The Virtual World of Playout

The International Association of Broadcasting Manufacturers released forecasts predicting that the global broadcast and media technology industry market will be worth $44.3 billion in 2017.

The report is based on the most comprehensive data model ever produced for the broadcast and media technology industry, encompassing over 2,500 companies that specialise in software, hardware as well as service providers.

The figures consider areas such as acquisition and production; post production; content and communication infrastructure; audio; storage; system automation and control; playout and delivery; test, quality control and monitoring; and services.

The results provide interesting food for thought. What is driving this growth?

One major development in broadcast technology is the continued shift from dedicated hardware to software running on standard platforms. At IBC this year, nearly every major vendor of hardware products announced their plans to provide software-only variants of the products they offer.

The possibilities enabled by a truly software defined broadcast environment are a very exciting prospect for the industry (and potentially lucrative for the winners, destructive for the losers). Channels can be deployed very rapidly and changed dynamically, even in real-time. To take full advantage of this software model we also need the underlying infrastructure to be highly automated and programmable – compute, storage and connectivity needs to be flexibly provisioned and operated.

The public cloud platforms lead the way today in this area and private cloud implementations are gaining parity. The broadcast industry needs to embrace and shape these new environments to our particular needs.

The past year has also been marked by significant R&D activity behind the scenes by vendors, and experimentation by broadcasters and service providers. We are not yet at the point where that translates into radically different channel economics. However, over the next few years we can expect to see the technology mature and our ability to harness it increase dramatically. This will alter the financial basis of channel creation and operation significantly.

As the components of a playout chain become software objects, the ability to interact and integrate with other related software and services increases simultaneously. This should allow us to innovate and iterate ideas more quickly than ever before. The flip side is that we must maintain very high levels of channel resilience and so interoperability between software services needs a level of standardisation to be widely used.

It is also becoming increasingly viable to run components for playout on virtual machines in datacentres or in a public cloud over IP networks. The promise of leveraging the huge investments being made by facilities and cloud providers is very compelling indeed. Any major vendor can probably show you a sneak preview of their virtualised product implementation and every broadcaster or service provider should be investing serious time and effort into evaluation and experimentation in this area.

But would most premium broadcasters be prepared to switch their live channels across to these environments right now? Probably not. However, this will change relatively quickly as industry experience and confidence builds. Those who are too slow to take advantage of what this future offers may be criticised just as much as those who jump too early.

The on-demand infrastructure which used to serve catch-up and similar content has also evolved rapidly and continuously over recent years. This contrasts greatly with the typical playout environment and linear channel output. As we move to a more software-defined playout implementation we can more closely align those two worlds and through experimentation decide how integrated, converged or otherwise the audience would like them to be going forward.

The future of the broadcast technology industry looks bright. Software-defined playout is helping to lead the charge.

Steve Plunkett, Chief Technology Officer.