On Tuesday, November 12, at Streaming Media Connect, streaming industry consultant Nadine Krefetz moderated the panel “Cloudsplitting: Tackling Common Cloud Live Broadcast Workflow Challenges.” Some elements of streaming workflows and architecture may always stay on-prem. However, the cloud affords streaming pros opportunities for scaling and cost-cutting that make the lure of cloud workflows too powerful to resist for most live streamers intent on managing large and unpredictable audiences, improving QoE, increasing ROI, and satisfying brands. The panel of experts discussed actionable insights on refining and streamlining your scalable cloud live-streaming workflows and jumping and dodging the hurdles that threaten to break your stride.
The panelists were Corey Smith, Media Technology Director, John Barber, Principal Solutions Architect MEGS, AWS, Loke Dupont, Staff Engineer, TV 2 Danmark, Nishant Agrawal, Industry Solutions Architect, Alibaba Cloud, and Daniel Healey, Senior Technology Partner Manager, Console Connect.
The group’s key points included the shift from traditional broadcasting hardware to cloud-based solutions, which offer greater flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
Krefetz asked the group to discuss what they considered to be some significant developments in cloud technology for broadcasting.
The transformative impact of cloud technology on broadcasting for large-scale events
Corey Smith noted the increasing shift to live broadcasting in the cloud, but he underscored that there is still a ways to go until a full implementation of across the board. “I think that until we switch the mindset of some of the legacy broadcast engineering, cloud is still going to be this opportunity for experimentation. It’s going to be an opportunity for us to move workloads to cloud as an extension of our physical facilities and venues. There are some broadcasters out there that are doing things 100% in cloud today. There are some that are doing it kind of a hybrid of 50/50 split.”
One of the most significant recent advancements in cloud technology in broadcasting has been its impact on streaming major live large-scale events, such as the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Agrawal of Alibaba Cloud said, “This [was] an event that basically reached all over the globe, [with an audience of] over 4 billion, and over two thirds of the actual leads were broadcast over using cloud technology.”
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
Agrawal highlighted some other advancements, such as “adding new capabilities on artificial intelligence and then being able to really create some new pilot projects, one of which is really being able to use UHD over IP.”
Daniel Healey of Console Connect discussed creating a new protocol using machine learning. “As I was working for [Caton Networks], we were creating our own protocol, starting about 12 years ago [to continually] evolve it with machine learning and the algorithms that we put in place to give it adaptive capability over challenged networks.”
The need for robust security measures in cloud environments
The panelists also discussed the need for robust security measures in cloud environments. John Barber of AWS said, “We’ve been talking a lot about ingest and egress methods and networks and protocols and within that you need to have encryption and security, and robustness built into your architecture, AWS’s position is we encourage you to be robust and secure and we give you the tools to do it.”
The challenges of transitioning to cloud-native solutions
The growing pains of organizations transitioning to cloud-native solutions was also discussed, but the point was made that the experimentation phase brought forth by the pandemic has now matured into more cloud-native setups. Corey Smith said, “The maturity model of cloud has accelerated rapidly, where you have Grass Valley AMPP, TVU, Gravity, [and] all these other different production tools that are now running in cloud natively under microservices.”
Overall, the discussion underscored the necessity of cloud adoption for modern broadcasting, enabling more dynamic and efficient operations.
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