BCA Show Preview - 108

108

SUNTEC SINGAPORE

A part of

MARINA BAY SANDS * SUNTEC SINGAPORE

SHOW PREVIEW | 26-28 June 2018

Technology Transformation
with Imagine Communications
A relatively new phrase is becoming more and more common in media technology:
minimum viable solution, says Jason Li, Sales Director AsiaPac at Imagine Communications...

T

his typically means developing, deploying,
or operating the smallest possible processes
necessary to just achieve the workflow needs no more and no less.
This concept was not always possible,
or even desired, in traditional broadcast
architectures, which were built on discrete
boxes that each performed a specific - but
rather broad - function. A routing switcher
allowed you to take any input in any format
and send it to any output in any format. A
transcoder accepted any number of codecs,
bitrates and wrappers, and output a signal in a
different codec, bitrate and wrapper - and so
on.
You typically had to acquire at least one of
each type of box to build a broadcast centre,
and you had to plug them together in a strict
order to get your content from the point
of acquisition to the point of delivery. This
resulted in a fixed infrastructure that was
not particularly flexible, and also required
significant capital investment.

Software-defined Workflow
Over the last few years, media processing
has been transformed. The IT industry caught
up with us and can now offer commercial offthe-shelf (COTS) compute platforms that are
powerful enough to do most functions required
for video and audio processing, in real-time.
Computers do not naturally talk SDI, but they
do talk IP. Through the efforts of organisations
like the Alliance for IP Media Solutions
(AIMS), we are now well on the path to open,
standardised protocols that allow computers
carrying out video and audio tasks to talk
directly to each other.
These required elements are now in place
and provide support for the real revolution:
the software-defined architecture. This is
the transformational leap from the traditional
architecture of a box that provides a broad
functionality to a piece of software that does
just one thing supremely well.
A true software-defined architecture will
be able to call up the software it needs to
complete a particular task. It will create a
virtual machine, or software 'container', for
that task - and when the task is complete, all
the resources it needed will be released for
another task.
This capability is transformative for the media
industry, but it is not new in IT. This simple idea

of making each function self-contained, while
utilising a simple communications protocol
so it can sit anywhere in a workflow, is now
common practice.

Microservices Architecture
The
evolution
of
software-defined
architectures is inherently tied into the
concept of microservices. A microservices
architecture separates the larger end-to-end
functionality typically offered by discrete
hardware or monolithic applications into
isolated services, each running in their own
process, container, or virtual machine. Each
microservice is responsible for performing an
isolated, discrete function. By chaining these
microservices together, the full end-to-end
workflow is realised. Microservices can run on
hardware in a machine room, in a data centre,
in the cloud, or in all three at different times.
As an example, visualise a traditional
hardware transcoder. This might include inputs
for MPEG-2, H.264 and JPEG2000, as well as
a de-interlacer and output codecs like H.265,
AV1 and more. What if you need to take a
progressive JPEG2000 signal and output it
as H.265? The de-interlacer is not needed,
nor are the other input and output codecs. In
a hardware transcoder you may have paid for
them all, and they are all running, consuming

power and generating heat that has to be
mitigated by machine room air conditioning.
In a microservices architecture, you simply
call up the software application that invokes
the JPEG2000 codec and transcodes to
H.265. That is a minimum viable solution for
the transcode workflow. It is also much more
cost-effective in terms of software licences
and energy consumption.
Because it is simply software running
on COTS hardware, it is not fixed and can
be modified at any time by adding other
microservices. In the future, for example,
a superior delivery codec may be created.
With microservices, no wholesale unbolting
of expensive boxes from rack cabinets and
replacing them with even more expensive
boxes is required. Instead, the microservice
that provides the new codec is simply added to
the workflow. Nothing else changes.

Tailor-made Workflow Solutions
Want to add your own specific piece of
functionality? Imagine Communications' own
microservices framework (Zenium™) allows
third parties, or even end users, the ability
to write their own microservices and chain
them together seamlessly, within the larger
catalogue of existing Zenium microservices,
to achieve a unique and tailored solution for

the specific workflow needs. As far as the
system, workflow, user interface and output
are concerned, it makes no difference who
developed the application - it's just another
working component in the catalogue.
Microservices can also be licensed in
perpetuity or by usage. If you simply need a
character generator for an hour a day, you
might licence the graphics microservice
for only an hour a day. If you run out of
processing power in-house, you might rent
cloud processing for only the time you need.
This flexibility allows the costs associated
with a media business to become much more
closely tied to the output - and therefore to the
revenue.
A microservices architecture allows you to
build a minimum viable solution at low risk and
complexity, while taking advantage of the everincreasing power of IT hardware. From this
foundation, you can continuously innovate by
adding, updating or replacing functionality as
you need it, without disrupting operations.
In the increasingly competitive media world,
systems architects need to be able to respond
to changes in the expectations of audiences
and advertisers, and a microservices
architecture is the newest generation of
technology to deliver this agility.
www.imaginecommunications.com

Zenium allows end users to
write their own microservices
http://www.imaginecommunications.com https://youtu.be/sHx5lkHbWQY
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