Exploring the Advantages of Blended Real-Time Production Using Automation
In the rapidly evolving world of broadcasting, the integration of cloud technology is becoming increasingly prevalent for live production and playout. This shift towards hybrid live production, which combines on-premises feeds with cloud receivers, is essential for effective workflows.
One of the key components in this hybrid setup is an orchestration system. This system serves as the central nervous system, providing seamless, unified control over both on-premises and cloud resources. Operators can select sources and receivers regardless of location, and the system automatically allocates encoders, protection, and gateways from a managed resource pool.
Key Features of an Orchestration System
A robust orchestration system offers several essential features:
- Unified Control Plane: Centralised governance for workflows across on-premises and cloud resources, with end-to-end visibility, monitoring, and resource management.
- Automatic Resource Allocation: Dynamic, real-time provisioning of encoding engines, ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) protection mechanisms, cloud gateways, and selection of appropriate compression codecs.
- Flexible Deployment Models and Scalability: Support for fully on-premises, fully cloud-based, or hybrid deployments, including the ability to dynamically scale according to workload or business demand.
- Dynamic Orchestration and Redundancy: Real-time configuration of redundancy models ensuring disaster recovery and high service availability, distributed across multiple sites and clouds.
- Cross-platform Visibility and Control: End-to-end monitoring and SLA tracking to improve reliability, reduce downtime, and ensure quality of service across all components.
- Integration of Legacy and Cloud-Native Systems: Bridging on-prem infrastructure with cloud offerings to avoid disconnects in complex workflows and enable frictionless operations.
- Efficient Workflow Automation: Simplifying traditional live production workflows such as source-to-receiver routing, ingest, playback, and codec configuration within a consistent operational model.
Benefits of an Orchestration System
The adoption of an orchestration system offers numerous benefits:
- Accelerated and Simplified Live Production Workflows: Quick deployment, faster turnaround times, and streamlined operations enabling fast, scalable, and flexible production workflows for live sports, news, esports, and entertainment.
- Cost Optimization: Reduction in infrastructure overhead via optimized multi-cloud operations and consumption-based pricing models.
- Improved Reliability and Quality: Centralised error handling, monitoring, and failover capabilities reduce downtime and maintain consistent high-quality output across multiple feeds and platforms.
- Resource Efficiency and Agility: IT and production teams are freed from repetitive tasks to focus on innovation, while the system dynamically manages resource utilization and workload distribution for maximum efficiency.
- Support for Complex, Large-Scale Productions: The infrastructure can handle numerous simultaneous encodes, multiple languages, localization, and complex routing such as in major esports tournaments, news, or multi-stage live events.
In conclusion, an orchestration system designed for hybrid live production provides a single pane of glass for controlling and automating end-to-end media workflows that span on-prem equipment and cloud platforms, enabling scalable, reliable, and cost-effective live content creation and distribution. The orchestration system covers secure communication between on-premises devices and cloud instances via encrypted communication protocols, interfaces with public cloud providers, and automates the scaling of cloud instances by spinning them up or down.
