ARMONK, N.Y. —Aspera, an IBM company, together with EVS, a manufacturer of broadcast and media production systems, and Elemental, a provider of software-defined video solutions for multiscreen content delivery, deployed the first large-scale system for high-resolution live video streaming via the cloud to enable viewers to watch live HD media and sporting events from their connected devices.
Demand for coverage of international sporting events continues to increase, with more viewers turning to the Internet for live match streaming. The challenge for many broadcasters is the ability to quickly transfer and distribute match content across smartphones, tablets, laptops and connected TVs. To support this growing online fan base, EVS integrated Aspera FASP high-speed transfer and Elemental video processing technologies to create a cloud-based content delivery workflow that scales to stream the world’s most-watched sporting events to a global fan base.
The collaboration resulted in an end-to-end production system that is capable of near-live distribution of live action sporting events to streaming networks. This provides regional broadcasters with access to all live camera feeds directly from sporting venues rather than from a single central live stream feed, giving them far greater speed and flexibility in the content they distribute:
- Through its C-Cast technology at the heart of the workflow, EVS captures video of multiple cameras angles from on-location live production feeds.
- Embedded Aspera FASP high-speed transfer software is used to transfer the video feeds in real-time across continents from sports venues directly to an Aspera On Demand server software running in the cloud. The new Aspera Auto-Scale platform manages transfer server instances to meet demand when workloads spike.
- Elemental Cloud video processing ingests the mezzanine format, converting it into the multiple bit rates, resolutions and streaming protocols required to serve a full range of fan devices.
- The final output of high-quality, high-resolution live content is delivered to regional broadcasters and streamed to online viewers across the globe.
The complete end-to-end platform has been tested to deliver hundreds of concurrent video streams transferred over a wide area network in real time directly to cloud infrastructure. This has been achieved with an effective transfer rate as fast as the live video capture rate at sports venues, despite heavy round-trip latency and packet loss (over 200 milliseconds and 10 percent peak packet loss over the WAN). The result is a consistent high-performance delivery of live feeds and near live broadcast quality video.
Aspera, EVS and Elemental will all be displaying this technology at IBC 2014.
