demand to available resources, portability and speed to market.”

While there are cost savings that can come with the adoption of virtualization, these are not the primary reason why broadcasters are considering it, but it does provide an added benefit.

“In the past broadcasters were prepared to pay 100 percent of the price for a product where they used 60 percent of the features 40 percent of the time,” said Ciaran Doran, executive vice president at Pixel Power in the U.K. Instead, a virtualized platform can provide the broadcaster to specify, with deep granularity, the feature sets they use and only charge them when they use them, according to Doran.

“This is a massive change in concept from today,” he added. “The technical and operational side of broadcasters love the idea as it means they can get down deep on the exact feature sets they need and quickly turn on other feature sets for short bursts when they need.”

Karl Mehring, director of playout and delivery at Snell Advanced Media

MOVING AWAY FROM HARDWARE
This transition away from hardware systems could also allow customers to better and more efficiently utilize resources, deploying these where needed and avoiding the need to have systems sitting unused.

“The main advantage that software systems deliver is the ability to accommodate busy workflows, so you can scale up for peak demand and then once the demand subsides, that standard IT kit can be repurposed for other functions,” said Karl Mehring, director of playout and delivery at Snell Advanced Media in Newbury, U.K.

“When you have all your content on a single consolidated platform, and one storage location so you don’t have to keep moving it around, it makes it much easier to push material out to different platforms—whether that is OTT or mobile,” Mehring said. “A lot of the savings are operational rather than pure cost savings as a virtualized environment allows you to have better, more automated workflows in place. However, while it flattens the cost out over time, it shouldn’t be assumed that replacing an appliance with focused compute or FPGAs is cheaper than bespoke hardware in the short-term.”

Even with the move to virtualization, it won’t signal the complete end of hardware-based systems. At least not in the near term, and most vendors would agree that hardware and software will co-exist.

Ciaran Doran, executive vice president at Pixel Power

“Hardware will be with us for a long time to come,” said Warman. “There are other factors, such as the use of uncompressed IP, interconnection of best-of-breed solutions, control systems and other equipment that are currently better suited to hardware. That said, the use of virtualized playout systems is rising and continues to gain traction in scheduled playout environments.”

Location may also play a role as well, as in many parts of the world, SDI playout remains the norm, noted Doran. “As with anything, it’s not useful to move the technology base simply because the technology is new; it has to make sense either financially or creatively,” he said.

The end game for virtualization shouldn’t simply be seen as the elimination of hardware systems. “The goal is to find the most efficient solution for a given workload as defined by the customers’ requirements and that means that in some instances we will definitely need hardware for some time to come,” said Eksten. “One thing we can count on is that the broader enterprise community will continue to drive innovation in CPU capacity and network speed, which in turn will drive down costs and create more opportunity to scale services. Aligning the broadcast industry to those trends will drive undeniable benefits for all of those who would buy into that strategy.”

NEW YORK—AT&T is launching beta tests of a new software-forward “next-generation” video platform that delivers many of the features a virtualized distribution architecture—4K, cloud DVR, several live channels and 30,000 titles on demand in this case—across “satellite, mobile or your own wired internet connection.” AT&T provided few details about the platform architecture other than its capabilities, and that it would be beta testing this summer with DirecTV Now streaming customers and launching commercially in the fall. 

“We all want easy and quick access to our content, regardless of where, when or on what device we watch it,” said David Christopher, chief marketing officer of the AT&T Entertainment Group. “By developing for a single video platform, we’ll deliver new features and platform innovations in a faster, more efficient way. And it will be simple and consistent wherever you watch—TV, phone or tablet.”

This is where AT&T described characteristics of a virtualized platform without employing the term: “AT&T has been transforming over the last several years into a software-led company in how we design and manage our network. We’re bringing that same approach to video and entertainment by incorporating principles of agile development, open systems, collaboration with developers and public beta programs to more quickly bring new and enhanced experience to customers. Our next-generation video platform is a key component of this ongoing transformation.”

The carrier is at the forefront of virtualization. It developed a network operating system dubbed “ECOMP,” for “Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management and Policy,” that AT&T Labs vice president of technology, Mazin Gilbert described as “a software-centric network running on a cloud environment.” (See theECOMP White Paper.)

The company offered up ECOMP for open-sourcing last March, which has evolved into the Open Network Automation Platform group comprising the likes of Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, IBM, Orange, VMWare and others along with AT&T. Earlier this month, carrier more recently invested $200 million to a venture-cap fund to invest in technologies that will run on ONAP.

“We believe [ONAP] is going to be the network operating system for the majority of the network operators out there,” AT&T’s Igal Elbaz said, according to Light Reading. Elbaz is vice president of Ecosystem and Innovation for AT&T Services.
A Bit of the ONAP Wiki
ONAP is an open source software platform that delivers capabilities for the design, creation, orchestration, monitoring, and life cycle management of...
...Virtual Network Functions;
...The carrier-scale Software Defined Networks that contain them;
...Higher-level services that combine the above.

ONAP—derived from the AT&T ECOMP—provides for automatic, policy-driven interaction of these functions and services in a dynamic, real-time cloud environment. ONAP is not just a run-time platform; it includes graphical design tools for function/service creation.
AT&T said it would start rolling out this new TV platform in the fall, beginning with DirecTV Now subscribers and DirecTV companion app users. The carrier said the platform would eventually “look and feel” consistent throughout the United States.

Beta testing will involve invited DirecTV Now subscribers who will test drive the cloud DVR and other features. Things like live TV pausing and parental controls are on deck for when the platform comes out of beta later this year. Other features, such as user profiles, download and go, and 4K HDR are planned for 2018.

As we look beyond 2020 we can see a world where a cloud utility model will turn broadcasting into a software driven business—often with the leading broadcasters becoming Broadcast Orchestrators in a larger eco-system.

Broadcast Orchestrators will own few of the assets. Instead, they will own the platform that delivers aggregated content or services—and a great experience—to customers. They will monetize the platform through advertising, subscriptions, or revenue sharing. The model is similar to Uber, the world’s largest transportation company, which owns no vehicles, or Airbnb, the largest accommodation provider, which owns no real estate.

Other broadcasters will morph into Live Content Creators (sporting events, news, etc.) and use Broadcast Orchestrators to deliver to their audiences. Virtualization is core to these new models.

KVM TOOLS

Virtualization, which first emerged in the 1960s, is the idea of creating an environment where independent applications and/or services can appear to own the same server when in fact they share it. Keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) technology was used as an initial mechanism to break the link of physical access and having to be at the device—essentially a first step in virtualization of access. KVM switches have been integral to media facilities ever since, allowing broadcasters to locate computers away from their production environments.

Virtualization of servers and networks in the cloud takes this to the next step. Virtualized hardware frees applications and services from specific machines and allows workloads to be ‘portable’. Streaming video over IP, rather than as SDI over fixed cabling, provides the flexibility to change workflow and video stream routes quickly in response to changing circumstances.

The move to leverage the cloud as the content storage and distribution platform with IP-connected commercial-off-the-shelf servers and software-defined workflows means ‘the virtual master control’ room can be used to automate and deliver workflow processes and technologies in a more agile and scalable way. This further reduces the need for traditional master control operations and reduces the need for task specific hardware, helping to lower capital expenditures. The outcome of this process will see broadcast networks operate along similar lines to data center-based systems common in IT.

The transition is already underway. Disney/ABC Television is moving its TV channels to a cloud-based virtual master control. The BBC has moved audio file storage, mixing and playout in a single data center to provide local stations IP access to these centralized resources so that the stations can create and transmit their on-air programming.

The driving reason for this transition is the ability to spin up new channels quickly in response to viewer demand including delivery methods and formats. The virtualized production model provides this, where software defines the production process, the cloud enables content storage/distribution, and commodity-priced IT hardware serves as the access and control interface.

While there is a compelling business case for IP-based virtualized broadcast production, there are significant hurdles to moving completely to this new model. For example, there is a lack of industry supported standards for virtualized production over IP. SMPTE’s 2022-6 standard is a good start but it is not sufficient to create a fully functional end-to-end solution. Such solutions need to handle traditional sources such as SDI and physical servers’ DVI/DisplayPort outputs as well as the new protocols of SMPTE video and virtual machine access.

Many papers and marketing programs imply a complete fork-lift upgrade of broadcast facilities to move into this virtualized world. But in real-life there is rarely the ability to select this option due to budget and time constraints. The transition to a virtualized/IP model will take time—many in the field estimate the end of SDI on premises will take between 5 and 10 years.

VIRTUALIZATION PLANNING

The fact that TV production/playout will become distributed over IP and software-driven doesn’t mean that the old ways of doing things will suddenly disappear. The model is changing the bit flow across networks and doesn’t mean it will change the workflow. Additional access to Virtual Machines will be needed to manipulate files and playout lists. These different resources, physical and virtual, will need to be accessed by operators in a transparent and similar manner to optimize efficiency and control.

A core component of the evolution is KVM technology which needs to provide ‘virtual access’ to physical resources as well as newer virtual resources. KVM technology can and should enable many users to connect to multiple computers or virtual desktops over IP so that the user has the same experience as if sitting directly at the PC.

Broadcasters building out new infrastructure need to consider this—even if initially they do not have virtualization on their plan. They need to consider solutions that provide future-proofing as the world moves to virtualization while supporting today’s needs of virtual access to physical servers.

This story originally appeared on TVT's sister publication TV Tech Global. 

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.

Moderator: Tom Butts, Editor-in-Chief, TV Technology
Featured Speaker: Tom Lattie, Vice President, Market Development & Product Strategy, Video Products, Harmonic

Featured Speaker: Tim Warren, Chief Technical Officer, Video Business, Harmonic

This column will review the key aspects of compute virtualization and application containerization as used in the data center and the cloud. Not familiar with these ideas? If you care about the future of the media facility and infrastructure, then stay tuned.

Compute virtualization is a kingpin for cloud computing and the modern data center. Virtualization began in the 1960s for mainframe computers at IBM, but reemerged starting in about 2001 as reinvented by VMware. Basically, it is a method of logically dividing a server’s resources (CPU, I/O, RAM) for use across isolated applications (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Compute virtualization software stacks The essential idea is to create an environment where isolated apps and/or services can appear to own the same server when in fact they share it. The hypervisor or virtual machine manager creates each virtual machine (VM). There are several types of hypervisors and we will consider type 2 (or hosted) as shown in Fig. 1. In this case, only two VMs are shown, but there could be more. Starting in 2005, CPU vendors added hardware virtualization assistance to their products; this enabled VMs to share the CPU with fewer cycles of overhead. Think of a VM as a personal server. Note, there are several popular hypervisors (from VMware, Microsoft, and open source such as Xen and KVM) each with their own performance curves.

Each VM looks like an application running on top of the Host OS. Each Guest OS runs concurrently and can be the same or different (Windows, Linux or other). The Bins/Libs layer supplies software libraries and services needed by the top layer apps. If a VM faults to a “blue screen of death” the other VMs continue blissfully on. Yes, there are other methods of server virtualization, with tradeoffs between them. But for basics, just remember that they all enable apps/services to independently share the CPU cores, I/O and local RAM.

Typical loading is about four to five VMs per core. So, with a 10 core Xeon-based server, expect about 45 VMs to run simultaneously. Is it wise to run this many? It depends on storage access rates, network access rates and performance required per app. If a single VM/app is doing real-time 4K video compression, all the cores may be used to support just one VM.

VM servers are easy to instantiate, destroy, move or scale. Their agile nature is what has made them the de facto standard for cloud computing. VMs enable improved physical server efficiency by managing their VM/app loading. Many vendors specialize in managing the flocks of VMs that make up the modern data center. See for example, ansible.com, getchef.comor pup petlabs.com to learn more about data center automation tools.

CONTAINER WORLD
Another way to share compute resources and create personal servers is by using software containers (see Fig. 1). This is a server virtualization method (but not a VM) where the kernel of an operating system allows for multiple isolated user space instances, instead of just one. Such instances are often called “containers.” In a nutshell, containers/apps share the same OS. In fact, each container thinks it owns the OS, including the file system root directory, but it does not.

Yes, containers are similar to VMs in their goals, but the hypervisor has a performance tax due to its overhead to manage each VM. There can be approximately a 25-percent (or more) performance hit with some benchmark applications with less than a 5-percent tax being more common. This tax is different depending on the I/O, compute requirements and storage requests per VM. In addition, spinning up a VM can take 5–10 seconds, whereas container creation is nearly instantaneous. The container tax is usually less than 2 percent.

The container idea is based on the OS providing isolated kernel and user spaces. Until recently, only Linux offered this feature called Cgroups. These groups completely isolate an application’s view of the operating environment, including process trees, I/O and file systems.

In October 2014, Microsoft announced support for containers in their Windows Server OS. Google has used them for more than five years. If you check Gmail, it’s running in a Google container, not a VM. They have stated that they are running two billion containers per week—now that’s validating the idea.

Currently the most popular container engine is called Docker (docker.com). This is open source software. It offers the promise to a developer to build/test an app, distribute the container to one or more platforms and run these containers at will. Containers have less performance variation than VMs so the confidence to run a container with known performance is very high. Frankly, Docker is hot and Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft and VMware already support it in their clouds. Docker container management can use the same VM tools cited above; the management problems are similar. Of course, there are other tools and Google’s Kubernetes cluster management is a prime example.

VMS, CONTAINERS IN THE MEDIA FACILITY
So which method has the advantage in the media facility? This depends on many factors, not the least your policies for managing them. It’s not a good formula to have a mix of virtualization methods spread about without a governance policy in place. Of course, there are technical and process tradeoffs between these two methods, though it’s beyond our scope to compare them further.

Most observers agree that the future of the data center (cloud, especially) will use VMs and containers. So when shopping for applications and software services, ask vendors questions such as:
• Do you support running your app/service in a container or VM?
• If so, which containers have you tested on? Docker? Which VMs? On what OS?
• What app/service configuration did you use for testing? (This should stress I/O, CPU and RAM use.)
• What is your level of continuous support for the tested container/VM?
• Have you tested your app/service on cloud vendor Z? Under what conditions and configuration?

Asking these and related questions will help you migrate into the world of clouds, VMs and containers.

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.