What Is Media Orchestration?

User interface from Harmonic Polaris
A new category has appeared in the marketing lexicon of playout automation and media management companies, namely ‘media orchestration’. It describes a process that will play an increasingly significant role as media organisations make the inevitable transition from baseband (SDI) to IP network technology.
“Broadly, media orchestration describes both the control of playout and media management but also addresses the management, configuration, and monitoring aspects that relate to content delivery,” explains Andy Warman, director of product management, media servers and storage at Harmonic - one of the company's using the term.
“Automation deals with accepting schedules, maintaining device control, and ensuring first that media is available and playable at the right time, and then, after playout, that it can be reconciled and monetized,” says Warman. “However, the ability to add new channels and features, reconfigure what is already in place, track the emergence of issues, move forward with diagnosis, and quickly fix any problems is also key to health of each channel. Media orchestration considers all these aspects of playout and media delivery.”
Another company making play of the term is Imagine Communications.
“While the specifics of the transition [to IP] are still being defined, maintaining the integrity of all content being created, processed and distributed remains a non-negotiable requirement,” explains Glenn LeBrun, Imagine's VP of product marketing.

The Magellan SDN Orchestrator from Imagine Communications
He highlights solutions like the Magellan SDN Orchestrator which “help facilitate a seamless integration of IP technology with legacy systems, protecting existing infrastructure investments while maintaining operational workflow integrity in the hybrid SDI/IP environment.” Ideally, says LeBrun, this ‘orchestration’ is invisible to the operator; “No new training or expensive ‘forklift’ system upgrade – during a phased transition to an IP infrastructure.”
Harmonic brands its range of media orchestration products as Polaris. These tools already uses IP connectivity for all control elements. Warman says it's the default way to control Harmonic video server and encoder products.
“We provide serial and GPI control to provide legacy support on both the video I/O devices and on Polaris automation systems. Once the dependence of these legacy interfaces can be removed, and pure IP control can be used, users are ready to take the first logical step to virtualizing playout. That said, there are other issues that need to be overcome in order to migrate control to the cloud.”

Harmonic's Polaris Live
The bigger issue is that the industry is in the early stages of its transition to off-the-shelf IP playout automation platforms that do not require dedicated hardware, but the vast majority of systems will continue to need some form of dedicated hardware for some time.
“Ties to dedicated hardware can stem from the need to interface to existing SDI infrastructure, requirements for serial and GPI control, and the use of house timecode sources and reference to sync automation and playout systems in the air chain,” explains Warman. “Even some cutting-edge solutions need GPU acceleration to perform on otherwise standard IT hardware. These limitations prevent broadcasters from taking a true datacenter-based and/or visualized approach to handling the playout chain. Consequently, appliance-type solutions — for which the vendor supplies the computer, configures it with add on cards, and warrants its performance — will be dominant for years to come.”
One issue in shifting control to the cloud is that of timing and, in particular, how to meet frame-accuracy requirements. Challenges in this area remain, but an end is in sight that could allow for a common time base in a virtual infrastructure. The next hurdle is that of managing control itself. Already, various de facto standard mechanisms and protocols (such as VDCP, CII, SCTE 104/35) exist to solve problems but typically they do not address the needs of the air chain itself and all of its sub-elements.
“If a number of these needs cannot be bundled together, then vendors create proprietary control mechanisms to achieve their goals,” warns Warman. “Thus, while virtualizing control is possible today, achieving a standards-based approach remains challenging.”
You might also like...
Remote Contribution At NAB 2025
The technology required to get high quality content from the venue to the viewer for live sports production remains an area of intense research and development, so there will be plenty of innovation and expertise in this area on the…
Production Network Technologies At NAB 2025
As NAB approaches we pick up the key theme of hybrid production network infrastructure that combines SDI-IP network infrastructure & data center model compute resources, with a run-down of what to expect from vendors on the show floor.
KVM & Multiviewer Systems At NAB 2025
It’s NAB time again. Once again, as we head towards the show, we will take a look at the key product announcements across a range of key technology and workflow areas. We begin with the always critical world of K…
Sports Production Infrastructure – Where’s The Compute?
The evolution of IP based production and increased computer processing power have enabled new workflows, so how is compute resource being deployed to create new remote and hybrid approaches?
Building Software Defined Infrastructure: Shifting Data
The fundamental principles of how data flows through local and remote processing systems are central to designing software defined infrastructure.