Making the cloud work for TV

In the TV business, the term ‘cloud’ no longer refers exclusively to OTT, multiscreen TV and the streaming video, CDN and backoffice infrastructure that makes Internet video delivery possible. It also describes a broad range of network and service concepts that are flowing out of the wider IT industry. One of the most important is virtualization, which is generally understood to describe the separation of a function from the computing resources required to run it. Another is the hosting of services and functions, including at third-party facilities.

With virtualization, a software application that normally runs on a dedicated appliance is moved to a more general commodity computing platform. A simple example is transcoding. Where today you might have a one rack-unit chassis loaded with its own video processing chips, optimized to run video transcoding software, this software could be moved to commodity servers.

A key principle with virtualization is that a media company can draw upon processing power and storage capacity that is no longer measured in discrete hardware units that have to be bought separately, and therefore planned for. You can demand extra resources on demand, assuming you have the necessary ‘reach’ onto remote compute resources. You simply demand extra sever, CPU and storage capacity and up pops another ‘instance’ of it for you.

Media companies, whether Pay TV platforms or broadcasters, do not have to fill in a form and book the capacity three weeks in advance, whether they need computing or storage capacity. Importantly, you do not have to provision your own facilities for peak demands and leave expensive equipment laying idle at other times. After using what you need, you can scale down your requirements, which could mean less capital investment.

As an example of what could happen, a channel owner might install enough dedicated appliances on its own premises to meet average transcoding requirements. Then it uses the cloud to run its chosen transcode software on hosted super computers when it exceeds the on-premise capacity.

There are a number of virtualization scenarios. At one end of the spectrum, the commodity compute resources might be owned by a broadcaster or platform operator and sited on their own premises, but shared by different applications. At the other end, the compute resources could be hosted in a third-party datacenter that serves multiple customers across an entire continent, with the necessary segmentation and security safeguards. Amazon Web Services is an example of the latter. Because resources are shared, they can be utilized very efficiently.

There are a range of places where the use of cloud infrastructure (meaning virtualization and hosting rather than ‘just’ OTT) can help media companies run their operations more efficiently or expand operations or service capabilities. These include on-demand storage of nPVR, user interface generation, various data analytics functions including real-time audience analysis, and A/B testing.

While cost savings are a big driver for the exploitation of the IT cloud, agility is the most important. The prize for the television industry is to have traditional services that are as agile as their multiscreen offers, enabling them to compete more effectively with highly web and cloud-centric companies like Netflix.

Netflix is a good example of a company that has made the most of IT cloud infrastructure (as well as OTT). Adrian Drury, Lead Analyst, Media & Broadcast Technology & Services at the consulting firm Ovum, comments: “Theirs is pretty much the complete cloud-driven infrastructure and systems architecture for the delivery of premium services. The entire thing is built on Amazon Web Services with the exception of a couple of datacenters where they handle all their customer data.

“It means they can very effectively scale up and scale down their services and it provides them with compute resources on-demand to test new applications that they are rolling out to end users. They have vast computational power to process the masses of data they are collecting about their customers and they have as much storage capacity as they want.”

He adds: “There is no such thing as a global Pay TV operator but if there was it would look like someone who is trying to copy the Netflix model.”

He picks out Comcast as an example of a traditional Pay TV operator that is starting to follow a similarly determined cloud path, although the cable operator is using its own private cloud environment as the architecture behind its X1 platform. X1 is the basis for a next-generation, more personalized user experience and new multiscreen and nPVR capabilities.

“With Comcast X1 there is the design and sophistication story and also the infrastructure and OpenStack [open source cloud operating system] story, which is about them having their own private ‘Platform as a Service’ environment where they can build new services,” Drury explains. “The key benefit is the speed and agility it gives them for new service launches.”

Drury adds: “Comcast is an absolute example of what we will see from other Pay TV operators.”

There are other platform operators who are making use of the ‘IT cloud’, including Liberty Global, which is virtualizing its video processing as well as using a cloud-rendered user interface for its second generation Horizon product.  Bouygues Telecom is investigating the power of the cloud for a range of television-related activities, having already used cloud services to deliver a gaming experience to customers since 2012.

But the company in Europe that seems to be exploring the potential for virtualization and the ‘cloudification’ of networks more than any other is Deutsche Telekom, the telco group and IPTV provider. The company has embarked on an ambitious transformation project that uses the concepts of Software Defined Network (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to streamline cost and technology and push services to market faster.

The basic idea behind SDN/NFV is that you build a common IT infrastructure using general purpose IT hardware and then you virtualize the applications and services you need. In the case of Deutsche Telekom it involves the use of IPv6 and the processing of complicated functions on datacenters that are distributed around its network and where the company has compute and storage resources to run services.

The company has been investigating these concepts as part of its TeraStream project in Croatia, where its subsidiary Hrvatski Telekom hosts a revolutionary cloud-enabled IP network architecture. This project is a world showcase for how SDN will work and Hrvatski Telekom has already demonstrated how the use of cloud infrastructure can increase agility with its rapid roll-out of a revolutionary IPTV service that includes notable firsts relating to its use of IPv6 and RDK (Reference Design Kit).

Videonet just published a new report called ‘Making the cloud work for TV’ that outlines the benefits of concepts like virtualization and hosting, investigate how pioneering media companies are using IT cloud infrastructure, the services that can benefit and how. Download the report here for no charge. The report contents are:

Virtualization and hosting underpin the IT cloud
Multiscreen TV and network PVR
The data analytics opportunity
Video processing is a cloud ‘battleground’
Production, security and redundancy
Turning up the cloud dial
Deutsche Telekom and the SDN
Making service providers more agile
Initiatives to virtualize the user interface
Preparing for a mixed cloud/ground environment
Saving money with cloud infrastructure