In Broadcast - March 2018 - 50

50

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 3 | March 2018

InStudio

Systems Integration - Part II

Håvard Myklebust,
CEO, Mediability:
"2017 was our first year as the
Mediability Group after we brought
together three leading Nordic media
solutions providers. We spent it
successfully establishing the new
company's position in the market and
delivering several end-to-end projects
for customers.
"As the need for media content
increases, delivering services to media
and broadcast is just a part of what
we do. Organisations like universities,
government agencies, newspapers
and houses of worship all now have
a common denominator - the need
to create and share video content.
This has created huge demand for
lower-cost content production and
publication workflows that are easy to
implement and operate.
Within
the
broadcast
space,
though, many content producers
are currently focused on replacing
outdated legacy workflows and
implementing infrastructures built

Andrew McGettigan,
VP of Professional Services,
Piksel:
"The US and Europe continue to be
strong, with a host of major players
starting to look at their entire media
supply chain in a more cohesive way.
More organisations are starting to take
a holistic look at end-to-end delivery
- from content commissioning all the
way through to the consumer.
"Over the last two years we've been
heavily investing in Piksel Palette, our
Cloud-based service offering, and 2017
was the point at which we started to
really see the fruits of that labour.
"The most significant trend we're
seeing is the number of companies
now looking to combine the scale and
efficiency benefits of automation,
while moving either completely to
the Cloud or using it for burst and/
or scale. Unlike OTT services, where
companies like Netflix and Amazon

on new technologies - including IP,
virtualisation and Cloud. And their
demand is for expert advice and help
in doing this so they can put in place
new system architectures to let them
create content more efficiently.
"Everyone is creating video content
and sharing or publishing it on
multiple platforms. And with the tools
available today, anyone can do it -
they just need to make sure they have
the right advice and training.
"With new kinds of organisations
entering the market, software-as-aservice offerings have become more
attractive than buying equipment
outright. The ability to turn on or off
a subscription is advantageous for
organisations that need to output
content but aren't in a position to
output as much as a traditional media
facility.
"And finally within broadcast,
transitioning to IP and virtualised
systems - including Cloud deployments
- will happen quicker than we initially
thought. No one can afford to wait
around - the demand for content is
now.
"The technologies that intrigue us
the most are ones that are presenting
more flexible ways of producing
video content. This year, these will be
software-based technologies replacing
proprietary hardware, the migration to
were largely born 'Cloud native', the
traditional broadcast company has a
mix of systems: primarily on-premise,
bespoke and often hardware heavy.
"Using software to replace bespoke
hardware appliances has been
commonplace for a while, but the
trend now is towards SaaS and Cloudfriendly offerings that are both highly
scalable and consumption-based. This
is helping broadcast organisations
shift from a CAPEX model to an OPEX
one, and for good reason: why
scale your datacentre to meet a
peak you only hit a few times a
year when it sits there being
underutilised the rest of the
time?"
"Perhaps
the
biggest
touchpoint for us right now is
looking at where tomorrow's
value lies and where today's
value points sit on the road
towards commodity. This applies
not just to our own service lines, but
also how we approach working with
our clients on selecting and integrating
new products and services to re-work

cont'd...

Intern Martine Forsmo at the University of Agder, Norway

the Cloud or the roll-out of complete
SaaS offerings for production and
playout solutions.
"The wider adoption of these
technologies only opens the door
further for the 'non-traditional' media
producers to capitalise on audiences'
desire for more video.
"The same can be said for Open
Source, shared API and SDK platforms
as well as IP infrastructure tools
and interconnected IP devices like
NewTek's NDI. Creating easier ways
of working supports us in delivering

a new kind of SI service to our
customers. "
"We believe strongly that our success
stories from Scandinavia are ready
for the rest of the world. So we have
opened an office in London at the end
of January. We're now ready to bring
this expertise to a wider market. Rex
Jenkins, former Vizrt UK Managing
Director, is heading up the UK office.
He will be instrumental in bringing
our unique approach to building new
facilities to media producers in the UK,
across Europe and in the Middle East."

their media supply chain.
"We're definitely seeing a continued
evolution in the role that Systems
Integrators play. Much of this
evolution is being driven by customers
who are wrestling with their approach
to Cloud migration - whether that is
a basic 'lift and shift' or a wholesale
move to becoming 'Cloud native'.

"Strategies for long-term migrations
of existing key system capabilities are
often more complex when moving
to a Cloud strategy. It's a case of
not throwing the baby out with the
bathwater, but figuring out how to
nurture the baby to adulthood."
"Machine learning is still in its
nascent stages in the broadcast
space, and that's incredibly exciting.
From potential applications around
metadata matching and enrichment
through to being able to analyse
usage data side-by-side with timebased data from video and audio
streams, I think we'll start to
see an increasingly clever
number of uses for machine
learning.
"At a more general level, I
think we'll also continue to see
the major Cloud vendors take
massive steps towards expanding
their ecosystems. They are all
raising the bar in terms of tools
and services aimed at this industry
that can speed up integration and
migration, and that will only continue."

Cloud-based service - Piksel Palette
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://www.mediability.com/ https://piksel.com/
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - March 2018
