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The Cloud: REVOLUTIONIZING

THE MEDIA BUSINESS

FROM ABOVE

L arger file formats, bigger data sizes, and higher-resolution images are the new normal throughout the media

and entertainment world. This trend trans-lates into more engaged consumers who are watching breathtaking shows shot in stunning 4K images on a growing number of devices—but it creates challenges on the technology front.

Those huge files need to be transferred around the world as they move through

the usual media processes of production, postproduction, aggregation, and distribution. In today’s file-based world, media content is typically sent as data files over IP networks, requiring specialized software to ensure fast, reliable, secure transfers from point A to point B.

As major media companies start to move workflows to the cloud, the role of accelerated file transfer software becomes even more criti-cal. This cosponsored ebook from NewBay Media’s Video Broadcasting Group and Signiant illustrates how acceleration offerings are evolving in the cloud era and explores how media companies are depending on them in new ways as they move their businesses to the cloud.

One benefit of the cloud is that it gives software companies the ability to deliver Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, which can be very powerful if they are built as cloud-native, multi-tenant solutions. On page 3 consulting engineer Al Kovalick discusses the new breed of SaaS apps for media companies and explains why such technologies can bring significant cost savings.

And, of course, the other major market dynamic relating to the cloud involves moving the media content itself into the cloud for pro-cessing and storage. IP network bottlenecks can be a significant barrier to adoption, but leading-edge media companies are eliminating this constraint by using accelerated file transfer software to get those big files in and out of the cloud. One of the most powerful examples is Discovery Communications’ new cloud-based process for aggregating programs from a global network of content producers.

Discovery, which operates hundreds of television channels world-wide, including Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TLC, has more than 650 production partners on contract. With the old workflow, all of these producers delivered finished programs to Discovery by phys-ically shipping data tapes—a process that is slow and laborious at this scale. Sensing the revolution that the industry was about to undergo, Discovery made the judicious decision to abandon the data tape and move its producers’ workflows directly into the cloud.

“Because of our global footprint, we’re always looking for ways to get programs around the world faster,” says Josh Derby, vice president of

Technology Development & Strategy for Discovery Communications. Last year, Discovery’s technology leadership team made the decision to move the com-pany aggressively toward the public cloud. By em-bracing the cloud across the entire organization, Derby says, Discovery could take advantage of the scalability, global availability, and inherent robustness of emerging cloud models.

“Repeated delays introduced at this critical point in the supply chain—between completion of production and entry into Discovery’s system—are no longer acceptable,” Derby says.

Discovery has a dizzying amount of data and number of files under its umbrella. A program series can produce up to 400 hours of video, with thousands of file deliverables needing to be bandied back and forth in the course of a year. In addition to finished programs, producers are also send-ing files including individual graphic elements, standalone scenes Discov-ery might use for international re-versioning, and alternate talent versions.

In order to build an efficient end-to-end workflow, Discovery needed what Signiant provides with Flight, a SaaS offering that pro-vides high-speed cloud uploads for large files over standard Internet connections. This cloud-native solution—which utilizes auto-scaling, load-balanced cloud infrastructure managed directly by Signiant—met Discovery’s requirements for speed, security, and reliability and was flexible enough to customize around their existing workflows.

Discovery has successfully refined the process of submitting finished programs, kept quality control in place, built automated processing around the submission process, and wrangled those small-but-vital parts of the finishing process—like language versioning, customization, and VOD distribution—into submission. In addition, they’ve eliminated the maddening wait, wait, wait dilemma of data tape stuck in snail mail.

Read on to understand exactly why media companies are looking to the cloud and to find out how Discovery in particular overcame some critical challenges in its effort to get the content submission workflow up into the cloud.

These examples are models for every broadcaster and content creator—no matter your size.

Carmel KingVice President/Group PublisherTV Technology/Broadcast Engineering Extra

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THE CLOUD: REVOLUTIONIZING THE MEDIA BUSINESS FROM ABOVE

PUBLISHER’S PAGE

CONTENTS3 Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth:

A Conversation with Al Kovalick

4 Case Study: Discovery Communications

6 Understanding Web Apps, SaaS for Media

7 Video: Signiant SaaS

8 Cloud-Washed versus

Cloud-Native Software

10 Believe It or Not, You Are Cloud-Ready

11 Video: Signiant Solutions

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ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Interest and activity in the cloud is exploding, especially in television. There’s still a lot of mystery and confusion about how the cloud works and what it means to video operations, so it was time to take a look at what the cloud can do for broadcasters.

To learn more about the cloud and how it impacts broadcasters, Broadcast Engineering Extra spoke to Al Kovalick. Al is the founder of Media Systems Con-sulting. Previously, he was a Corporate Fellow at Avid, CTO of Pinnacle Systems and Video Systems Archi-tect at HP. He is an active speaker and educator, and has penned the book “Video Systems in an IT Environment—The Basics of Networked Media and File-Based Workflows (2009).”

Al has an MSEE degree from the University of California at Berkeley, holds 13 US patents and has authored more than 50 papers. He is a SMPTE Fellow and recipient of the David Sarnoff Gold Medal.

BE Extra: Why should a broadcaster consider integrating cloud video services? Is this something a local broadcaster can use, or is it more of a network concern?

Kovalick: The migration to the cloud will occur in layers. First will be the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) cloud apps that support office operations such as HR, accounting, sales, payroll and other non-media (example, zenefits.com). Media, archive storage, file conversion/processing and MAM are migrating to the cloud. Real-time broadcast workflows will stay local for most stations. Pick the low hanging fruit first.

BE Extra: Migrating operations to the cloud often means spending less on capital equipment and more on operations. How has this worked out for broadcasters in actual experience? Are the savings in capital ex-pense eaten up by operating costs, or are there savings involved?

Kovalick: SaaS apps are a definite money saver. Many companies use SaaS apps to run their business. A new breed of SaaS apps for media is available. For some media examples see tinyurl.com/TVT-SaaS. The cloud adores peaky, irregular workflows, and these often make economic sense.

BE Extra: Cloud operations opens up possibilities for over-the-top video services. What sort of latency can be expected from transcoding and dis-tribution in the cloud? Will you hear your neighbors cheering the touch-down while you’re still watching a time out?

Kovalick: First, let’s look at cable and satellite TV channels; many seconds of delay compared to over-the-air. OTT has comparable delays, or even less, but this is of little concern in practice. The cloud does not inherently add seconds of delay, workflow processes do. Some cloud round-trip processes are in the order of 150 ms so this will not be an issue for many workflows.

BE Extra: What are some of the challenges to pro-cessing video in the cloud? Are there instances

when you would NOT want to do this?

Kovalick: Non-real-time processes (files) are best since the end-to-end delay variation is acceptable. Real-time processes (streams), on the other hand, can be problematic. The cloud is not great for guar-anteed, non-varying, performance. So, users need to pick workflows that can tolerate performance variation or design around it. Cloud performance is improving daily, so stay tuned.

BE Extra: How important are security and reliability still? Have vendors made significant strides in enough areas so this is not as much of a concern anymore?

Kovalick: Regarding reliability, users must design for failure. Don’t depend on SLAs or MTBFs, depend on “failure happens.” A work-flow can be partitioned across multiple servers, cloud availability regions and even different cloud vendors. Smart implementations are based on managing failure intelligently. Cloud security is “world class” today. Security is a shared responsibility; part cloud vendor, part end user.

BE Extra: What is the meaning of “virtualization” with respect to cloud video services? Is this something that broadcasters need to be aware of?

Kovalick: Cloud resources are normally virtualized; storage, com-pute and networking. For example, users see compute as a service and don’t care what physical systems it runs on. This is the basis of virtualization—separating the physical from the virtual. Many differ-ent users can share the same server because virtualization carves out isolated compute environments for each user. The same thinking ap-plies to storage and networking. n

BRINGING THE CLOUD DOWN TO EARTH: A CONVERSATION WITH AL KOVALICKIs the cloud ready for prime time?

By Bob Kovacs

Reprinted from

Al Kovalick

INTRODUCTIONEvery year, Discovery contracts with more than 650 production partners to create thousands of hours of video content for its popular nonfiction media brands, including Discovery Channel, TLC, and Animal Planet.

The variety of producers and the assets they create vary from program to program. “Some produce 400 hours of video across several series, some may just deliver one-off specials, and there are plenty of people who are doing 10 to 20 hours a year that might have a single series with us,” says Josh Derby of Discovery Communications.

Likewise, assets include everything from finished programs to individual graphic elements, with components in between such as program extensions and clean, or “textless,” scenes Discovery can use for international re-versioning, as well as alternate talent or alternate network versions.

In all, there are 30 types of media deliverables that producers can include, according to Derby, that add up to “multiple thousands of file deliverables in the course of a year. And most of our files are 40 to 60 gigabytes for a program package.”

MULTIPLE DELIVERY SYNDROMEThose quantities are a lot for producers to manage, and they’re a lot for Discovery’s quality control teams to check in to the system individually so they can get to their “real job” of actually viewing the materials for quality acceptance.

But it’s not impossible. In fact, Discovery already has a process in place that’s been applied uniformly across its networks to make submitting the finished programs, and all associated media files, consistent and the process makes it easy for QC to check these files in as well.

“We built automated processing around the submission process,” says Derby. Once a data tape containing new program material is received by the quality control team, “it’s all pushbutton automation, scripts, and everything’s going where it’s supposed to.”

But that doesn’t help the producers get it right before they send it.The problem? First, the producers, whom Discovery engages for

their production expertise, had to become file delivery experts as well. They had to make specific choices and set parameters to write the program to LTO tapes—and there was no room for formatting errors. They also need—often in the rush to meet tight deadlines—to manu-ally type in precise metadata information that couldn’t be off by even a single character, digit, hyphen, or space—a mistake that wouldn’t be caught until the automated QC process rejected it.

If the producers got any of this wrong before shipping it overnight to Discovery, it would have to be shipped straight back to them for fixing.

The physical tape method also poses a second problem: when a package has to be shipped overnight, the producer who sends might not know its status for days. And it can take two or three times longer (and cost two or three times more) if Discovery needs to ship it back to the producer to fix errors … two or three times.

“Because of our global footprint, we’re always looking for ways to get programs around the world faster,” says Derby. “Repeated delays intro-duced at this critical point in the supply chain—between completion of production and entry into Discovery’s system—are no longer acceptable.”

A MANDATE FOR CHANGEDiscovery Communications recognized early on how the power of cloud technology could be harnessed to enable the massive changes taking place in the media and entertainment industry. In 2015, Discovery’s tech-nology leadership laid out a transformational vision for the company to move aggressively toward the public cloud. In addition to the upstream video supply chain, the company had several areas it wanted to innovate by moving infrastructure to the cloud. Embracing the cloud across the entire organization, says Derby, would help Discovery take advantage of the scalability, global availability, and inherent robustness of emerging cloud models.

CASE STUDY: DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS Moving Producers’ Workflow to the Cloud

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One significant area of leverage involves moving completed programs through processes such as language versioning, customization, and VOD prep and distribution—all activities that have traditionally taken place one after the oth-er—much more quickly. Doing them in parallel in the cloud “decreases time to market and makes everything more efficient,” Derby says.

Getting the programs into the cloud to begin with was the critical first step. In order for this to be successful, Derby knew his team would need to do three things:

• Eliminate the delays and inefficienciesinvolved with getting media assets into thesystem with data tape;

• Retain the highly effective metadata model toautomate cloud processes once checked in;

• Keep producers aware of errors, delivery, and acceptance status sothey can act immediately.

“Signiant was the first place we turned,” says Derby. Discovery has long relied upon the company’s various on-premises software and SaaS solutions to move media assets around the world. For fast file transfer into the cloud, Signiant was the logical choice.

MOVING LARGE VIDEO FILES TO THE CLOUD—FASTDiscovery saw what Signiant was doing with Flight, a SaaS offering that provides high-speed cloud uploads for large files over standard Internet connections. With an auto-scaling, load-balanced cloud infrastructure managed by Signiant, Flight is a break-through solution for companies like Discovery that understand the power of cloud-native implementations.

Discovery’s Global Technolo-gy and Operations team quickly zeroed in on the Web Transfer API variant of Flight, which allows developers to embed accelerated file transfer into their own Web application. Discovery had already built a Web interface called the Producer’s Portal and planned to extend its functionality to include submission of finished content directly to the cloud. By incorporating Signiant’s Web Transfer API into this application, Discovery’s developers gave producers the ability to easily initiate high-speed transfers of show materials from a local computer to Discovery’s virtual private cloud in the Amazon Web Services platform.

As Discovery’s existing online system for communicating with producers about their deals, program assignments, and proposals, the Producer’s Portal was an interface they already knew. “It wasn’t that hard to have them start thinking about it as their one-stop dashboard for delivering everything they needed to deliver to Discovery, including media assets,” Derby says. This made the new workflow as intuitive and easy to learn as any consumer file-sharing service.

For producers, manual text entry is no longer necessary at all on most metadata fields. On other fields, it’s not possible for producers to proceed when there are errors, so they can fix mistakes in real time instead of having to wait for a few days of round-trip, and expensive, shipping. A status page shows the progress of all the transfers that are ongoing during the producer’s upload session, so production partners are now always aware of the delivery and acceptance of their materials. And delivery takes place immediately, with the push of an upload button.

Simple for producers, yes. But it’s the file handling under the covers that makes the difference, robustly linking metadata entered on each asset to tie it in with the rest of the workflow automation. Specific file information is now actively communicated to other cloud-connected processes, so the systems that are expecting the asset in their queues can initiate their workflows automatically upon check-in—thereby activating the parallel cloud workflow that Discovery’s technology leaders envisioned.

RAMPING UP SUCCESSDiscovery recently began the new portal’s rollout, transitioning pro-ducers to the cloud workflow that will eliminate the delays of shipping physical media as well as the inevitable do-overs to correct problems on the tape, followed by more round-trip overnight deliveries.

Production partners will merely see the delivery experience as a new feature on the Producer’s Portal. But behind the scenes, Signiant technology is working to ensure fast, reliable, and secure delivery of media assets to object storage in the cloud. The entire submission process is now reduced to “two and a half hours, already checked in to the MAM, while in that time, it’s been through two automated quality checks and four transcodes,” Derby says—ready for the QC technician to start watching. “Having the Transfer API available for us to build the application we wanted made that possible.” n

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“Signiant was the first place we turned,” says Derby.

… For fast file transfer into the cloud, Signiant was the

logical choice.

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Please nod if you enjoy installing standalone programs on a PC, Mac or Linux desktop. Again, if you enjoy rein-stalling them after the machine is repaired or replaced. No nods? The process of installing and maintaining desktop programs is a pain. Not so with Web applica-tions. A Web application runs in a browser that renders the application’s user interface and is sometimes called a “Web client.” The actual app logic is executed on a server, either on premise or in a remote cloud.

Web applications are popular due to the ubiquity of Web browsers on a variety of desktops, laptops and mobile devic-es. Apps can be updated without distributing and installing software to potentially millions of client computers.

I use a task tracker and accounting tool from Paymo and it some-times automatically updates to the latest version while in use. Show me an installed app that does that.

BUSINESS MODELIf you use Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Dropbox or YouTube you are using a Web app. Basic usage is free, but there may be fees for premium services. On the other hand, there are vendors that only sell Web app services (cloud-based) under the rubric of SaaS or “Software-as-a- Service.” This model is for rental, not for ownership; usually pay-by-the-month-per-user, or per-transaction or other fee models.

SaaS is a business model, not a technology. Some of the early adopt-ers and evangelizers are Salesforce, NetSuite, Success Factors, Google Docs, Workday, Zoho, ZenDesk and others. These vendors built their business by offering SaaS Web apps only. They have no user-installed versions and apply the cloud for app execution and data store.

Then there are the major software players who are transitioning to a SaaS model for some products such as Microsoft (Office 365), SAP (ByDesign), and Oracle (Oracle Cloud).

What about media-specific SaaS vendors? There are no SaaS-only behemoths in the production/post/broadcast media space in 2015. This does not count Internet distribution players such as Netflix. One way to divide the Web apps media landscape is as follows:

• Traditional media software vendors with at least some SaaS services. Examples of these are Adobe (Creative Cloud), Envivio (Nuage), Signiant (Media Shuttle) and Sony Media Cloud Services (Ci).

• Many traditional software vendors now offer Web apps instead of standalone installed programs. The vast majority of these vendors don’t offer SaaS services, but they could. Many of the 2015 NAB Show vendors had Web app-based products.

• New wave of media software vendors that only offer SaaS products. Some

of these companies also offer “private cloud” versions of their products. A variety of vendors run services in their private cloud while others may use Amazon or Azure compute/store resources. A few examples of this new breed are Aframe, Bright-cove (Zencoder), Encoding. com, Forbidden (Forscene), Generation Technologies (NIMExchange), Mediasilo (V6), Nativ (MLP), Piksel, Prime Focus Technologies (CLEAR), Sundog (Media Toolkit), Tedial (Evolution), ZooDigital and others.

Bottom line, Web apps are mature and SaaS is gaining steam in me-dia. A few observers expect the NAB Show/IBC to become “media apps shows” over time. Sure, cameras, displays, control surfaces and other mediarelated devices will be present, but private cloud Web apps and public SaaS will have significant momentum.

A DEEPER LOOKOf course, there are tradeoffs between installed programs and their Web app version. Here are some Web app (public cloud execution) benefits:

No daily backups by user, potential worldwide reach, patches and feature upgrades invisibly made, real-time collaboration, ability to run on “cheap” thin clients, and mash-ups are possible by combining pan-els/features from multiple Web apps.

On the other hand, there are some shortfalls:Network required for accessing either local or remote cloud, round-

trip latency to server may be problematic, network bitrate limitations, browser incompatibility and security.

For media apps, constrained access bandwidth poses the biggest problem (i.e. 4K editing). Usually the media is first uploaded to the server location, which could take days for some workloads. So it’s not always practical to use Web apps, which is one reason why Avid, Adobe and others do not yet offer full-featured creative apps only via SaaS.

That said, many proxy-based workflows are very practical and are the bulk of Web app use today. As Internet access rates increase SaaS

UNDERSTANDING WEB APPS, SAAS FOR MEDIABy Al Kovalick Cloudspotters Journal

Figure 1: Three different methods to execute and deliver a Web app. The server execution can be local or in a distant cloud.

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(and Web apps) will become more common.According to Cisco’s “Global Cloud Index,” by 2018, 59 percent of

the total cloud workloads will be SaaS. They are also predicting in the same year that 28 percent of the total cloud workloads will be Infra-structure-as-a-Service (IaaS). With so much SaaS in the works, let’s in-vestigate its underpinnings.

Fig. 1 shows three different methods to execute and deliver a Web app. The server execution can be local or in a distant cloud. Method one (far left) shows a 1:1 relationship between the app UI and the exe-cution engine and database if present. There is no magic with this case; it’s similar to the desktop app-per-user model.

Case two shows a single application execution instance with a distinct database engine for each app. You may wonder how one app instance can serve so many clients.

The instance is built using the concept of a multi-tenant architecture. One instance may serve thousands of simultaneous tenants (clients). Clever use of metadata enables the execution instance to track the state

of each UI. Each client thinks it owns the execution engine, but it does not. The database stores the UI state for each client. To scale for more clients, the same instance is installed on multiple machines (horizontal scaling).

Finally, case three in Fig. 1 shows the ultimate multi-tenant con-figuration. In this case, there is only a single execution instance and a single database engine. The biggest SaaS players (think Salesforce. com) use this model. Of course, there may be security and performance con-cerns using multi-tenancy, so you will need to ask pointed questions if considering this type of deployment.

Web apps and the SaaS model are the future of the media facility. Stay alert for developments in this area. n

Al Kovalick is the founder of Media Systems consulting in Silicon Valley. He is the author of “Video Systems in an IT Environment (2nd ed).” He is a frequent speaker at industry events and a SMPTE Fellow. For a complete bio and contact information, visit www.theAVITbook.com.

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If Signiant’s technology approach seems uncannily responsive—solving problems before they erupt, adding features without disrupting current installations, designing new capabilities to address challenges you thought only your company struggled with—it’s no coincidence. Signiant is

the innovator in developing cloud-native SaaS software for moving large files quickly, securely, and reliably over IP. Learn more about the thinking behind the development of SaaS solutions at Signiant and the benefits of cloud-native software to the user.

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The term “cloud-washed” came about the same way “green-washed” did—a term that was used to expose companies that repackaged and marketed existing products as “green” without meeting any of the en-vironmental standards. Likewise, “cloud-washed” is used to describe a trend in the software development community where companies take advantage of the basic concept of cloud computing—a general refer-ence to any service provided over the Internet—to rebrand their prod-ucts as cloud solutions. However, software that is truly integrated with the cloud is built specifically to take advantage of all the cloud has to offer and pass those benefits on to customers.

Many larger companies engaging in cloud washing do have some cloud integration. However, they haven’t adapted their design principles, built the needed infrastructure, or hired dedicated management teams to support true cloud-formed software—all of which is a major financial investment. Most of the time, these compa-nies take software that was previously built for on-premise purposes and modify it to run on virtual machines. Then they have their customers deploy it from the cloud and pay by the hour to use it.

Although on-premises software definitely has its place, be careful about cloud-washed software that has been repackaged to look new. You won’t have access to all the services that cloud-native software offers and you’ll more than likely be partnering with a com-pany that takes shortcuts or is failing to stay current and covering it up with marketing.

Basically, there are highly important services missing from cloud-washed soft-ware. To better understand the difference, we’ll have to evaluate the fundamental services that real cloud-native software, or SaaS, offers.

FREEING YOUR IT WITH AUTOMATED UPDATES AND MAINTENANCEBy definition, cloud-native software is fully coded to be hosted in the cloud from the beginning. The software is maintained for the user across a multi-tenant architecture for multiple levels of redundancy. Clients are given a virtualized infrastructure that is maintained and managed by the vendor. This allows the client access to the most up-to-date products and releases without having to change customized settings. This also means that the client’s IT department won’t have to worry about installing upgrades or maintaining outdated versions.

Updating cloud-washed software requires downtime. Cloud-native software doesn’t need downtime, because SaaS upgrades are automat-ic. Cloud-native software relieves your IT department from having to download upgrades and perform software maintenance. One way to

determine whether or not your software, or software you’re consider-ing, is truly cloud-based is to search for it on Amazon Web Services. If your software doesn’t appear under a search for SaaS, then the software is not SaaS and is not a full cloud-based service.

THE POWER OF THE SAAS MODEL— NETWORK AUTOMATION AND FLEXIBLE BILLINGCloud-native software is built entirely on the cloud, giving the customer an automatic connection to their vendor. Utilizing the network auto-mation features of SaaS, labor-intensive processes can be mechanized. Network-enabled automation is cost-effective because it frees a client’s on-premises storage and IT department from performing a range of tasks, from automated deployment to real-time maintenance needs.

IT professionals are facing a more complex future in which auto-mated processes will be a necessity.

In IDC’s most recent study, their seventh on the digital universe, EMC’s Jeremy Burton shares insight on a recent trend—companies from all industries are shape-shifting into software-defined enterprises. As more companies shift, so does the burden on IT departments. They will need to discover new ways to adapt their technologies around existing infrastructure.

Additionally, the amount of digital data created by individuals and organizations is growing exponentially. IT departments will have to take on more, especially in the stor-ing, analysis, and management of massive amounts of data.

Automating IT tasks and business pro-cess translates to cost-efficiency that is felt immediately. The scaling ca-pacities of cloud-native software add to the savings. Because hundreds to millions of customers are served on shared infrastructure, SaaS vendors can operate an economy of scale, reducing the cost of operation with each additional client and passing the savings on to each client.

Setting automated infrastructure (IaaS) as the standard allows soft-ware to be developed simply and deployed easily, because developers don’t have to reconfigure or upgrade in the installation process. This in turn reduces the TCO (total cost of ownership) and frees the vendor and clients from performing unnecessary tasks. Benchmarking, col-laboration, crowdsourcing, and real-time analytics are all exclusive to cloud-native software. Each offers potential sources of income with a competitive advantage and marketing insight.

A significant perk of cloud-native software, through its SaaS fea-tures, is its billing. SaaS uses subscription billing, otherwise known as “pay-per-use,” allowing clients to better manage costs by scaling up or down depending on their needs. A company will also be able to save by

CLOUD-WASHED VERSUS CLOUD-NATIVE SOFTWARE

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Software that is truly integrated with the cloud

is built specifically to take advantage of all the

cloud has to offer and pass those benefits on to

customers.

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purchasing only one account, instead of paying for 50 and only using one for a single task or having to go through the trouble of adding a new one. The benefit of this model is that customers will only pay for what they actually use.

THE NEED FOR GLOBAL PERFORMANCE AND HIGH AVAILABILITYCloud-native software is built with failover capabilities—automatic switching to redundant or standby servers in case of failure—giving ac-cess even when something fails in the system or data is lost or corrupted. This makes cloud-native software invaluable in a global performance setting where software needs to be highly available and resilient.

If you operate software on a single machine instance, you will have not only global performance and high availability issues, but you will also run into problems with scale. Infrastructures that are fixed make it difficult for vendors to service each client’s needs automat-ically. Cloud-native software is automated to deliver new machine instances as you need them while also balancing the load across mul-tiple instances.

With multi-tenancy—multiple accounts sharing the same infra-structure during periods of low use—coupled with automatic scaling and load balancing, SaaS vendors have the ability to service multiple clients with high efficiency—be it five or 500,000 uses to transferring 5 GB or 5 PB.

No matter where you’re working with Internet access, cloud-native software offers consistent performance around the world. You can expect access to the same customizations, files, and transfer speeds, regardless of your available bandwidth or the infrastructure of the local net-work. Consistent performance is a tremendous advantage for global

companies with multi-national locations. The technical differences between cloud-native and cloud-washed software are highly nuanced and growing more important over time.

THE IMPORTANCE OF SECURITYAccording to a study by Gartner, the majority of security breaches occur at the application level. For on-premise software, IT organizations are responsible for the application security. With the SaaS model, the appli-cation is done by the vendor—which is a double-edged sword. Reliev-ing some of the IT department’s workload is becoming a necessity over time. At the same time, dealing with compliance, audits, and the poten-tial threat of cyber attacks by hackers becomes complicated with multi-tenant and virtualized multi-locations. Some SaaS developers respond to security reactively, as breaches are occurring, rather than strengthening security features as a part of the entire development process.

Security has always been a core concern at Signiant, because we consistently deal with high-value, large asset file transfers through the Internet. Traditionally, most of our clients are involved in the media and entertainment industries, and security of their intellec-tual and creative property is paramount. However, we’ve also been working with more clients from a variety of industries as companies overall are taking on large-scale digital data projects. Our larger cli-ents are moving massive files, such as entire movies, worth millions to billions in investments. Other clients moving smaller assets still need enterprise-grade security features to move the intellectual property that is at the heart of their businesses. We take security ex-tremely seriously and apply multiple layers of security and end-to-end encryption of data to both of our SaaS products—Media Shuttle and Signiant Flight. n

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TORONTO—Out of all the technologies broad-casters use, cloud has to be the single most con-fusing. I believe this is due to the nature of cloud itself. More than a decade ago, all signal flow di-agrams featured a cloud representing a type of remote transport mechanism that magically de-livered content into and from our plants.

The magic has continued, as cloud has now become synonymous with offsite services, remote computing and a way to leverage the Internet to save money.

What many broadcasters don’t realize is that as they gradually move into an IT-based environment, they are actually now running their own private cloud services, which puts them in a position to in-teract with other remote cloud services in a seamless manner.

GOODBYE TO TAPETake ingest and playout as an example. Tape-based activities have pretty much disappeared, especially after the 2011 Japanese tsunami caused sources of tape to suddenly become scarce. The whole in-gest-edit-playout analogy is now completely based on computer hardware, with only a tiny portion being cus-tom SDI I/O modules. These systems are essentially your own private clouds, with controlled inputs, outputs and clearly-defined func-tions and capabilities.

So what is the difference between your current play-out cloud and cloud services? Besides the fact that your playout cloud is determin-istic (meaning you can pre-cisely handle live switching), your playout system isn’t scalable. For example, your station may sud-denly decide to bring up another service, be it a dot two/three chan-nel on your multiplex, a streaming service or additional cable/satellite channel. To do this, you need more video server capacity along with more general processing and switching gear. This takes time to plan, order, install and test. In a true cloud scenario, adding a new service or channel should be almost instantaneous and seamless; no new equip-

ment, no extra rack space, no new software licenses, just a simple re-quest for additional cloud capacity is all that will be required.

Here is the magic. As our plants moved into the IT realm, this has positioned us into being cloud-capable. Files and streams can be moved directly from playout servers into cloud services for editing, playout, processing, transcoding, collaborative sessions, graphics, private viewing, approvals, news services, Internet chan-nels, social media, live streams and also handling tasks such as adding in closed captions.

BREAKING DOWN SILOSSo what if you are not ready to jump straight into trusting a cloud ser-vice? Take a look around your operation. You will see how dependent you already are on cloud services for email, search engines, remote archives, newswire, ad sales and delivery, DRM and pretty much all aspects of web and social media. The reason this isn’t acknowledged is due to the siloed nature of broadcast operations. IT and cloud services represent both the capability and reason to break down these opera-tional silos and operate more efficiently.

Sports is a perfect example. On the Internet, people can watch the broadcast feed along with many other cam-era feeds, slow-motion out-puts, stats info and melts in an instant. These are typical-ly considered as single, sepa-rate elements, each requiring their own media. Then there is the whole social media aspect of handling feeds for Twitter, Facebook and countless others.

Realizing the potential income from digital content distribution, many sports

rights holders now split the licensing for broadcast and digital rights content. On the production side, budgets in digital rights are a frac-tion of those in broadcast, so conventional broadcast production workflows that require traditional broadcast equipment are not a viable solution. By pushing IT-based streams into cloud-based distri-bution, digital rights content producers have instant access to create subclips and highlights packages and broadcast these streams seconds

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, YOU ARE CLOUD-READYBroadcasters already have the infrastructure in place

By Stan Moote, CTO, IABM

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As an example of a cloud-based third-party production tool, Forscene provides a virtualized process that can be integrated seamlessly with the broadcast work-flow, saving time and money and providing real scalability.

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behind the live action, without the need for any additional hardware.Windows Azure Media Service (WAMS) is a Platform as a Service

(PaaS) cloud offering that ingests media assets, encodes them and pro-vides on-demand streaming. These streams and metadata can be used directly by third party production tools, such as Forscene, making sub-clips or full highlights packages instantly. Once the clip is complete and the metadata has been edited or added, the sequence is dropped back onto Azure for faster-than-real-time conform and distribution. The entire process is virtualized and integrates seamlessly with the broadcast workflow—which saves time and money and provides real scalability, (Fig. 1).

The key to this operation is getting media into the cloud for live streaming, and using these streams as files and proxies for the rest of the activities on a remote basis, including having rights manage-

ment tables predefined so there isn’t any worry about delivery content where it isn’t authorized.

A final word about IT and cloud: Make sure the IT people in your organization are trained, and understand broadcast operations, needs and specialized requirements. Taking general broadcast courses like the ones IABM provides (www.theiabm.org), are ideal ways to assure yourself that you can take advantage of cloud services, whether it be testing the waters by using cloud services for disaster recovery and business continuity, or moving 100 percent to cloud in the future. n

Stan Moote has worked worldwide in the broadcast industry for over three decades and has a clear understanding of technology combined with a sol-id business twist. You can see many of Stan’s articles and contact him di-rectly at ca.linkedin.com/in/stanmoote.

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