In Broadcast - March 2015 - 48

48

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 3 | March 2015

InMedia

Streaming Live Video Via The Cloud
Broadcasters are providing content to a generation of mobile consumers who are now used
to viewing high quality live or near-live streams on any device...

B

roadcasters,
sports
leagues
and event organisers need to
quickly manage, transfer, process
and distribute video content across
smartphones,
tablets,
laptop
computers and connected TVs. As they
look to extend their customer base
by offering new viewing experiences,
their ability to deliver premium content
to consumers, broadcast partners
and digital outlets at high speed
while maintaining broadcast-quality
standards is critical.
As they face these challenges,
turning to IT-based infrastructures,
high-bandwidth wide area networks,
cloud processing and storage for
content delivery seems like the right
way to go, but without modern digital
transport technologies, these solutions
lack the real-life performance, security
and scale needed to distribute content
to internet-connected devices in
real-time.
Recently, Aspera technology has
been successfully proven to power
live streaming applications to second
screens - in which video feeds
captured from multiple cameras
are transferred in real-time to the
cloud into multiple formats and bit
rates through a scale-out cloud video
platform, using high-performance WAN
transport across continents.
Network Infrastructure
Global live and near-live viewing
experiences are now expected by
consumers all over the world, without
delays and at the highest quality.
International sporting events such as
the Football World Cup
and the Olympics gather
massive audiences and
have the highest volume
of online streaming
content. In 2014, the
Football World Cup
delivered
66,000
minutes of live streams
of content to about 35
million fans from around
the world.
The
diversity
of
IP networks creates
multiple
challenges,
with different media,
bandwidth rates and
overall conditions. While
bandwidth
capacity

available to businesses and consumers
continues to increase at decreasing
costs, variable bandwidth rates still
need to be accounted for, from slow
connections to super-fast, multi-Gbps
access.
Network media remains diverse
with terrestrial, satellite or wireless
infrastructure.
Conditions
vary
greatly, with all networks being
prone to degradation over distance.
The audience is worldwide and can
be located far from the broadcast
or delivery infrastructure, often
in locations with poor network
connectivity. Without the right
transport technology, moving video
over the WAN can prove impractical or
at best yield mediocre quality.
The Promise Of The Cloud
From a business perspective, the
cloud offers a few key advantages:
*	 Ability	as	a	company	to	grow	as		
	
the customer base increases;
*	 Reduced	overheads	&	expensive
	
real-estate investments;
*	 Worldwide	capabilities	to	reach	
	
new and unknown customers;
*	 Delivering	to	consumers	on
	
demand content while
maintaining control over revenue
and quality;
*	 Flexibility	to	serve	the	need	of	
	
the content providers for short
periods of time without
continuous investment once the
event has ended.
Providing
experience

a
to

near-live viewing
consumers is a

challenging
proposition,
where
processing and distribution need to
instantly respond to unpredictable
bursts in demand. Video transcoding
alone is expected to generate
hundreds of varieties of bit rates and
formats to match a multitude of target
devices. Audiences peak to millions of
concurrent streams and die off shortly
after the event.
Consumers are now accustomed
to the utmost quality of service and
a near "zero delay" in the viewing
experience is expected. The success of
Second Screen video delivery depends
on near instant access and instant
replay capabilities.
Linear video transcoding approached
simply cannot meet such demands
and are too expensive for short term
use, hence the need for parallel, cloud
architectures.
Also, investing in on-premise
network
bandwidth
for
mass
distribution is impractical, as millions
of streams would require terabits per
second of available bandwidth.
Aspera FASPStream
Traditionally, dedicated satellite
feeds have been the only available
solution for live ingest and delivery
of broadcast quality video, but this
method remains costly, difﬁcult
to maintain and deploy. For some
regions, it might be impractical due
to budget constraints. IP distribution
shows promise but over distance,
network conditions degrade and even
the most contemporary TCP-based
streaming solutions are unable to

End-to-end live video streaming through the Cloud

deliver broadcast quality media to
massive audiences, making Content
Delivery Networks (CDNs) an essential
part of any IP delivery workﬂow.
FASP Transport
Aspera FASP transport technology
already plays a key role in enabling
global content workﬂows, where
content can be accessed and
distributed practically, wherever it is
created, transformed or stored.
But until now, regardless of the
radical speed improvement provided
by the Aspera software, digital content
distribution remained a non-live
proposition.
The new Aspera FASPStream
technology provides breakthrough
capabilities that are critical enablers
of end-to-end live video streaming
through the cloud. Transfers no
longer need to start and end with a
ﬁle system; they can be performed to
and from a custom process running
in memory, such as live video capture
and parallel video transcoding. Aspera
FASPStream enables operations to
be performed on data being received,
before the end of the ﬁle is reached,
which facilitates the implementations
of proxies, transcode, sequential
access ﬁle systems and other
"middleware" applications.
With the right combination of
network
infrastructure,
scalable
cloud resources and efﬁcient digital
transport, it is now possible to achieve
an effective data transfer that matches
or exceeds the live video capture rate,
in spite of heavy round-trip latency
and packet loss (over
200 milliseconds and
10% peak packet loss
over the WAN).
The result is a
consistent
highperformance delivery of
live feeds and near-live
broadcast quality video.
In conjunction with
solutions from EVS,
Elemental Technology
and the use of the
AWS
cloud,
Aspera
FASPStream
powered
the new second screen
experiences
provided
during the 2014 Football
World Cup.
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=fs4NPq8jLrI
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