In Broadcast - NABSHOW 2016 - 48


48

www.inbroadcast.com | NAB SHOW 16-21 April 2016 | InShow Guide

The Future of
Video Distribution
By François Quereuil,
Senior Director of Worldwide Marketing

Today's broadcast and media industries are
undergoing rapid, yet fundamental transformations...

A

s consumer demand for content
anywhere, anytime, and on
any device continues to grow, media
organisations urgently need to deploy
new technologies and techniques to
enable them to produce and exploit
high-quality video content on multiple
platforms as quickly, reliably, and costefficiently as possible.
Delivering High-Resolution
Video in Real Time
Live and near-live streaming of
broadcast-quality
video
content
(10-40 Mbps) over IP networks with
low start-up delays and glitch-free
experiences has traditionally required
expensive,
specially
provisioned
infrastructure: live satellite feeds from
the streaming source or dedicated
terrestrial networks with high quality
of service, to ensure low latency
and packet loss, to maintain playout
quality.
At both ends of the spectrum
- broadcast-quality ingest and
remote playout, and consumer web
streaming - media companies pay a
heavy premium to minimise network
round-trip time and packet loss. This
is particularly impractical for live and
second-screen applications for onetime events like sports tournaments,
movie premieres, concerts, etc. that
can't justify investment in dedicated
infrastructure for direct distribution.
The need to ingest and distribute
live media over wide area, low-cost
IP networks has created a significant
technology void. Traditional TCPbased approaches like adaptive bit
rate streaming over HTTP are too slow
over commodity Internet WANs.
A new, fully reliable bulk data
streaming protocol delivers data and
video streams over Internet WANs
with game-changing quality, including
minimal buffering and glitches and
negligible start-up delay. Media
companies can achieve cost-effective,
long-distance ingest, remote playout,
and even distribution of live video

to playout systems, over commodity
internet WANs while preserving
reliability and quality, revolutionising
live video transport.
Direct-to-Cloud Innovation
The ability to deliver highresolution video over commodity
internet is an industry breakthrough.
But it's not just a fast and secure
path for delivering high-quality
content to viewers. In many secondscreen applications, media needs
to flow through distant cloud-based
transcoding platforms to transcode
the live stream into many formats
concurrently. The ability to deliver
high-resolution video over commodity
internet provides a way to collect
and process a live data stream in
highly-scalable
cloud
computing
and clustered file systems from
any location, enabling real-time
processing such as simultaneous, live
transcoding for immediate delivery to
multiple viewing platforms.
Previously, moving large amounts
of content in and out of the cloud
has presented an insurmountable
challenge for media organisations.
Typical file transfer acceleration
"gateways" upload content to cloud
object storage in two phases. First,
the content is uploaded over the
wide area network and written to the
local storage attached to the virtual
machine in the cloud. In a second
phase, the content is copied from
the local storage to the target object
storage. This dramatically reduces
the content size limit to the maximum
size of the attached disk, as well as
introducing a significant delay from
when the transfer is started, to when
the content is readily available for use
because the content must be copied to
the object-based storage before it can
be fully utilised. It also increases local
storage costs and machine compute
time and costs.
Direct-to-cloud technologies, on the
other hand, achieve maximum end-

to-end transfer speeds and scale out
of storage through direct integration
with the underlying object storage
interfaces,
enabling
transferred
content to be written directly to object
storage and available immediately
when the transfer completes.
Workflow Automation for
Multiplatform Workflows
To maximise the speed and
efficiency of multiplatform workflows,
high-speed transfer and workflow
automation are critical at all points
of the media workflow - from
ingest to ad insertion, transcoding,
QA, encryption, distribution, and
archiving.
Workflow
automation
solutions must be able to scale
fluidly and reliably for the extreme
processing required by high-volume
workflows.
For example, a typical VOD
advertising ingest workflow may
be expected to process several
hundred content files and several
thousand schedule files arriving
through network file transfers per
hour, including virus checking,
transcoding, archiving, and reporting.
Many conventional automation and
managed file transfer tracking and
reporting systems work well when
file volumes and arrival rates are
slow, but break down under load as
reporting systems come to a crawl,
and automation processes fall behind

or fail altogether. Single points of
failure in the system, such as a failed
or misconfigured storage system, can
halt the entire workflow.
Workfow
automation
systems
should be able to start small and
incrementally add resources to
scale up performance and load
non-disruptively to workflows and
users. They should be able to support
aggregate transfer speeds at gigabits
per second on commodity hardware
and scale linearly in throughput
with each additional transfer - 100
concurrent transfers ought to achieve
the same throughput as one transfer
at 100 times the speed.
Concurrent transfers need to
gracefully share limited network
bandwidth and system resources with
one another. Here, true congestion
control and bandwidth sharing
fairness is essential to avoid certain
jobs from unintentionally denying
service to other jobs by hogging
limited bandwidth - or worse,
drowning out other critical network
applications.
When the required scale exceeds
the fixed capacity of the existing data
centre(s), workloads should be able to
burst out to the cloud, with high-speed
transfer of large content, parallel
processing into the required target
formats and bit rates, and high-speed
delivery.
Aspera at NAB
At
the
2016
NAB
Show,
Aspera will showcase its latest
technological advances -including
bulk data streaming, direct-tocloud technologies, and workflow
orchestration - that enable media
organisations
to
satisfy
video
distribution demands both now and
in the future. Flexible, easy-to-deploy,
scalable software innovations give
media companies the fast, efficient
workflows they need to quickly exploit
the most cost-effective, profitable,
and secure placement of their content
on a global scale, while satisfying
viewer demand for content on any
device.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.asperasoft.com
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