Channel playout has been an evolving technology for decades, but as broadcasters have moved from analog to digital, the advantages of digital have perhaps been best demonstrated by the flexibility, scalability and cost savings that come with deploying channels virtually—whether on premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid set-up.
Since the concept of the “channel in a box” was launched nearly 20 years ago, virtualized playout (or what some prefer to refer to as “cloud playout”) has gone from an option to a must-have for broadcasters needing to compete in today’s multichannel environment.
Steve Hassan, senior director of playout for Grass Valley, has been involved in playout since 1991, starting with the BBC. “I originally started in the BBC control rooms before any automation systems, and spent probably just under 20 years at the BBC and in the playout environment and so I’ve seen a lot of things in my time,” he said. “In the ’90s, a BBC One control room had about seven people to run one channel—the director, vision mixer, engineer, two people in VTR running the programs in, as well as a continuity announcer and everything else.
“But now some of our customers have single operators looking after 30,40, if not more, channels at any one time,” Hassan added. “So the paradigm has completely shifted for customers to be able to do more with less, as it were.”
Non-Monolithic
Flexibility has been among the most important benefits of virtualized playout, according to Hassan, who pointed to Grass Valley’s Playout X as more adaptable than traditional virtualized playout systems.
“A true virtualized system is just taking what you’ve got in a monolithic architecture and running it in virtual compute, but actually there’s no real benefits there for our customers today, because it’s running the same footprint, it’s still monolithic,” Hassan said. “Playout X, which is part of our AMPP platform ecosystem, is completely cloud-native, so it’s based on a series of microservices, rather than being a monolithic application. It’s based around an edge-compute architecture, so that allows for hybrid deployments, both in terms of geography as well as platforms.”
Playout virtualization has also evolved in tandem with the “software as a service” concept, which allows broadcasters to expand services and save money by tapping into massive data banks.
“Business models can change quickly, so broadcasters need flexibility and that can manifest in a bunch of different ways, including things like more flexible ways to pay,” said Andy Warman, chief technology office, video for Imagine Communications. “People don’t just want to make capex purchases anymore. They want things like term licensing and other options, but they don’t have to take a hit up front on what they’re buying. But it also covers things like redistribution of channels, ability to be more eco friendly and the ability to sort of bounce their business across on prem and cloud.”
For broadcasters who want to move their playout operations to the cloud, there are a number of cost, reliability and security considerations, not to mention whether or not the cloud is public or private.
“We’re seeing some customers deploy virtualized playout via private cloud networks, whereas others are preferring public cloud solutions,” said James Gilbert, senior vice president, sales and marketing for Pixel Power. “Pixel Power has an agnostic position on this—our role is to support our customers regardless of the operational model they prefer.”
Vendor-Client Relationship
Gilbert pointed out another consequence of moving towards a more automated playout scenario that has impacted the relationship between customer and vendor. “Where once a broadcaster maintained a large in-house engineering team with very specialized skills, they now need much broader experience including IT maintenance and network design,” he said. “The solution is a much closer bond between vendor and user, with new contractual agreements focused on service, delivery and performance levels rather than specific hardware.”
Van Duke, U.S. director of U.S. dperations, PlayBox Neo, a provider of playout systems to mid-Tier-1 enterprises, says the learning curve for new playout customers can also be a hurdle.
“We just did a big move with a client of ours that has 35 channels on servers in a data center, and we had to install those 35 channels on AWS,” he said. “And that all went well, but it’s not easy. It has to be set up and the client has to understand how to operate it, and it’s a little tedious. It’s not cheap either.”
Marco Branzanti, chief technology officer for AxelTech, a provider of automation tech for radio and TV, advised broadcasters to shop around when considering a cloud playout provider.
“In the very beginning, AWS was actually very cheap, but then they kind of specialized and introduced a lot more types of services, more types of architectures, and differentiated their price list a lot more and the prices went up a little bit,” Branzanti said. “But normally, other providers that are not so big are usually your web servers where you buy a virtual machine someplace, or you need a physical web service. Those have been going down all the time, and that’s what I suggest.”
AxelTech’s XTV Suite for TV broadcast automation manages video playout, capture, trimming, scheduling and CG. Granting automatic and unattended efficiency around the clock, the XTV channel in a box guarantees linear scalability of TV playout facilities, supports all major broadcast production standards and, with the latest release, is ready for the cloud.
The Importance of Orchestration
The workflow and the ability to take a holistic approach to channel launches has also greatly evolved, according to Neil Maycock, chief commercial officer for Pebble.
“Playout is no longer a standalone process at the end of the chain, but completely integrated into every aspect of the broadcaster’s business,” he said. “To serve multiple versions and outputs, and allow for pop-ups and additional services, users expect the playout platform to be providing intelligent orchestration across the whole media estate.”
For broadcasters concerned over rising costs, security and flexibility in their playout operations, many adopt a hybrid approach, using both public or private cloud with on-prem storage. This is especially true given today’s more complex channel environment, Maycock adds.
“For 24/7 playout which is a non-stop, mission-critical process, that has high utilization of infrastructure, broadcasters are still tending towards keeping the primary technology on-site, using virtualized systems like Pebble Integrated Channel,” he said. “But to address the increasing trend of channels with variable use patterns the economics of cloud are very attractive, this is leading to many broadcasters adopting true hybrid playout environments.”
AxelTech’s Branzanti notes that whether playout is stored on-prem, in the cloud, or hybrid, they all have to work equally as well. He describes some of the challenges involved in on-prem, for example.
“In video, we really need a lot of GPU to do H.264 or H.265 encoding, and usually when you rent cloud servers the GPU is one of the expensive options, which really can go for hundreds and hundreds of dollars per month,” he said. “So we try to keep everything in CPU, rent more CPU, and use the CPU to do those kinds of processes which are usually on-premise, would be GPU. We also have dedicated resources for development and optimization of the solutions which can be run in virtualized environments, in the cloud, or on rented environments.”
Despite the processing costs, storage costs continue to decline, offering a more compelling case for some on-prem setups for broadcasters just starting out, Branzanti adds.
“I usually propose a simple physical machine which is in the cloud and doesn’t cost so much; and those costs are going down,” he said. “That is the trend I see.”
Imagine’s Warman offered his assessment of the costs: “I would have thought they’d have declined more, but, you know, we actually map this stuff out periodically and it’s really not declining much at all these days. I’m not going to call it ‘plateaued,’ exactly, but it has stabilized significantly. I would have thought it would have tumbled significantly over the last decade, but really not that much change. I think a lot of that is driven by particularly integrated channel-type solutions that are able to pack more functionality into them.”
Disaster Recovery
For those broadcasters who want to emphasize security and reliability, disaster recovery is top of mind.
“That’s one of the major pros of the cloud,” Branzanti said. “Your TV station can go down at any moment and you need backup technology. We talk about the 3:1 method, which means you need three backups with two different technologies. One has to be delocalized in another place, or else you’re gonna lose your data.”
Grass Valley’s Hassan outlines the variety of security implementations within its Playout X platform in AMPP.
“Our orchestration or control platform is completely redundant in that we have multiple platforms around the globe and each platform is deployed across three physical AZs [availability zones] with multiple Kubernetes clusters, so the platform itself is resilient,” he said. “The customer gets to choose where they deploy what we call the “data plane”—this is where the video processing is actually carried out, and everything else. And they can choose to deploy that in multiple regions or multiple ways.
“We also have the ability to deploy an on premise orchestration, which replicates our cloud platform to provide an almost standalone system for regions of the world where maybe you can’t rely on the internet,” Hassan adds. “So in places like India where they often suffer internet outages, they can utilize what we call ‘AMPP Local’ so you deploy the orchestration layer on premise.”
Elements in the Playout Chain
As channel playout has become more virtualized over the past several decades, the move to all-software, cloud or on-prem environments has been optimized by lower storage and processing costs, faster IP, as well as the ability to manipulate, insert and integrate multiple elements of the video, whether it’s inserting ads, lower thirds or processing audio.
This is where companies like Telos Alliance come in. While not traditionally a channel playout provider, Costa Nikols, Strategy Advisor for M&E for the company, has started to think about his company’s role in the technology’s future.
Nikols notes how the trend towards remote production was accelerated by Covid and how the demand for improved connectivity during the pandemic has impacted the various elements of the playout chain.
“When Covid hit, things got really interesting, because the need for remote production really kicked off and what really was the big enabler of all of this was that the internet got fast enough and reliable enough, and with the least amount of latency,” he said. “And then where it’s becoming really interesting is that we’re enabling the audio to be manipulated and corrected within the playout chain. But now, as we move forward, we’re actually enabling the user, the viewer to select what parts of the audio spectrum they actually are interested in, such as next generation audio, which offers dialog intelligibility, immersive audio as well as personalization.”
Nikols suggests that enterprises entering and expanding their playout operations ask themselves some crucial questions.
“For the next 15-20 years, you’re going to see more and more cloud-enabled production, and definitely cloud-enabled playout,” he said. “And of course, with that, you still have certain needs: Where’s this content going? What platforms is it designed to be consumed on? Is it going to be live streamed, or is it going to be file based, VOD? And what do you need to do in order to create the best user experience for those platforms you’re delivering?”
In the end, the requirements needed to deploy a virtualized playout setup haven’t changed since the early days of the technology, but as complexities grow, those demands grow ever more important.
“The primary requirement has always been seamless and accurate delivery of programs, commercials, promos and graphics,” said Pixels’ James Gilbert. “In today’s environment this also means serving multiple platforms with complex quality and regulatory requirements. Customers want the security of knowing quality control standards will be met and, given that today’s broadcast delivery is a part of the wider connected world, reassurance that the playout platform has been hardened against all forms of cyber-threats.”
Article published in the TVTech November Ebook
