In Broadcast June 2012 - 40

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 9 - JUNE 2012

InMEDIA

Realising Stations In The Cloud
The cloud computing phenomenon has swept its way through the IT industry in the last few years and is now starting to make its presence felt in the broadcast industry. The emergence of server virtualisation, hypervisors and virtual machine managers (VMM’s) have matured rapidly, making the use of virtual servers indistinguishable from the real thing to end users and software alike. Many of the most popular software services in use today, by both consumers and businesses, are running on virtual or cloud based platforms; often with the end user not even being aware of this fact. This technology has the potential to change the face of broadcast technology forever, empowering broadcasters to provision additional services quicker and at a lower cost than at any time in the past. However, to take advantage of these technologies a next generation of systems integration is required. Integration at the network and software interface level will become an important differentiator of systems integrators in the future.

Andrew Davies

Andrew Davies, General Manager at TSL Middle East, discusses pending developments for the cloud
secured permission to transmit some major sporting event perhaps winning the rights from another competing broadcaster. This channel will need to create additional channels quickly and with minimum cost to ensure a credible return on investment. Today this would be a major problem to any TV channel in this situation. They would have to ask themselves if they can afford the physical deployment of hardware? Can the services be built in time? Do they have the space to house the equipment in their existing buildings? What will happen to the new channels if they don’t manage to retain the rights in future years? Using a stream-based workﬂow which can run on virtual appliances and provisioned using cloud technologies this would be a much easier exercise. With our “Channel in the Cloud” we can use the online environment to order a new channel with just a few mouse clicks and a credit card! In the same way that the IT professionals were able to create new MS Exchange servers in a few clicks, so it can be with broadcast professionals, creating a new channel by conﬁguring options from the “Channel in the Cloud” website. Aspect Ratio, HD or SD, HD Format, Closed or Open Subs, RTP/UDP steam delivery point etc. The broadcaster’s operators would be able to access their thin client GUI’s within minutes of the order being completed to start the work of uploading content, scheduling the channels, managing content, compliance editing, QC and ultimately controlling and monitoring transmission. The technology, software and hardware to provide the above services and solutions already exist today. In fact TSL has already run proof of concept trials of this type of solution, integrating several manufacturers existing off the shelf software products into fully cloud based solutions. It is this new approach to systems integration that will bring these isolated technologies together into a coherent whole. ■

Private Cloud

broadcaster we will ﬁnd IT servers running applications at every stage of the workﬂow.

Ingest
Base band is always going to be a problem for a cloud-based platform. The whole point is that the cloudbased platform uses standardised interfaces such as CAT5 and IP and not broadcast speciﬁc standards such as SMPTE 424M. In a cloudbased application the essence of a broadcast transaction will remain the same but the interface is likely to change. The essence will still be based on broadcast standards but the interface will be an IT interface. This has already happened in the coding and mux world where traditionally signals passed around as DVB compliant TS on ASI which is basically coax and a BNC. Today the same DVB compliant TS is passed to the same broadcast standards but it is now carried over UDP/IP or RTP/IP on a standard twisted pair and Cat5. The direct ingest of media as ﬁles is now common place, this effectively negates the need for a conversion from the base band material. Up to 70% of broadcasters content is now being delivered by ﬁle rather than tape and over the last 12 months, during which time, the Tsunami in Japan made tape products scarce; there was a signiﬁcant switch to ﬁle based delivery allowing the migration to

Cloud Infrastructure
Virtual machines have enabled a new public utility of cloud based computing, providing IT resources which are charged based on usage. This new utility has transformed the way IT companies deploy applications hosted on x86 server architecture allowing them to quickly deploy new software and services. More recently vendors of broadcast technology have extended their use of the x86 Intel server architecture as they move towards workﬂows based on ﬁles. In the early days it was back room systems such as trafﬁc and scheduling which made the most use of an x86 architecture. As IT servers become ever more powerful many of the broadcasting tasks, which historically have been handled by unique proprietary DSP’s, are now able to be carried out, using software, on standard IT servers. If we look at an entire workﬂow of a typical publisher-

the cloud to happen that bit more swiftly. Even live feeds coming in from live news or sports events can be accommodated. More recently designed DSNG vans and OB vehicles can deliver live material by utilising IP delivery protocols. Often today when these signals get to the broadcast centre they are converted to a base band SDI signal but this is often only to satisfy the needs of other legacy equipment. In a total cloud based system this wouldn’t need to happen allowing the live signal to remain as a stream.

Transmission Stream
Even the complex functionality of a traditional broadcast chain including the video server, presentation, logo gen., graphics and ARC can be replicated exactly using software running on a generic x86 server. The so called “Channel in a Box” systems have already shown this concept to be true. The output from such devices is no longer coax cable and a BNC connector but rather uses standard routed IT infrastructure to deliver the encoded signal using UDP or RTP over IP. We start to now see the emergence of a “stream-based workﬂow” enabled by the underlying ﬁle-based workﬂow. It is the next logical step as the broadcast industry moves towards a generic base for its platforms. Take a TV company who has just

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In Broadcast June 2012

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