Cloud migration for live and file-based video services is the way of the future. See how video service providers are making the move to the cloud.
Migrating live and file-based video services to the cloud holds the promise of huge flexibility in deployment architectures, geographical backhaul possibilities, virtually limitless peak provisioning, pay per use pricing, access to advanced intellectual property on-demand, and much more. This migration is still in its infancy and will ultimately drive new cloud business models and partnerships to create viable financial common ground, but there are some critical technical challenges facing video service providers looking to de-risk the move to the cloud.
Most content and service providers have operational teams that understand video very well and have years of experience working with on-premise video architectures. Many of these teams have Network Operation Centers (NOCs) that allow them to monitor the video as it traverses their video networks. The video is typically inspected at each demarcation point between the pieces of equipment to provide the transport (Quality of Service – QoS) and video/audio content (Quality of Experience – QoE) visibility so the operators know the video is good before it goes into the delivery pipes to the consumers, and is then tracked across the delivery network.
For many content and service providers, moving their video services or video distribution to the cloud is a daunting prospect due to losing visibility for their operations teams. Many are used to “walled garden” architectures and do not understand the complexity of the cloud, and the thought of sending precious streams off into the unknown with no knowledge of whether they arrived intact is just too big a leap to make. The latest wave of reliable transport technologies (SRT, Zixi, Aspera) can help to carry the content to the relevant cloud data center for processing, but it still needs to be checked before and after the video processing pipeline. Otherwise, if the viewing experience is bad, how do you even begin to diagnose the issue? Figuring out where something has gone wrong without integrated cloud monitoring is like trying to find the needle in the proverbial haystack.
How Telestream can Help
At Telestream we can now help content and video service providers make this migration by ensuring that the monitoring solutions they know and love are available in the cloud, whether analysing transport stream integrity and picture/sound quality at cloud ingest or encoding points, or joining adaptive (e.g. HLS or DASH) streams post-CDN to make sure the manifests and stream bit rates are available and can be delivered correctly nationally or globally. SRT or Zixi-enabled QoE probes in the cloud measuring QoE at cloud ingest, and the new Optiq Monitor service incorporates active test probes into an “on-demand” multi-cloud solution that enables hundreds of global testing locations at the push of a button.
At IBC, we worked closely with partner companies to demonstrate how the cloud can not only be used for global remote edit and live streaming workflows by leveraging Vantage Cloud Port and Telestream OptiQ, but critically how world-class monitoring can provide the visibility and confidence that content and service providers desperately need to be able to embrace the cloud and de-risk the migration to cloud-based video services.
This article was originally published by Stuart Newton, VP Strategy, Corporate Development Group at Telestream in Asia-Pacific Broadcasting.
To find out more about broadcast production in the cloud with Haivision SRT Hub and Microsoft Azure as presented at IBC, go to www.haivision.com/srt-hub-and-microsoft-azure-panel/