The cloud in broadcasting

The emergence of cloud and its benefits across industries has had a significant impact on the broadcast market. Broadcasters are slowly realising the benefits of moving into a virtualised environment and leaving traditional playout platforms behind. The issue of safety within the cloud remains a top concern for organisations and content owners alike. The most important factor when choosing cloud playout, is that assets (content and technology) are hosted in a secure environment, such as a purpose-built data centre, and not in an office building or server room on-premise.

The full benefit of cloud

In addition to improved safety, the use of a secure data centre to host the cloud infrastructure has other associated benefits, the biggest one being redundancy. Data centres are built on the pillars of availability, security and disaster recovery. What this means for broadcasters is that the provision of power and connectivity into a site is guaranteed and more than that, there is no single point of failure within the chain as the platform is replicated elsewhere as part of a disaster recovery plan.

The cloud as a playout environment gives broadcasters a greater level of versatility and functionality; they are able to quickly, accurately and effectively deliver changes and rapidly adopt new approaches to meet the changing needs of the market, more so than they would be able to using a traditional playout model. Another added benefit of using cloud is the ability to scale up – or down – as needed.

The cost implications are significant too – operating expenditure can be reduced in terms of both the amount of staff needed and the distribution contracts.

Using cloud for playout is also proving to be a competitive advantage for new entrants to the broadcast market. There is no need for heavy investment in hardware and playout infrastructure; instead the barrier to entry is much lower and time to market is decreased.

Other features of cloud include include complete visibility of assets, as well as access to those assets and channel outputs across the entire workflow. This ensures that all assets can be effectively managed and made broadcast-ready, therefore eliminating any errors that could potentially cause on-air outages.

Cloud playout and the role of IP

Cloud-based playout is supported by the use of Internet Protocol (IP) as a standard transport system. IP is ubiquitous, cost-effective and the network infrastructure already exists within an organisation to some degree.

However, IP is not being used by many operators as the main transportation mechanism for live video around their facilities. Most organisations are relying on the traditional proprietary hardware solutions and mechanisms that incorporate the use of SDI (serial digital interface). SDI, however, limits operations as it creates a one-to-one relationship between one device and another, is fixed and not scalable. Ideally, IP will be the technology that ultimately replaces SDI and brings the adoption of cloud-based playout to more broadcasters.

While IP is slow to be adopted, however, many broadcasters are realising its benefits. The majority of archiving solutions already use file-based formats and a number of UK broadcasters have recently implemented the use of file-based delivery – including BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

Conclusion

Cloud has been widely used in a number of environments – business, manufacturing and medicine – to great effect. Broadcast may be lagging behind this wider use, but the benefits are quickly becoming clear. Coupled with the move away from traditional hardware and use of IP within the broadcast workflow, the future of cloud-based playout as the dominant paradigm is not too far away. 

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