In the interview, Felts discusses MediaKind’s new cloud platform MK/IO, which aims to provide a seamless transition for Azure Media Services customers as Microsoft refocuses its efforts. He explains how MediaKind will leverage Microsoft’s AI and machine learning capabilities to enhance content delivery and monetization.

Felts also provides perspective on the over-reliance of AWS in the industry and the need for multi-cloud strategies. Overall, Felts offers an inside look at how a major technology vendor is guiding media companies through a period of rapid change.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is MK/IO and how does it connect to Azure Media Services?

We have a strong relationship with Microsoft. They’re planning to refocus the effort [that was previously used on Azure Media Services] on other parts of the business. We have worked with them to build a replacement service based on our technology and our stack that will mimic all the APIs, all the calls, and all the functions that Azure has today so that we can have seamless onboarding from existing customers. So that’s really step one.

MK/IO is a replacement so that we can keep the customers … on Azure, so you don’t have the hassle, I would say, of changing their flow, the content, etc., because we adopted the APIs, the same pricing and the same interfaces that typically they’ll find today on Azure Media Services.

The goal for us right now is to ensure we have a seamless transition proposal for these customers… so we’re trying to make sure that they find a new home.

What is driving Microsoft’s decision to divest from Azure Media Services?

Their strategy in the media space has been mostly through work that enables partners in ecosystems, and their added value, I would say obviously is about compute, storage, etc, and artificial intelligence.

They’re focusing the effort, I would say, on enabling partners inside ecosystems. 

How will MediaKind leverage Microsoft’s AI and machine learning technologies?

There’s a slew of applications that can be bought in… in terms of extracting contents, extracting context from the contents.  Everything that you have inside a content management system can be highly automated.

We’re looking at scenarios mostly for the dispersion, but there are also scenarios for the creative side. 

And from the content delivery side, how do you see it fitting in?

It’s actually how you turn an asset that was created and monetize it and extend it and extend the shelf time.

How you can make sure you can monetize an asset for subscription or, eventually for advertising? I think there’s an area of possibility that gets offered right now where you can get enhancement of the content with AI. And so that processing gets a lot faster and a lot cheaper, because it doesn’t require many interventions anymore.

We’ll be focusing on that aspect as well as how we can create monetization scenarios from that content.

Do you view the industry, as a whole, as under-monetizing archival content?

It’s probably true, especially when you see what’s happening right now with strikes.

There could probably be a shortage of content in a couple of months. So if you find a way to monetize your archive to some extent, refresh it, and there’s a variety of techniques to do that and monetize it a bit better, I think it can expand the value of these catalogs.

You can enhance the quality – the video quality – you can make it look sharper and more attractive. But it goes as well to how you monetize them. 

Is the industry too reliant on AWS?

Relying on a single cloud provider creates issues as well in terms of reliability and so on. What we’re seeing right now is mostly if you want to push the agenda on being a reliable service, not having any interruption time, etc., people are going with an average strategy with multiple clouds.

Where does MK/IO go from here?

We are launching this right now, and I say it’s a replacement product for Microsoft, but it’s just the first milestone. The ambition is much larger. I think what Microsoft had as a product was a crossover between an enterprise application and a media application. We’re really focused on the premium media applications, like how can bring the experience at scale, the quality, the bridge, the advertising, monetization piece, and so on.

As we follow the roadmap, we’ll expand the capabilities of MK/IO to really go and dive into all the modernization aspects that we also deliver today, but we don’t deliver yet as SaaS.

How easy will the transition be for Azure Media Services customers to MK/IO?

The post Q&A: MediaKind’s Boris Felts on the transition from Azure Media Services to MK/IO appeared first on NewscastStudio.

Enter the cloud-native media supply chain—a model that promises to revolutionize how we process and deliver media content.

What is the cloud-native media supply chain?

Unlike legacy systems, a cloud-native media supply chain aligns supply with demand as efficiently as possible, adapting to the needs of the moment.

It’s the difference between having a delivery show up at your door versus keeping a truck in a garage for your next delivery. This model offers unprecedented flexibility, allowing media operations to be processed into final products for consumption most efficiently.

Future-proofing your media supply chain: The cloud is key to success from now on

Power of Flexibility: Cloud-native vs. traditional systems

Flexibility is paramount in the ever-evolving world of media production. The ability to adapt to changing demands, new technologies, and evolving market trends can be the difference between success and stagnation. This is where the cloud-native media supply chain truly shines.

Traditional systems, while robust, often lack the flexibility needed in today’s fast-paced digital environment. They are typically built around fixed infrastructures, with costs tied to hardware, storage, networking, licensing, support, and upkeep of assets. These systems can be costly to maintain and difficult to adapt to changing needs, making them less than ideal for the rapidly evolving media landscape.

On the other hand, a cloud-native media supply chain offers unprecedented flexibility.

Built from within the cloud, these systems leverage the power of microservices—small, independent processes that can be scaled up or down based on demand. This allows for a level of adaptability that traditional systems can’t match.

Moreover, cloud-native systems provide full visibility into each step of the supply chain. This transparency allows for more accurate budgeting and resource allocation, as costs can be tracked on a process-specific basis rather than being tied to infrastructure. This shift in perspective can lead to significant cost savings and improved operational efficiency.

Additionally, the cloud-native approach enables seamless integration with other cloud-based tools and technologies. This interoperability allows media companies to easily adopt new technologies, experiment with innovative processes, and adapt to changing market trends.

In conclusion, the flexibility offered by cloud-native media supply chains represents a significant advantage over traditional systems. By embracing this approach, media companies can better adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape, driving innovation and ensuring their continued success in the industry.

Microservices: The building blocks of cloud-native workflows

At the heart of the cloud-native perspective are microservices—small, independent processes that work together to form a larger system. These microservices can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently, providing a level of flexibility and scalability that traditional monolithic architectures can’t match.

In a cloud-native media supply chain, each step in the workflow—from content ingestion to processing to distribution—can be handled by a separate microservice. This approach has several key benefits:

• Scalability: Microservices can be scaled up or down independently based on demand, allowing for efficient resource utilization.
• Flexibility: New features or processes can be added as separate microservices without disrupting the existing system.
• Resilience: If one microservice fails, it doesn’t affect the rest of the system, leading to higher overall system reliability.

Pricing based on usage

One of the most significant advantages of the cloud-native perspective is the ability to price services based on usage. In traditional systems, costs are often tied to infrastructure—hardware, storage, networking, licensing, support, and upkeep of assets.

In contrast, a cloud-native media supply chain allows for commoditized processing, where you only pay for a given process when it occurs. This usage-based pricing model can lead to significant cost savings, especially for operations with fluctuating demand.

Continuous innovation

The cloud-native perspective also enables continuous innovation. In traditional systems, updating software often involves bringing down the entire system, which can lead to disruptions and downtime.

However, microservices can be updated or replaced independently in a cloud-native environment, allowing for continuous improvement without disrupting the overall system. This approach also makes experimenting with new technologies or processes easier, fostering a culture of innovation.

The convergence of technology and the cloud in media production

Operating system agnostic

Cloud-native systems are independent of the operating system framework, eliminating many of the roadblocks and barriers associated with traditional systems. This OS-agnostic approach allows for greater flexibility and interoperability, making integrating with other systems and technologies easier.

In conclusion, the cloud-native perspective offers a new way of thinking about media supply chains. By building workflows from within the cloud, we can leverage the power of microservices, usage-based pricing, continuous innovation, and OS-agnostic design to create more efficient, flexible, and cost-effective media operations. As the media landscape continues to evolve, adopting a cloud-native perspective will be key to staying competitive and driving the industry forward.

Why now is the time for cloud-native

The migration case becomes stronger as the industry becomes more comfortable with the cloud’s reliability and security. The accessibility of cloud-centric tools is blossoming, and the cost of cloud storage is now cheaper than the total cost of owning a selection of on-premise storage tiers.

The only type of media supply chain infrastructure that can adapt to a perpetually unprecedented future is a cloud-native one. The future of media and entertainment is here, and it’s cloud-native. It’s time for us to embrace this change and harness the power of the cloud-native media supply chain to drive our industry forward.

The post Embracing the cloud-native media supply chain appeared first on NewscastStudio.

Programs including “Servus Nachrichten Deutschland” and “Guten Abend Deutschland” are now broadcast from Berlin using the secondary studio of Welt.

Welt was chosen by ServusTV to handle both the editorial realization and technical production of these programs, with ServusTV retaining editorial control and licensing while focusing more intently on content creation. Welt was the perfect partner for ServusTV because of its 2021 facility upgrade, moving to a new broadcast facility built with software-defined switcherless workflow for the production control rooms. 

WELT automates production, workflows in new facility with Vizrt tools

“By partnering with Welt as a strong production partner, ServusTV is able to bolster its plans for the German market, while Welt is further strengthened as a producer of high-quality television formats in the long term,” wrote Pedro Sugasti, Vizrt specialist at Welt, on LinkedIn. 

One key element of this partnership is integrating three Vizrt products – Mosart, Multiplay, and Content Pilot Edge – into ServusTV’s operations to create an automated program pipeline. 

Mosart, an automation system, simplifies control of all production equipment and processes through a single user interface. This helps streamline the workflow and makes switching between different content sources easier. Similarly, Multiplay provides a flexible platform to manage content displayed on the studio’s large LED video walls.

This allows the creation of custom layouts and templates adaptable to different types of content, such as live video feeds and graphics necessary for a daily news program.

Meanwhile, the integration of the software with ServusTV’s newsroom system, Octopus Newsroom, allows staff to create and manage graphics content within the system. This further optimizes the workflow, reducing the time and effort required to create and publish graphics content.

The centerpiece of this partnership is the automated video IP infrastructure and video wall solution, a visually engaging element of ServusTV’s broadcasts that reflects the sophisticated integration of Vizrt’s products.

ServusTV Deutschland plans to continue linear operations through the end of 2023. The network will switch to a digital-only format in 2024 with distribution through ServusTV’s web platform and various applications. 

The post Case Study: How Welt is producing ServusTV’s German output appeared first on NewscastStudio.

We’ll delve into five common mistakes to avoid when purchasing broadcast equipment. These insights will arm you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and ensure your investment delivers optimal value and performance.

Mistake #1: Disregarding future-proofing

The pace at which broadcasting technology evolves can be dizzying. While it might be tempting to opt for a bargain, this can often mean settling for older equipment that may soon become obsolete. Future-proofing is a vital aspect of any broadcast equipment purchase. This means considering how well the equipment can adapt to future advancements, including software updates, compatibility with upcoming standards, and scalability.

When purchasing, ensure that the equipment has upgrade paths, whether through software updates or hardware expansions. Avoid getting locked into a technology that has a limited lifespan or can’t adapt to new protocols or standards. It might seem like a significant investment upfront, but it pays off in the long run by avoiding frequent replacements and ensuring compatibility with future innovations.

Mistake #2: Overlooking the total cost of ownership

When assessing the price of a piece of equipment, it’s easy to focus on the upfront cost and ignore the total cost of ownership (TCO). TCO includes not just the purchase price, but also the ongoing costs of operation, maintenance, and even decommissioning.

Before making a purchase, consider factors such as power consumption, maintenance costs, licensing fees, and potential repair costs. High-end equipment might come with higher maintenance costs or require expensive proprietary accessories. On the other hand, cheaper equipment might consume more power over time or need frequent repairs, adding to the operational cost. A thorough analysis of TCO can help you choose equipment that offers the best value over its lifespan.

Mistake #3: Neglecting interoperability

With broadcast systems often comprising a myriad of devices from various manufacturers, interoperability is key. The last thing you want is to invest in a piece of equipment that doesn’t play well with others in your ecosystem.

Interoperability is not just about ensuring that your new equipment can connect with the old. It’s about ensuring that all components of your broadcast infrastructure can communicate effectively in a succinct workflow. It’s about creating a cohesive, efficient, and adaptable system.

When adding a new piece of equipment to your setup, evaluating its compatibility with the existing ecosystem is important. This includes considering the interfaces it uses, the protocols it supports, and how it can be integrated into your existing workflows.

Furthermore, consider the future. With the continuous evolution of broadcast technology, new standards and protocols are frequently introduced. Ensure that your new purchase supports widely used and upcoming standards – from NDI to SMPTE 2110. 

In a multi-vendor environment, interoperability also ensures that products from different manufacturers can work together without a lot of extra headaches. 

Mistake #4: Failing to consider usability and training

While it’s crucial to focus on technical specifications, usability is an equally important factor that’s often overlooked. 

Highly technical specifications and advanced features are of little value if the equipment is so complicated that it disrupts the workflow, slows down operations or leads to mistakes. A piece of broadcast equipment should have a user-friendly interface, intuitive controls, and clear instructions.

Moreover, the cost of training your team on how to use new equipment is an often overlooked expense. Complex equipment may require extensive training sessions, which can be costly and time-consuming. It’s not just the direct costs of the training sessions themselves, but also the indirect costs, such as lost productivity during the training period. When assessing usability, it’s also beneficial to consider the feedback and reviews from other users. This can give you valuable insights into the equipment’s ease of use in real-world scenarios, potential issues, and associated learning curves.

Another aspect to consider is how well the new equipment fits into your existing workflows. Does it enhance the workflow or require a complete overhaul of your processes? The latter could significantly increase the time to integrate the new equipment into your operations.

Mistake #5: Ignoring post-sale support

Finally, it’s crucial to consider what happens after the purchase. Is there a robust customer support system in place? Does the vendor offer reliable warranty terms? What about after-sales service and technical support?

These factors are critical, especially when dealing with complex broadcast equipment. A vendor with a strong support system can offer invaluable assistance in case of technical issues, saving you time and frustration. Additionally, favorable warranty terms can protect your investment and provide peace of mind.

The world of broadcast technology is a dynamic and constantly evolving landscape. Decisions made in the equipment acquisition process can significantly impact the quality of your broadcast operations, the efficiency of your team and the overall success of your production. 

Future-proofing, total cost of ownership, interoperability, usability, and post-sale support are all essential considerations that can make or break the value of your investment. These are not standalone factors but interconnected aspects that shape the effectiveness and longevity of your equipment.

So, as you navigate the complex terrain of broadcast equipment purchase, keep these insights at the forefront. Arm yourself with the knowledge to make informed decisions that ensure optimal value, performance and longevity from your investment. After all, in the world of broadcasting, the quality of your equipment is intrinsically linked to the quality of your output.

The post Five mistakes to avoid when purchasing broadcast equipment appeared first on NewscastStudio.

In this Industry Insights roundtable, industry vendors discuss the challenges, opportunities, and benefits of adopting cloud technology in various stages of the media production pipeline. The conversation delves into topics such as the agility, flexibility, and cost-efficiency offered by cloud solutions, the impact of cloud-based workflows in the news environment, the role of automation, and the aspects of the media pipeline that the cloud best serves.

Join us as we explore the innovative ways in which cloud adoption is transforming the broadcasting and media sectors, paving the way for greater collaboration, scalability, and efficiency.

Industry Insights: Cloud adoption, pain points and security in broadcast

Beyond collaboration and scalability, what is the biggest benefit of the cloud today?

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The greatest benefit of the cloud is the agility it gives users to react to business demands. Cloud users can quickly and easily spin up an environment for whatever work is needed (such as a cloud edit session) and then spin it down when that work is done, only paying for the actual usage of the cloud infrastructure.

Chris Kelly, solutions manager for production workflows, Ross Video: What excites me most is lowering the cost-of-entry barrier to live production. There is a lot of risk to starting a new production, especially when it requires commitment to new control room gear and the infrastructure to support it. Cloud can lower that risk, by making it something you try for a while, but didn’t invest a ton of time in building and maintaining.

Charles d’Autremont, CEO and founder, Cinedeck: The cloud offers unparalleled flexibility. Live production teams are able to work remotely with minimal hardware, and footage captured goes directly to the cloud. Once it’s in the cloud, it can be accessed, processed and distributed by users from any location, at any time. But there is more to be done to achieve interoperability between solutions and vendors.

Frederic Petitpont, co-founder and CTO, Newsbridge: Flexibility — cloud users are not limited by input-output on hardware. There’s also the OpEx and sustainability element; we are running AI indexing on CPUs instead of GPUs. We reduce our cloud processing pipelines and media transit weight by 80%, this means cost efficiencies for our customers, and makes our products an ally in organizations’ missions to reduce their energy consumption.

Raúl Alba, director of solutions marketing, media and cloud, Avid: The biggest benefit to media companies adopting the cloud is their teams’ ability to remote access their workflows from anywhere. This gives companies access to a global talent pool that is not limited by geography. Reducing a company’s real estate footprint, especially in costly, prime real estate locations, is another key benefit of the cloud.

David Rosen, VP of cloud applications, Sony Electronics: One of the biggest benefits is the ability to try things quickly without massive investments. You can test out ideas and learn so much faster when you don’t have to think about large capital expenses and amortization schedules. There is a real opportunity cost of not having your content in the cloud.

Julián Fernández-Campón, CTO, Tedial: The quick time to market as new services can spin up really quickly and users have the flexibility and freedom to choose which ones to implement. Here is where our NoCode Media Integration platform can really help test and integrate new systems in just a few clicks.

Miroslav Jeras, CTO, Pebble: The cloud enables broadcasters to easily launch a temporary pop-up/event channel or an experimental one where they want to pilot a channel to see if it will become popular with audiences. Broadcasters can also deploy IP-based channels without the need for racks of proprietary hardware and keep their desired workflows in place.

Jonathan Smith, cloud solution area expert, Net Insight: Commercial flexibility; consuming resources and service on demand alongside pay-as-you-go commercial terms are exceptionally well suited to event based broadcasting and ad-hoc contributions.

Rick Young, SVP and head of global products, LTN Global: We tend to think primarily about cloud production being a revenue-enabler in terms of its ability to power creativity and customization of live content and channels targeted at consumers across a wide variety of platforms. This is all made possible through flexible cloud workflows as traditional on-premise only methodologies do not have these capabilities.

Stephen Tallamy, CTO, EditShare: Access from anywhere. Take the example of a reality show, shot on location over a period of weeks or months, with nightly broadcasts. In the past, you would have had to move post-production facilities and people to the location, with all the associated costs in accommodation, catering and additional staff payments. If you upload all the content to the cloud, editors can work from their usual facilities, or from their homes, where they are more comfortable and therefore more productive, and save all the additional costs.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: Remote access, which is related to collaboration, but is also its own unique function. Giving all users access to the tools from one access point makes management simpler from an implementation point of view.

Grigory Mindlin, general manager of broadcast, Disguise: I think a lot of people are realizing that while there are upfront costs to cloud adoption, once you get it all set up it does save you money. If you work in the cloud then things like support, upkeep and upgrade is much faster and easier, which will bring down your overall costs.

Venugopal Iyengar:, deputy COO of digital, Planetcast International: More flexible pricing models on a pay-as-you-use basis provide game-changing benefits for media companies and drive cost-efficiencies. The cloud is all about agility, from both a business and technology perspective. Organizations can reduce their time to market and spin up services easily and quickly with a cloud-based approach — critical in a fast-evolving and diverse global media market.

Jon Finegold:, CMO, Signiant: Elasticity still remains one of the biggest benefits of cloud technology allowing companies to spin up the resources they need when there are surges in activity and spin them down quickly when they are no longer needed.

How are cloud-based workflows adapting for the news environment?

Geoff Stedman: In news environments, speed is the priority. With the cloud, content can be uploaded from wherever the news is happening, and journalists and editors can access that content from anywhere.

Chris Kelly: I would say we’re still in the exploratory phase of cloud-based workflow in the news environment. One of the biggest challenges of news gathering has always been the journalist’s time away from the office, and the effort required to update the status back to the newsroom of the story in-production. NLEs and cellular technologies have gone a long way to improve that from the days of tape and pagers, but I think a gateway in the cloud has enormous potential to bridge the news gathering teams and the newsroom.

Frederic Petitpont: Through cloud-based workflows, journalists and news producers have real-time access to content and remote editing capabilities. The average bitrate we see in news production is around 7 or 8 Mbps — meaning editing in the cloud does not require a super high bandwidth to be smooth. The dream is to get the news to come to them (through notifications, smart collections, live clipping, etc.), and the cloud makes this possible.

Raúl Alba: News workflows require remote working by definition. Advances in IP streaming technologies and cloud deployments are making it easy for news gathering teams to collaborate in real time with everyone else in the organization.

Rick Young: News-producing broadcasters are harnessing cloud technology across multiple elements of the production chain, from content aggregation and live feed management through to playout workflows. We’re seeing major broadcasters utilize cloud-based playout to efficiently create multiple versions of a primary news channel, spinning up localized versions for distribution across digital, OTT and FAST platforms, with altered programming to fit cross-platform requirements and deliver tailored experiences for diverse audiences.

Stephen Tallamy: News has always led to remote access: journalists on location access the news archive to enrich their stories. Cloud hosting simply makes this more flexible.

Grigory Mindlin: We’re now seeing some options for cloud-based newsroom systems, switchers, automation and graphics systems. News workflows are all about 24/7, and working in the cloud can reduce any chance of downtime as well as make it far easier to work remotely. That brings huge benefits to people working in busy news stations.

Venugopal Iyengar: News-producers are experimenting with different service models on cloud, harnessing it to seamlessly spin up pop-up channels or to enable production control room (PCR) functionality. Customers are utilising cloud-enabled systems for content storage and archive, as well as deploying more flexible, commercially viable cloud-based playout disaster recovery to ensure business continuity and protect high-value live news content.

Do cloud and automation go hand-in-hand?

Geoff Stedman: By using a strong cloud automation platform, users can automate both the cloud infrastructure deployment as well as the application needed for each individual task. This means their operators can concentrate on using the system to create or shape the content, not spending time on infrastructure or workflow management.

Chris Kelly: I’m not sure “hand-in-hand” is the right term, but both have roots in improving efficiency. One improves the utilization of their people, where the other improves the utilization of equipment and infrastructure. With those efficiencies, the flexibility is there to put more people and resources into creating more compelling content.

Charles d’Autremont: Absolutely. Automation enables the seamless transfer of media files and associated metadata to the next stage in the chain. When ingesting direct to the cloud, content is automatically duplicated and stored in backup cloud storage which saves time and resources. Automation reduces manual intervention, and the cloud provides the ideal base to automate tasks.

Frederic Petitpont: If you work with cloud-native SaaS that has access to API and webhooks, yes, most of the time. The flexibility of the cloud allows for automated media logging and automated workflows to bring about overall business efficiencies. We’ve seen video ingest productivity gains of as much as 80 percent.

Raúl Alba: Both cloud and automation are important tools to increase efficiency, but they are not necessarily correlated. Obviously, moving workflows and media to the cloud makes it easier to access AI and ML tools that help automate processes to increase efficiency.

Miroslav Jeras: Yes. Leveraging automation and using the cloud, particularly in conjunction with remote monitoring solutions, has risen since the pandemic for obvious reasons. However, not all broadcasters/media companies are ready to use fully cloud-based solutions/workflows in their operations. These are time critical, with real-time complex graphics and if you throw UHD resolutions and HDR into the mix then you require a hybrid approach that provides flexibility and improved redundancy. 

Jonathan Smith: Only as hand in hand as automation sits for any given deployment strategy. Cloud does not fundamentally change the relationship and need for automation.  As has been the case for many years appropriate automation should be employed to drive efficiency, this is an operational strategy and not one of underlying architecture.

Stephen Tallamy: Moving to the cloud but doing the same things you have always done is probably not going to gain you much, and certainly is not opening up the full potential. One of the great advantages of moving to the cloud is the ability to call upon almost infinite processing resources, so it makes sense to automate as much of the routine as possible. An editor, for example, simply wants to cut pictures together not worry about camera formats, so use the power available in the cloud to provide resolution independent editing while automatically generating proxies if needed, along with canonical storage, archiving according to your business rules, and all the various deliverables.

Grigory Mindlin: Absolutely. We see a lot of automation systems and switchers moving to the cloud. At disguise we have some master control projects that we’re discussing with customers that want to automate and operate their entire production control and master control from the cloud.

Venugopal Iyengar: Cloud and automation can absolutely go hand in hand, provided the technology partner meets a customer’s design requirements accurately, including enabling real-time workflow integration. Cloud can also help fuel machine learning and artificial intelligence innovation, unlocking new functionality in media asset management (MAM) and post-production, such as AI-assisted editing, captioning, highlights creation for live sports, and quality checks and compliance.

Jon Finegold: Every media company is trying to generate more and better content with less or the same amount of resources where cloud technology and automation can help in that journey. There are increasingly more opportunities and tools available to enable automation using cloud technology. An area we see companies having success is using modern tools like AWS Lambda to quickly write workflows that connect off-the-shelf products together to automate workflows.

Which phase of the pipeline is the cloud best serving? Acquisition? Production? Delivery?

Geoff Stedman: The cloud is equally capable of serving all phases of the pipeline, but what we’ve seen work well for customers is to start at one end and move across as they gain cloud experience. Perhaps most important is to build a media production pipeline where content is moved to the cloud and processed in the cloud to avoid egress costs associated with moving content into and out of the cloud repeatedly.

Chris Kelly: Today, I believe delivery is the most well established. While not termed “cloud” as such, our customers have been centralizing delivery for more than a decade. Much the same way REMI parallels with the cloud for production, hubbed distribution shares similar parallels to cloud delivery, making the path to cloud adoption a cleaner and smoother transition.

Charles d’Autremont: There are solutions and tools for every part of the media chain now, so it’s difficult to choose a single phase that the cloud serves best. The cloud can provide value throughout, but it’s down to individual companies to ascertain how and why it’s the best option for them in any stage. From an ingest perspective, it is now possible to manage, encode, schedule ingest, and playback, whether that’s from a single stream or multiple ISOs.

Frederic Petitpont: Any phase of the pipeline, except if you are a colorist that has to work on original content, and if this content is of a very high bitrate (i.e., RED footage) — bandwidth and virtualization are key to providing a good experience. That being said, we have seen providers such as Flaneer and Parsec push the boundaries and provide 4:4:4 BT2020! So it would even be possible to work on HDR content remotely.

Raúl Alba: Cloud technologies are well suited to all phases of the production chain. Adoption is however easier on the “Edges” of the pipeline, that’s why many media companies started cloud adoption at the Media Delivery stage.

David Rosen: Being able to scale immediately without long procurement cycles and implementation delays is a huge advantage. Cloud is increasingly being leveraged in production and post production where teams are working remotely. It has enabled everyone involved to have a “central” place to work even when they are physically separated. Cloud based editing and cloud accessible content lakes are powering workflows that 5 years ago would have seemed impossible.

Julián Fernández-Campón: I’d say delivery first, as content can be distributed from the cloud quickly and more efficiently. Production second, for all related to localization, collaborations and even some kind of remote editing. And acquisition will be viable if the rest (or part) of the operation is done in the cloud too.

Jonathan Smith: The cloud is a means of deploying and consuming services in a well-connected, easily accessible and flexible way, this approach finds its appropriate use cases in all areas of the broadcast chain.

Rick Young: The best way to look at this is through a slightly different lens. In order to really enable effective cloud based production you need to solve the acquisition and delivery challenges first. At LTN, we are highly focused on these parts of the workflow as we know they will then drive more innovation and creativity when it comes to production workflows and associated tooling.

Stephen Tallamy: The question needs to be turned on its head. We need to stop thinking of production, post and delivery as separate silos but as a single continuum, achieved through seamless connectivity and high levels of automation in the cloud. This is where the real benefits lie.

Grigory Mindlin: Acquisition of content and users. Today, so much user content is in the cloud and a lot of things, especially live events, are all moving there. This is why we launched disguise drive to help and speed that adoption.

Venugopal Iyengar: Distribution was clearly the first to leverage the advantages of the cloud. The advantage of faster and wider reach with low CapEx and reduced entry barriers drove distribution for players big and small. More recently, production is seeing the increasing impact of partial or entire workflows moving to the cloud. Access to better technology and talent enabled by cloud-based workflows is improving production quality, processes and costs.

Jon Finegold: We see cloud being used all throughout the supply chain but more and more in aggregation and distribution workflows. If you need to get content sent to multiple places simultaneously, for example, leveraging the cloud provider’s massive bandwidth for that short period of time is a great use for cloud.

Industry Insights: Cloud adoption, pain points and security in broadcast

The post Industry Insights: Embracing cloud solutions for enhanced media production workflows appeared first on NewscastStudio.

In this Industry Insights roundtable, we speak with industry vendors to discuss the current pain points, the progress of cloud adoption by broadcasters and the significance of security in the journey towards cloud production.

We delve into the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead as broadcasters and media companies navigate the ever-changing landscape of cloud technology. 

Industry Insights: Embracing cloud solutions for enhanced media production workflows

What are the current pain points for cloud media production?

Jon Finegold, CMO, Signiant: The biggest challenge we see is around the economics — not just cloud storage, compute and egress costs but many underestimate the costs of homegrown solutions. Engineering teams lean towards building it themselves and the cloud providers offer many powerful tools to build anything you can dream up but media operations teams need speed and agility. Working with off-the-shelf SaaS solutions can help make costs much more predictable and, if designed right with modern APIs, still offer engineering teams the ability to extend and integrate products to meet specific business requirements. 

Venugopal Iyengar, deputy COO of digital, Planetcast International: The pain points of moving to the cloud include security issues, latency issues, bandwidth and storage capacity. However, technology providers with proven expertise and gold standard, proprietary infrastructure are building solutions that overcome all these hurdles, ensuring a greater sense of trust in cloud workflows among the media and entertainment community. It’s also important that cloud solution vendors deliver predictable project costs and seamlessly enable multiple plug-in integrations for cloud production and support workflows to enable a better customer experience with more transparent pricing.

Grigory Mindlin, general manager of broadcast, Disguise: We’re in a transitional period, companies are trying to switch to the cloud, but they also have a lot on prem. From a preparation and cost standpoint, many broadcasters may not be ready to move the whole system to the cloud yet, so lots of the current pain points are around working on prem and the cloud at the same time.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: Every organization will have a different answer to that. Certainly, many of our customers have very unique use cases. Ultimately, our main focus is on the production and delivery component. Of course, the cloud is absolutely essential where consumer delivery is concerned.

Stephen Tallamy, CTO, EditShare: Cloud technologies are now mature — that is not the issue. Where we still see resistance is in seizing the opportunities that the cloud brings to transform workflows and business processes. Whilst you can lift and shift to the cloud as a first step: you need, as a business, to re-evaluate what you need to do to serve your users creatively and cost-effectively, and develop the workflows that will achieve that. 

Rick Young, SVP and head of global products, LTN Global: There are two key pain points that I think are posing challenges for organizations across the value chain. One being the ability to reliably and predictably deliver low latency feeds into cloud environments, and the other being able to affordably deliver produced events and linear channels from cloud environments to final destinations. Both scenarios can be neatly handled with a mission critical global IP network.

Jonathan Smith, cloud solution area expert, Net Insight: There are three competing technical parameters that productions fight with, latency, quality and bandwidth.  Latency and bandwidth are often detracting factors when using a cloud environment, so maintaining quality in a cost-effective way can be a challenge.

Miroslav Jeras, CTO, Pebble: As a technology partner we understand one of the pain points is the potential for security breaches and the need to protect sensitive media content while it is stored and shared in the cloud. Additionally, the lack of standardization of cloud services can make it difficult for media production teams to manage live signals and minimize latency.

Julián Fernández-Campón, CTO, Tedial: There are many, but the two more important pain points are cost: How much I will have to pay for my cloud media operation and what are the variable costs, and efficiency? Will it work as seamlessly as on prem does?

David Rosen, VP of cloud applications, Sony Electronics: Two major challenges are moving big files around and finding them when you need them. Big files and unpredictable internet conditions make that a challenge. Solutions like Sony’s Ci Media Cloud reliably deal with these conditions by using file transfer acceleration, built in retry mechanisms and delivery notifications. 

Raúl Alba, director of solutions marketing, media and cloud, Avid: While media production in the cloud is gaining traction, there are still several pain points in increasing its adoption. These include not only in-house knowledge about cloud technologies to maintain production systems, but also media companies’ recent investments in on-prem technology and understanding or the true total cost of ownership of on-prem systems. There are also concerns about security and reliability and the complexity of hybrid workflows, particularly in the way media is ingested and egressed.

Frederic Petitpont, co-founder and CTO, Newsbridge: Discoverability of media assets is a large pain point. Many customers want the ability to search through their content in the same way they use Google. However most MAMs lack the full text (semantic) search capability to enable this.

Charles d’Autremont, CEO and founder, Cinedeck: Bandwidth limitations present challenges in remote work and disrupt workflow continuity, but external issues like this aren’t always easy to rectify. At the ingest end of the chain, it is important that delays are minimised so that editors can get to work straight away. By recording ISO streams directly to the codec required for editing and file delivery, it is possible to dramatically reduce the time taken from capture to initial editing.

Chris Kelly, solutions manager for production workflows, Ross Video: Pain points are mostly a function of expectations for how the system will behave. There’s an expectation that there will be delay; this isn’t like SDI or IP in an on-prem control room where signals are sent and received within a frame of delay, and I think that’s mostly accepted. Where it gets complicated is when you have on-set displays being fed by a cloud resource, and then fed to the ground only to be shot by a camera that’s then sent back to the cloud for a program output; that delay profile gets a lot trickier. 

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: The most often mentioned challenges with cloud media production are related to latency, especially for live production. Depending on location, limited connectivity to the cloud, particularly for moving large media files, can also be a bottleneck.

Where are we in terms of adoption?

Jon Finegold: Prior to 2020, we saw steady growth of cloud adoption year over year. Then when the pandemic hit we saw an explosion of cloud adoption with nearly five times the amount of data being moved into and out of the cloud on the Signiant Platform. Most media companies are now using the cloud in some way and most remain in a hybrid state with some workloads in the cloud cloud and some on-prem — a trend that looks like it will be the norm for the next several years.

Venugopal Iyengar: Increasingly, traditional broadcast customers are looking to migrate to hybrid models that build on the security of on-premise solutions with the flexibility and scalability of cloud. This approach can also have OpEx benefits over fully cloud based approaches. While we’re seeing media brands embrace hybrid models as a flexible and logical approach to cloud adoption, it’s worth noting that the technology is mature — cloud-based production, media management and distribution workflows are in action today, and proving to be successful on the global stage.

Grigory Mindlin: The world’s biggest broadcasters and media companies lead the way as they have the budgets to adopt first and take chances. I believe those companies are somewhere like a third of the way, meaning they’re doing some things in the cloud. It’s not ubiquitous, I can’t think of a single broadcaster that’s moved everything 100% onto the cloud, they’re all somewhere along the journey.

Sam Peterson: We’re in the early stages of cloud production, certainly compared with archive and asset management, which are much further developed. We’ve seen some experimentation with limited live workflows, such as production switching, but it’s early days for sure.

Stephen Tallamy: Inevitably we are in a time of transition. We have users who have enthusiastically embraced cloud workflows — including the remarkable power of cloud-hosted editing — while some see the cloud as a backup and archive for now, and others prefer to keep their media on premises. As production and post companies are challenged to find new solutions, so the advantages of the cloud will become more attractive.

Rick Young: Cloud workflows have evolved considerably over the past couple of years. Broadcasters are no longer just experimenting with new ways of working, they are embracing and deploying cloud-based solutions across real-word, live production environments. Customers are adopting cloud-enabled solutions to drive scale and flexibility, and increasingly, as a means of enabling efficient content versioning to cost-effectively reach fragmented audiences through global multi-platform digital distribution strategies.

Jonathan Smith: In recent years we have seen a massive increase in the number of live events produced by our customers; a lot of these increases have been associated with lower end productions.  In many cases these have been completed in a cloud environment, so the adoption has accelerated quite rapidly.

Miroslav Jeras: With the advent of remote productions, broadcasters are leveraging the cloud to increase operational efficiencies — since a reduction in costs is a natural by-product of no longer sending staff out on location. As experts in playout automation, we know there is also a desire to use virtual playout in the cloud for offering greater flexibility and spinning up pop up channels quickly. However, we also know that for now many broadcasters want to adopt hybrid workflows that leverage the use of legacy equipment on-premises whilst deploying cloud-based technologies.

Julián Fernández-Campón: It really depends on the use cases. Some use cases like localization, collaborations and remote production are widely used already, and other use cases that are quite dependent on the size of the media post-production are getting less adoption.

Raúl Alba: Many broadcasters have already adopted cloud technologies for some parts of the workflow, like distribution or playout, and now they are slowly expanding adoption to other parts of the workflow, like media production. Cloud adoption is not running at the same pace across all geographies, with North America and Northern Europe at the forefront of adoption.

Frederic Petitpont: Not where we would expect it to be. The hybrid approach of part-cloud and part on-premises remains popular with broadcasters. We know from the International Federation of Television Archives’ latest annual research that more than 35% of respondents fear the cloud will be more expensive, almost 30% believe they already have sufficient storage, so have no need for the cloud, and almost one-quarter of respondents had concerns about data protection.

Charles d’Autremont: The media and entertainment industry has seen a rapid growth in the adoption of cloud technology for all aspects of workflows. Production and post-production organisations have shifted to cloud because of its flexibility, scalability, and accessibility. The industry is still in the early stages of cloud adoption, but with the development of more solutions and tools, this will only increase and eventually become the norm.

Chris Kelly: I’d say we’re in the early adopters’ portion of the curve as we’re all watching things produced in the cloud, and most viewers wouldn’t know the difference. REMI has been around for several years, and many of those principles are at least parallel with cloud production which has I think accelerated some adoption. I think mass adoption is still in our horizon though it’s getting closer, and how we think about cloud will probably shift and adjust as we get closer to cloud production being a common reality. 

Geoff Stedman: Where we see a lot of adoption of the cloud for media production is with edit workflows. There has been a lot of innovation with cloud-based editing software so that an editor can access and edit content from anywhere without having to move content to a local computer.

Where is security in your customer’s mindset?

Industry Insights: Security and APIs in broadcast media asset management

Jon Finegold: Security concerns are at an all-time high and we hear it over and over from the market. In fact, it’s been a good growth driver for the Signiant Platform, driving companies to finally retire legacy solutions like FTP, harddrive workflows and older software. Customers require cloud and SaaS services that are built with a “security first” mind set.

Venugopal Iyengar: For an existing linear channel, security can require a paradigm shift when moving to cloud, as customers may need to re-validate compliance with security requirements. Security will always be a top priority for media companies, especially when handling unreleased content. Increasingly, it’s possible for cloud to be at least as secure as on-premise and hybrid production models.

Grigory Mindlin: Security is really important. As it moves to the cloud, there’s been even more secure protocols. Some of our customers have increased their security and adjusted how they provide access to their network for vendors accordingly.

Stephen Tallamy: Concern over security is perhaps the biggest reason for the reluctance to move further into the cloud. It is really important to develop very strict protocols not only to protect against intellectual property theft but also against commercial cyber threats like ransomware. That may mean doing things which are counter-intuitive: remote editing is a standard today, but post houses are finding they need to establish connections from the center out rather than opening up portals for editors to log themselves on.

Rick Young: Security has been at the forefront of the agenda for our customers dating back more than a dozen years when we first started enabling cloud based, IP transmission workflows. This continues to this day but with the right core technology and understanding of business needs, security can remain a concern but not a blocker for our customers.

Jonathan Smith: Security is at the front of most consensus customer minds.  As we move into the IP transport domain, especially when over public connectivity, the need to secure feeds and hand-offs is of the utmost importance.

Miroslav Jeras: Security is at the top of the priority list. The current political landscape means cyber security threats and concerns of being on the receiving end of a hacking attack are at an all-time high. Customers want security of their content, especially content they can monetize, and they want full transparency around what measures are in place for disaster recovery when placing a system in the cloud, where their on-premises infrastructure is also protected.

Julián Fernández-Campón: They are all aware that security is a must and they are always looking for solutions where security is embedded within the system and the vendor itself.

David Rosen: We’ve seen a dramatic shift in customers’ perceptions of the security of the cloud. There used to be a sense that if your content wasn’t in your own facility then you couldn’t be sure it was safe. Time and experience has taught us that on premise facilities are no safer than cloud infrastructures. 

Raúl Alba: Security is top of mind, and delegating this to third party vendors like cloud providers is not something all of them are ready to do. One interesting thing is that the security of the average broadcaster is less strict than the standard security in the public cloud. Cloud infrastructure vendors have a business because their solutions are secure.

Frederic Petitpont: Security in the mind of our customers relates to trust when working with SaaS. Pentesting can be quite expensive, and that’s also why they are working with SaaS. Security issues are much less likely with cloud editing workstations, and customers are able to use the RBAC (Role-based Access Control) authentication mechanism to provide access to content.

Chris Kelly: It was a lot harder (though not impossible) to hijack an analog signal. In recent years, there have been some high-profile and not-high-profile incidents that influenced the on-air product. I believe all customers see these incidents and recognize that we’re living in a new world where people don’t necessarily work within the four walls of their office, but that very special attention needs to be put in place to mitigate the security risk that’s introduced when you open that door.

Geoff Stedman: Security is always top of mind for our customers. All media companies want to protect their content as well as tightly control who has access to their content. Fortunately, there are well-architected methods for securing cloud-based content and workflows to ensure that work can be done by only those who are authorized.

Industry Insights: Embracing cloud solutions for enhanced media production workflows

The post Industry Insights: Cloud adoption, pain points and security in broadcast appeared first on NewscastStudio.

Recent updates to Ci include the ability to search files by timed text, saving users from the unnecessary hassle of sifting through files to find specific moments in videos; forensic watermarking to offer more security options; and improvements to commenting in MediaBox share links, allowing for more effective and specific feedback. Ci’s powerful Workflow app which enables a secure, automated VFX pull workflow by simply submitting an edit decision list (EDL), is expanding to include additional input and output format support. Mobile app enhancements will allow for bulk upload and download, the ability to upload files directly from a mobile device and download files to a device for offline viewing, as well as native Japanese language support. 

New pricing plans for Pro and Team online customers provide more storage and data transfers and new add-on options to expand usage gives users the flexibility to create a custom plan for their needs. The Team plan supports unlimited users for enhanced collaboration, at no additional cost.

Ci is also available as part of Sony’s new cloud-based platform, Creator’s Cloud, which provides enterprises in the Media & Entertainment industry, as well as individual creators and small teams, with secure access to efficient services and apps to maximize their production workflows.

Collaborations and Integrations

Recent alignment with Teradek accelerates camera-to-cloud workflows, while new integrations with industry leaders including Atomos allow for more camera compatibility and built in camera-to-cloud capabilities. Integration with Pomfort’s Silverstack Lab on-set and post-production software provides an on-premise solution for pushing content into Ci. Additionally, Deloitte will be a new strategic service provider.

Atomos
Collaboration with Atomos will enable Ci Media Cloud access directly from Atomos Cloud Studio – integrating Atomos’ pioneering CONNECT range of camera mounted monitor-recorders which can be attached to virtually any HDMI or SDI camera source.  This speeds up content creation, getting content into editors’ hands faster and making the files available for preview, commenting, review, and download. Files, live streams, proxies, and clips can be delivered to post-production teams directly from Ci, avoiding duplicate copies of files and redundant rendering. Flexible access models, unlimited user limits, and secure file sharing tools allow productions to quickly and easily bring new team members on to projects and work seamlessly together.

Pomfort’s Silverstack Lab
Pomfort, a leading provider of professional software applications for digital media assets and color management in motion picture, now supports direct upload to Ci from its dailies creation and data management software, Silverstack Lab. Reviewing footage for dailies and post-production process can be initiated more promptly with the remote file gathering capabilities offered by Ci.

Deloitte
Deloitte joins Ci’s list of strategic service providers. The organizations will also join together in the delivery of a comprehensive suite of media technology consulting and system implementation services for enterprise customers of Ci. This collaboration will allow companies to easily integrate Ci into their media supply chains and production workflows by leveraging Ci’s REST API.

The post Sony expands Ci Media Cloud with new features, integrations appeared first on NewscastStudio.

Sinclair aims to “democratize news acquisition” by enabling fast content delivery to production centers, Ernie Ensign, AVP, news technology and operations, noted in a release.

To achieve this, Sinclair is utilizing Avid’s MediaCentral news production platform paired with Sony cameras and camera to cloud solution, C3 Portal, with Marquis for complex workflow integrations.

Industry Insights: Navigating the future of media asset management in broadcast production

Ensign noted that the new system offers significant business and operational benefits including faster turnarounds and automatic delivery of structured metadata to newsrooms. By optimizing workflows and refining technologies across six stations, Sinclair is working toward accessing all content in near-real-time. Future steps will focus on improving compression efficiency, reducing bandwidth consumption, and enhancing metadata transparency.

A key aspect of Sony’s C3 Portal news workflow is the automatic preservation and enrichment of metadata from the origination point. The C3 Portal pushes metadata to the camera before shooting begins, maintaining it throughout the production process. Future workflows will also maintain rights information and genealogy automatically from creation to archiving.

A crucial component of the new workflow is the ability to send proxy video back to the news production center rapidly via 5G networks and Sony’s C3 Portal. The Marquis integration enables an ‘edit while record’ feature in Media Composer, allowing stories to be edited when the proxy file starts ingesting. 

“The pressure to deliver content and get editors cutting faster is relentless. The focus of Avid’s partnership with Sony and Marquis is to pioneer new ways to quickly ingest proxy media with metadata and fetch only the required high-resolution media in a sequence,” said Ray Thompson of Avid.

“The combined offering enables lens-to-first-edit workflows to flow from Sony cameras, through Sony’s C3 Portal leveraging Marquis software to deliver proxy media and camera metadata into Avid on-premises or cloud-deployed production solutions. This includes sending content into Avid Production Asset Management environments to simplify news and sports workflows or sending content directly into the Avid Edit On Demand SaaS platform in the cloud.”

The new workflow automates the extraction of sequence information from the Avid low-res proxy edit, resulting in a 90% reduction in 5G data transferred and network bandwidth required. The high-res content replaces the low-res content in the timeline, transforming news production.

The post Sinclair partners with Avid, Sony and Marquis on 5G acquisition workflow appeared first on NewscastStudio.

Eldridge weighs in on the challenges of migrating legacy applications to the cloud and how cloud-native applications must prioritize security from the very start, along with the current state of cloud adoption and the reason behind AWS’ popularity with broadcasters.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is being overlooked as broadcasters embrace the cloud for every part of their workflow and operation?

I think the biggest issue is legacy vendors lifting and shifting their standard applications to the cloud. Many broadcast media applications were traditionally in closed, isolated networks, and security was somewhat of an afterthought because the thinking was, well, this is isolated.

I think when you build cloud-native applications, security is one of the things that you bake in right from the very start. So anybody who’s just taking their on-prem applications and moving them up isn’t getting any benefit of that kind of new model.

Industry Insights: Security and APIs in broadcast media asset management

How is security different when comparing cloud with on-prem?

I think there’s an argument to be made that public cloud is more secure than private cloud or private data centers, assuming that you follow the best practices.

Whenever somebody is assigned a permission, they get the absolute minimum permissions needed to do that task. Those kinds of practices didn’t tend to happen on premise or in private data centers. It was pretty common for an application or a server to have a default user and a password. That doesn’t fly in the cloud.

What additional levels of security do broadcasters need to keep in mind with the cloud?

Almost all big enterprise customers at this point insist on support for single sign-on platforms. If your application can’t tie into the customer’s enterprise-wide authentication system, then it’s just not going to work. 

What do you see as the largest security concerns today?

I think the biggest thing that our customers are concerned about is security of their content itself. And so most of them, if not all, want to own the storage platform in which their content is stored. They want to own how access is granted to those storage locations. They want to audit exactly who’s accessing it and why, and they want the ability to be able to revoke access at any point.

All of those things are pretty hard to do with a traditional on-premise system, whereas with a proper cloud security model, you can just revoke someone’s privileges and they’re out of your storage locations.

The other part is just general hacking fears of ransomware attacks or phishing attacks. These systems tend to be isolated from public interfaces, so there is a mechanism to get into your stiff system, but it’s completely separate from your email services or your other file storage services.

Where are we on cloud adoption?

Historically, the trepidation was, “Can it do what I need, and is it secure?” I think we’re past that, and I think the vast majority of customers have seen what is possible and have seen the increased security that you get with cloud if you do it right.

I would say that the challenge now is the skillsets broadcasters have to migrate from broadcast operations or broadcast engineering people to DevOps and cloud engineers. 

In your view, what is the most significant piece of the cloud that is currently missing?

That’s a good question. I can’t think of a use case now that I haven’t seen demonstrated on the cloud, whether it’s live production, media processing, or running playout channels, even down to complex movie production, done completely distributed.

So it’s hard to say that there’s a technology missing at this point.

Is there any concern with the fact that this relies on two or three public cloud vendors and that there’s not enough diversity in endpoints?

There’s definitely that concern I think in the market, and I mean it’s quite easy to argue that there is one dominant public cloud vendor and then other options.

I think there’s a desire for more choice and quality there just because nobody wants the whole world to end up with a single platform they run on. Having said that, I mean AWS is typically the first name out of customers’ mouths when they talk about the cloud.

Is there a reason AWS is typically preferred by broadcasters? 

I think just the maturity of the platform really. I mean part of it is first mover advantage, but the benefit that comes with first mover advantage is they’re way ahead in their innovation curves in terms of capabilities.

That said, there are things like AI tools or content analysis tools. We have multiple customers who are moving content around in order to take advantage of those tools. So definitely, there’s a move to multi-cloud, use the best tools where the best tools are, but really they’re the sort of leading edge customers as opposed to the majority. That introduces another whole set of interesting security challenges as well as soon as you get multi-cloud.

What else should broadcasters be considering with cloud and security workflows right now?

If you think your broadcast network is completely isolated from your corporate network, it’s probably not. There’s probably a path somewhere.

So encryption is obviously a big one, and making sure that where you store the content has a high level of encryption, making sure that when the content’s being moved around in transit, it’s still encrypted. There are multiple customers who are doing things like adding DRM or watermarks to the content so that if it does get out, then they have a traceback mechanism. 

There’s the default level of encryption that gets turned on when you create an S3 bucket and is a perfectly good example of, “It’s probably good enough.” Most customers like to do things like use their own keys. So even if that encrypted content was copied to somewhere else without the key, you actually can’t play it anyway. To some degree, it depends on the content that is being dealt with and where it is in its lifecycle. If it’s 20-year-old TV seasons that are being published to a VOD platform, you are going to be less paranoid than if it’s pre-release movie content. So to some degree that’s nice because you can apply the level of security that’s applicable to the value of the content that you’re dealing with.

The other one is about threat detection and proactive monitoring. Not waiting to find out, hey, something just happened, but actually knowing either when it’s happening or when it looks like something is about to happen. That’s becoming much more prevalent.

Then the only other one that I wanted to touch on is the idea that the process of evaluating vendors or customers being able to know who’s safe, gathering around a standard way of doing that would benefit everybody.

How do you see AI and machine learning continuing to be embraced by broadcasters?

I think the use cases that I’ve seen AI and ML being used in media today are things like, show me where the ad breaks are. Show me where the clock is or show me where the scene changes, those kinds of basic functions.

Beyond that, certainly, we have some customers who are using it pretty heavily for content compliance. So you run it through AI, tell me where all the nudity, violence, bad language, all the stuff that you worry about for international distribution. And most customers are using that to inform operators instead of replacing operators.

I think as we go forward, that whole process can probably be automated as people gain confidence in the results of the AI analysis. We’ve seen people toying with automatically creating highlight reels from sporting events. So I think as we go forward, it won’t replace highly produced quality content, but there’s a subset of content that doesn’t need a person sitting and making.

How do you look to incorporate new technologies like AI into your product stack?

We have integrations with all of the major AI tools and really what that does for our customers is allow them to pick the one that’s most appropriate for the use case that they’re trying to do. 

We actually had a customer recently that did a really interesting thing. They found that when they used to make a particular show on television, you’d always get the kind of catch up and here’s what you saw before the break and here’s what you saw after the break, that kind of repetition. And that was primarily to make a program fill the slot it was designed for without shooting more content.

Now as soon as people start bingeing that show, it becomes extremely repetitive because you’re just seeing the same thing repeatedly without ad breaks. So they actually ran their library through an AI tool to remove all that repetition. 

The shows were much shorter, but the retention of viewers was much higher because they didn’t have to put up with that stuff. So there’s a good use case for, “Hey, we got more eyeballs because we processed the content in this way.”

The post Q&A: Navigating cloud security challenges in the broadcast and media industry appeared first on NewscastStudio.

As part of our Industry Insights series, leading vendors gathered to discuss the current challenges and explore the potential of cloud-based MAM systems along with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to address these pain points. Central to the discussion is the importance of seamless collaboration, navigating the complex storage options landscape, managing high operational costs for new formats, and prioritizing flexibility and openness in MAM systems.

The roundtable participants acknowledge that cloud adoption for MAM and storage has gained significant traction, primarily due to the coronavirus pandemic, which emphasized the need for remote access and greater flexibility. However, professionals in the industry often operate within storage silos and face challenges in unlocking the full value of stored assets for distribution and monetization. As a solution, hybrid cloud models, which combine both on-premise and cloud storage, are emerging as a practical and efficient approach for many organizations.

In addition to embracing cloud solutions, the impact of AI and ML on broadcast workflows is becoming increasingly apparent.

Monetizing MAM: How to make your stored content work for you

These technologies have the potential to streamline operations through improved metadata management, automatic transcription and translation, and intelligent indexing of content. This allows media professionals to focus on creating and delivering high-quality content in a competitive market. As the industry evolves, leveraging these cutting-edge technologies will be essential for success and maintaining a competitive edge.

Industry Insights: Security and APIs in broadcast media asset management

Make sure to also read part two of our roundtable which dives into cloud security, APIs and current MAM offerings. 

What are the current pain points in broadcast storage and MAM?

Sunil Mudholkar, VP of product management, EditShare: Current pain points I think are focused on making collaboration easier across locations that are more dispersed than ever. Whether this is performant, remote access to media or keeping NLE projects in sync across tools and creators/producers.

Jon Finegold, CMO, Signiant: The sheer variety of storage options and MAM vendors make it a very confusing landscape. There are so many different choices between on-prem and cloud, different tiers of storage, file and object storage, etc. IT teams have a lot of flexibility to balance cost and performance but that choice also creates complexity.

Toni Vilalta, director of product development, VSN: New formats, such as 4K or 8K, make the operational costs too high. With cloud or hybrid storage architectures, MAM systems should provide support for critical security services like encryption or cryptographic protocols. Another challenge of MAM systems is to be able to manage enormous amounts of content in storage, adding AI capabilities for automatic cataloging.

Sam Peterson, COO, Bitcentral: There is no “one size fits all approach” because customers and the industry as a whole will have varying business requirements and they’re constantly evolving depending on their needs and the market landscape. For some in the industry, there is also a resistance to change, which is undermining successful projects. Changing these attitudes can have a positive impact going forward.

Andy Shenkler, CEO and co-founder, TMT Insights: As people have shifted their supply chains to become predominantly cloud based, their assets continue to exist in a both a legacy on-prem storage model as well as single or multi-cloud. Processing of content must be co-located with your assets in order to be economically viable. Large content libraries are not easily migrated, and often times require clean-up before being viable for automated processing, all of which comes at a cost of both money and time.

Aaron Kroger, product marketing manager for media workflows, Dalet: Many people find themselves with aging on-premises infrastructure managed by an out-of-date monolithic MAM that is lacking the connectivity and scalability they need to achieve their business goals. Replacing this equipment comes at a high cost and leads people towards the cloud. While the cloud can alleviate many of the current pain points, it’s not without creating some new ones and raising questions such as what are the true costs, how do I migrate all my data, and is my data secure?

Savva Mueller, director of business development, Telestream: In this constantly shifting market, media companies do not want to be locked into any one vendor’s solution, and they need their content to be accessible to all of their business systems instead of being stored in a proprietary format. For these reasons, they are looking for more open approaches to asset management and storage.

Stephanie Lone, director of solutions architecture in media and entertainment, AWS: While our M&E customers are in varying stages of their digital transformation journeys, common pain points include: operating in storage silos; navigating the sheer volume of assets that require storage; unlocking the value of these stored assets for distribution and monetization; and localizing content for broader distribution. Presently, many of our customers operate multiple lines of business that use different MAM and storage solutions, making it challenging to uncover and unlock the value of all the assets across their enterprise. Often, they find that their on-premises storage capacity can’t accommodate the growing volume of video footage being acquired.

Melanie Ciotti, marketing manager, Studio Network Solutions: Lack of speed, collaboration, ease-of-use, and organization are repeat workflow offenders, and creative teams are looking to solve those shortcomings when they set out to find their first shared storage and MAM solution. What they don’t always consider is the flexibility of that system, which becomes an issue after it’s been in use for some time. Accessing the shared storage and MAM system remotely, adding users easily and cost-effectively, and scaling the system as your team grows are all pain points we see when well-established teams come to us to fix their existing storage or MAM workflow. 

Geoff Stedman, CMO, SDVI: Users must select an archive format, a tape format, a tape library and drives, and a hierarchical storage management system. They also must continually keep track of milestones such as hardware and software end-of-life, and tape format or drive migrations. MAM systems were typically deployed to manage what assets were stored where, but most have significant gaps in metadata, making it difficult to find what a user is looking for.

Julián Fernández-Campón, CTO, Tedial: The physical location of files and the obsolescence of hardware leading to hardware replacement and content migration from time to time.

Alex Grossman, VP of product management and marketing, Perifery, a division of DataCore: One of the most common pain points we hear is the overall complexity in setting and using most MAM systems, and the on-going difficulty in configuring for change.

James Fraser, VP of U.S. sales, Newsbridge: The biggest pain point that exists is undoubtedly content discovery. Every prospect and customer we speak to highlights the poor searchability within their existing infrastructure as a real headache that costs them time and money. Poor searchability limits them from not being able to find assets for long periods of time or worse, purchasing content from competitors that they know they own, but simply can’t locate.

Another pain point is how much they rely on archivists to be the internal knowledge base for locating content. They need a solution that enables journalists and content creators to be truly autonomous and find what they want. Furthermore, content not being centralized is a challenge. We commonly see content stored in multiple locations and not accessible to everyone. Finally, expensive SLAs are an issue. Customers are fed up with paying thousands of dollars and still having to wait for a call or email back from vendors to help them with an issue. This is why we introduced intercom, a direct communication line into our operations and support team that has a response time of under two minutes.

Where are we in terms of cloud adoption for MAM and storage?

Sunil Mudholkar: I think it’s practically in the main line at this point. Virtually every opportunity we are involved with has some sort of cloud component whether it be MAM or storage or both. Use cases range from simple archival to full cloud editing.

Jon Finegold: On the MAM side, it seems most deployments are still on-prem but there are some innovative approaches to media management leveraging cloud technology. Media Engine isn’t a MAM, but it does leverage the power of the Signiant Platform and cloud technology to offer lightweight media management capabilities in a disruptive way.

Roberto Pascual, head of sales, VSN: The adoption of cloud technology in terms of MAM and storage has been accelerated for the last four years, especially after the Covid-19 outbreak, and it will continue as we discussed a few months ago on FIAT/IFTA World Conference.

Sam Peterson: MAM has generated more interest in recent times, and we are seeing more and more media companies make the transition to the cloud. This was accelerated due to the pandemic, but its evolution in a short space of time has really helped the whole value chain thrive in this new era for broadcasting.

Andy Shenkler: Cloud adoption for core MAM services has finally reached a crescendo and most go-forward activities now are being done in the cloud. Along with that adoption is a cloud-first model for storage, but trepidation still exists around mismanaged costs and lack of control. There is still emotional comfort that comes from having a “fixed” based cost model for storage that has been the predominant way on-prem storage has been thought of for so long.

Aaron Kroger: The industry is well on its way to transitioning to the cloud, but it’s happening in steps. Having a cloud-native solution such as Dalet Flex that can also be deployed on-premises or hybrid, is a popular option allowing for the best of both worlds. There are still some links in the chain that have not migrated to the cloud so a hybrid solution can create better connectivity to those today and be ready for the transition to a fully cloud-hosted business in the future.

Savva Mueller: Pre-2020, cloud adoption was still fairly low. While many customers were investigating hosting critical systems and storage in the cloud, very few had near-term plans to do so, and even fewer had already made the move. The Covid pandemic accelerated the move to cloud storage and cloud processing. This was most pronounced in North America. Other regions have seen a slower adoption.

Stephanie Lone: Challenges remain in defining the best practices for how the industry should build media supply chains for enhanced localization when it comes to MAM and storage. To this end, the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) Accelerator Initiative Cloud Localization Blueprint is working to standardize practices and formats to ultimately empower the entire industry to save time and money.

Melanie Ciotti: The cloud is everywhere—it’s on our phones; it’s in our workflows; it’s omnipresent. And while the cloud has made its way into a majority of broadcast and post-production workflows across the nation (and around the world), very rarely is the cloud managing 100% of that workflow. It is much more common to see a hybrid approach with both on-premise and cloud storage working together—which truly offers the best of both worlds.

Geoff Stedman: Today, the cloud has become a central location for media storage, as users have become much more comfortable with the reliability, security, and affordability of the cloud for content archives. In many cases, what started out as a secondary, or backup, location for content storage turned into the primary storage location as people discovered the ease with which they could access and collaborate on content from anywhere. 

Julián Fernández-Campón: Storage in the cloud has been adopted for some specific use cases, but not widely. Often a second, low-res copy is used for redundancy or native storage for workflows that are executed in the cloud, such as massive distribution or collaboration workflows.

Alex Grossman: Many organizations adopted a public cloud first initiative in 2018 or 2019 and archive was the most often preferred usage model. News and live broadcast saw the adoption of production/editing, but there has been a retraction due to unpredictable costs.

James Fraser: The cloud is finally becoming the new norm for small-to-medium sized media companies. The sports industry has been an innovation ambassador of transitioning to the cloud for media asset management. Large media companies are still not fully embracing the cloud for media asset management. Many are adopting hybrid models thanks to edge computing, which offers a more gradual transition path. There are a few challenges for major media and public companies to overcome with cloud adoption, such as data sovereignty regulations, security, vendor lock-in, skills gaps, existing data center investments and the capex and opex business model. 

What benefits come from moving to the cloud?

Sunil Mudholkar: MAM and storage can become easier to access for clients in varying sites. Utilizing tiered cloud storage for both block and object based, in an intelligent manner can be very cost effective for those that like OPEX style financial models with predictable infrastructure/software expenses. 

Jon Finegold: Elasticity is probably the biggest benefit, being able to manage surges. If you have lots of projects at once or a big influx of assets at one time, the cloud gives you tremendous elasticity. There are cases where cloud can be a lot more economical, but that depends on a lot of factors and your use case.

Roberto Pascual: Firstly, the cloud allows maximizing flexibility as well as minimizing capital investment in terms of business, which is significantly appreciated in times of upheaval or constant adaptation to new viewer demands. Secondly, cost is high but evolution of hybrid solutions Finally, there is a final reason to think about since maintenance and security might be one of the unexpected benefits from moving to the cloud.

Sam Peterson: There are many benefits for broadcasters and other media companies including greater flexibility and reliability. Cloud also enables a level of scalability that would be otherwise unaffordable through on-premise storage. Moving to the cloud provides the added capabilities regarding remote access to content and tools, which allows the industry greater opportunity to work more collaboratively.

Andy Shenkler: A clear benefit from moving to the cloud is the ability to scale dynamically without needing to invest ahead of an activity or needing to procure capacity for peak loads that become costly and sit idle for the majority of the time. In addition, flexibility around business continuity without needing to stand-up complete duplicate physical footprints certainly changes the mindset about your business and its options.

Aaron Kroger: Moving your MAM to the cloud enables you to have a highly accessible, auto-scalable, metadata-rich library that will decrease your TCO while increasing your collaboration and ultimately, your revenue. Being able to easily access content from anywhere allows you to reuse content already captured in new and creative ways or even directly monetize it. With cloud storage, you can automatically scale your storage volume and tier as you need, allowing you to find the correct balance between storage costs vs retrieval time.

Savva Mueller: The trend toward remote work has been a major factor in the increased adoption of cloud services since cloud services are designed to be accessible anywhere. Hosting systems and storage in the cloud also provides operational benefits including built-in business continuity through data replication and the reduction of organizations’ data center footprints and associated costs.

Stephanie Lone: Elasticity is one key benefit, as providing live coverage of tent-pole events such as the Super Bowl and March Madness to large-scale audiences requires the ability to quickly spin up resources on-demand. The cloud enables content providers to deploy hundreds, or even thousands, of servers in just minutes and then promptly spin them back down as their traffic patterns return to normal. Cost savings is another cloud advantage, as it alleviates customers’ need to wade through the lengthy hardware purchasing and provisioning processes required to house data centers, which typically takes months to plan, acquire, install, and provision.

Melanie Ciotti: When done right, a cloud or hybrid cloud workflow can be a major catalyst for productivity and creativity. The cloud can enable better remote editing, archival, file sharing, mobile workflows, and so much more for a production team. No hardware needed can also be a benefit.

Geoff Stedman: Companies of all sizes are realizing that they can become more efficient and agile when they take advantage of cloud technologies. With content in the cloud, it can be easily standardized into a common format, and the metadata can be enriched using cloud-based AI tools. Moving their archives and media processing to the cloud, even at relatively smaller scale, makes monetizing that content for the plethora of distribution platforms now available much easier and faster.

Julián Fernández-Campón: Benefits include redundancy, which is provided naturally for the storage service, scalability, and accessibility.

Alex Grossman: While most would say OpEx vs CapEx, the real benefits are derived from taking advantage of the apps and services provided by the cloud including AI/ML functionality.

James Fraser: A key benefit is flexibility. Cloud users are not limited by input-output on hardware. Opex and sustainability are additional advantages of the cloud. Newsbridge is running AI indexing on CPUs instead of GPUs, reducing cloud processing pipelines and media transit weight by 80%. Our approach provides significant cost efficiencies to our customers. In addition, it enables organizations to reduce their energy consumption.

How are AI and machine learning impacting broadcast workflows?

Sunil Mudholkar: AI is making it easier to add value to content through extended metadata with great accuracy and volume, reducing the need for manual resources. It’s also speeding up aspects of the remote workflow with features like automatic transcription.

Jon Finegold: There are some very practical applications of machine learning and AI that are in play today. One example is Signiant’s use of machine learning in its intelligent transport protocol to determine the most efficient way to move data over a network at any moment in time. There’s certainly a lot of buzz about using artificial intelligence to automatically translate content, to tag content, identify images in videos but that mostly seems in the early experimental phase but we’re on the cusp of some of that capability being used in more widespread ways.

Toni Vilalta: Thanks to AI, human tasks can be focused on supervising the metadata generated automatically, instead of wasting time and resources in manual cataloging. The automatic transcription and translation can save a lot of time too, and the closed captions or subtitle files can be easily generated, delivering packages to traditional broadcast or new multiple non-linear platforms. With machine learning capabilities, broadcast and media professionals can train their own archiving systems and create their own term structure, without worrying about the type of content or the localization of their companies. 

Sam Peterson: AI and machine learning have the potential for significant positive impacts on broadcast workflows as they are helping broadcasters make more informed decisions. One application where broadcasters are using AI and ML technology today is for intelligent indexing of content. These techniques are also improving workflow efficiencies which is crucial in today’s demanding market, allowing broadcasters time to focus on creating new products/productions.

Andy Shenkler: At the moment, the machine learning activities around broadcast workflows still remain heavily focused on reducing repetitive human tasks (i.e. identifying commercial breaks, credit points, augmented QC functions), not to say there isn’t other more sophisticated processes being deployed. As both the technology and the skillsets of the people leveraging that technology improve, we will begin to see greater adoption around compliance editing, localization and real-time enriched consumer experiences.

Aaron Kroger: AI enables you to identify what is in your content, what was said, who is in it, what logos are shown, and more. Today, this also allows you to increase the automation of your existing workflows. With richer metadata, you can trigger automated processes to send those clips to the next step in the process and the relevant audiences. 

Savva Mueller: Currently speech to text is being widely used, particularly to provide closed captioning and subtitles for content. The quality of these services has improved dramatically over the past decade. Visual recognition is not being used heavily today, both because of its costs and its effectiveness. Going forward, we expect that visual recognition services will become more effective, and that systems will provide more efficient ways to implement these services to reduce their costs.

Melanie Ciotti: AI and ML continue to astound me. ChatGPT and friends are making waves in every industry with well-written, well-researched content for virtually any purpose, and AI can add relevant metadata tags to video clips in ShareBrowser MAM at the click of a button, making decades’ worth of untagged media searchable within the media asset management system. AI is the present and future of broadcast workflows, and I’m waiting with bated breath to see what it does next.

Geoff Stedman: The use of AI and machine learning is still in its infancy for broadcast workflows, although it is starting to have a positive impact. One way that AI tools are being used is to analyze video and audio content to extract information about the content that can be used to enrich the metadata for those assets. AI is also being used to perform automated QC reviews, with results that then guide operators for manual reviews of only questionable points.

Julián Fernández-Campón: The impact of AI and machine learning is increasing in some use cases such as video analysis, image recognition, speech to text, but there are many features that currently exist as a result of AIs based on GPT 3 (Open AI) and others that claim to be able to do summaries, create pictures or videos.

Alex Grossman: The impact has been minimal compared to where it will go. As applications take advantage of AI/ML, the efficiencies provided will drive faster adoption.

James Fraser: AI is bringing overall business efficiencies to broadcasters and media companies. Thanks to automatic multimodal AI indexing, our clients are reporting improved time to market, reduced manual/human logging requirements and general improved efficiency of sourcing, editing and distributing content to both internal and external stakeholders.

Industry Insights: Security and APIs in broadcast media asset management

Make sure to also read part two of our roundtable which dives into cloud security, APIs and current MAM offerings. 

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