Why Broadcasters Should Have Their Heads in the Cloud

The promise of the cloud is indeed very compelling. Rather than invest in your own small fixed capacity technology estate with all the environmental and operational overhead that entails, simply buy what you need, when you need it, from one of the large global cloud providers such as Microsoft or Amazon and piggyback on the multi-billion dollar investments they are making instead.

A great number of enterprises, large and small, are doing just that. Migrating their IT services or building new ‘cloud native’ application environments on these public platforms. But what about broadcasting? Aren’t we different, with our real-time synchronous video feeds, huge files, highly deterministic processing needs and high value content? Yes and no. The move to IT systems and IP distribution has been underway in broadcasting for some time (and still has a long way to go), but parts of our broadcast and media workflows are already suitable for cloud deployment and others will become so in the near future.

This blog is the first in a series of three that will explore why the cloud matters for broadcasting, where it can be used appropriately (and where it cannot), and how you can go about doing it.

Before delving into the specifics of which broadcast and media services make sense for the cloud, it is probably useful to clarify some terminology and definitions first. The ‘cloud’ can mean different things to different people and because it is a term currently in vogue, it is being slapped on to all sorts of services (new and old) with wild abandon. Here are some useful tests that can be used to assess the ‘cloudiness’ of a service:

Can you pay as you go?
One of the key commercial benefits of cloud delivered services is the ability to pay for the service based on usage and with little or no upfront investment. This is not to say that all services are priced at a flat rate – typically either discounts or guaranteed performance require term or volume commitments that themselves require upfront fees. But if a service does not offer a basic pay as you use commercial structure, then its cloud credentials are somewhat dubious.

Can you drive it yourself?
Renting a car is a very different proposition to hiring a cab even though the basic needs they serve are the same. In a cloud delivered service you should typically have the option of driving your needs directly from the platform, should you choose to do so. A good test is whether you can access and interact with a flexible set of APIs and self-serve. A well-defined cloud service should be highly programmable.

Does it provide significant scaling capabilities?
One of the reasons for going to a third party for a service or infrastructure is that they can provide better scaling than you could build yourself. This removes the traditional risks associated with dimensioning a private fixed capacity estate that will almost always be either under-utilised (and therefore wasteful) some of the time or over-utilised (and therefore unable to meet business demands) during peak usage periods. Rapid up- and down-scaling support should be considered essential in a cloud service.

None of the above are useful indicators for the quality of such a service of course – price, performance, utility, flexibility and security are key additional metrics to be considered, but they at least help qualify the use of the term cloud.

What about private and hybrid clouds? The public cloud providers have demonstrated the advantages of highly programmable, software driven infrastructure and those same techniques are equally attractive attributes in a private estate. Initiatives such as OpenStack and CloudStack (to name two of the more prominent) promise many of the advantages in terms of flexibility and control of cloud infrastructure in a private setting and certainly have a role to play in the future.

Going back to the original question then, what role does the cloud play in broadcasting? Potentially a very significant one. The suitability of the cloud as an operating environment depends greatly upon the nature of the broadcast service and its current technology options. The next two parts of this blog will explore this in more detail: first of all, we’ll look at the area of media services (receiving, verifying, transforming, storing and delivering media assets); then we’ll look at playout (the scheduling, presentation and publication of broadcast channels). So check back in with us next week for the next instalment.

Steve Plunkett, Chief Technology Officer.