In Broadcast - April 2015 - 50

50

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 5 - Issue 4 | April 2015

InMedia

A New Era Of Broadcasting
With Cloud At The Helm
Richard Craig-McFeely, Business Development Director, Media Services,
Tata Communications, discusses why broadcasters should consider moving to the cloud...

T

raditionally,
the
technology
needed to set up a broadcaster
and the network of masts needed
to broadcast signals to deliver high
quality content was capital-intensive
and required expansive and specialised
expertise.
As a result, much early TV
broadcasting was state-funded, such
as the BBC model established in the UK
in the 1920s. The state-funded nature
of the broadcasting industry meant
that new developments took time to
come into play, with long transition
times from black and white to colour,
then from SD to HD, for example.
Today, the industry looks very
different, and the progress of
technological innovation is much
faster paced. As Tata Communications'
involvement
with
Formula
1®
demonstrates, it's now possible
to construct a temporary MPLS
circuit and 14km of ﬁbre optic cable
- the equivalent of a whole city's
infrastructure - at each new Formula
1® race location, with a full connectivity
platform, including voice, data and
video services, in just a few days. With
this, Tata Communications is able to
broadcast to peaks of seven million
fans in 188 countries simultaneously
on race weekends.
Cloud Delivery
The distribution process has also
been simpliﬁed, which means the time
from capture to broadcast is greatly
reduced. Broadcasters have embraced

Growing connectivity with the Cloud

the trend of delivering multi-platform
content, and much of the software
used in broadcast is now cloud-based,
delivered to devices such as laptops,
tablets and mobile phones.
Chello DMC, for example, the ofﬁcial
F1® broadcaster that works closely
with Tata Communications, delivered
six high quality live video feeds from
19 Formula 1® races on Dutch channel
Sport1 last season, which were viewed
on multiple devices including TVs,
tablets, smartphones and laptops.
The way that people consume content
is changing, and forward-thinking
broadcasters are proactively adapting
their approach to account for this.
This new era, with cloud at the helm,
has driven the arrival of new players
to the market. This is, in part, because
the cloud technology provides a lower
cost to entry, low risk when launching
new services, low opex charges, and
the ability to beneﬁt from the latest
trends in technology. Using cloudbased software, these new entrants
generally have lower investments in
equipment, lower operating costs and
smaller teams running their channel,
which means they are achieving a
signiﬁcant competitive edge on legacy
players.
As these new entrants are
experiencing, cloud-based software
allows broadcasters to upload quality
content directly from the production
location and edit it remotely, allowing
global teams to review and approve
the content in real-time.

This increases efﬁciency signiﬁcantly,
so broadcasters can place more
emphasis on planning and creativity,
ultimately meaning they are able to
produce better quality content that
consumers are keen to access.
Secure Content
While there are naturally some
security concerns around protecting
highly valuable and sought-after
content from competitors, it's
important to keep security in
perspective - storing content in a data
centre is far more secure than sending
off a tape for review via a courier.
Remember your personal ﬁnances are
likely in the cloud too.
In addition, storing your content
in a data centre has the advantage
of reliable access, regardless of
geography. In fact, it's not just a case
of access to content, but also access
to the media services and Web-based
applications that the team will be
using.
Cloud-based software allows media
companies to scale capacity as
required - for production companies,
working predominantly on projects
with varying data requirements,
this is a highly ﬂexible solution.
For broadcasters with more of an
"always-on" approach, this allows for
additional capacity as required. The
pay-as-you-go nature of cloud services
also means that it's possible to make
signiﬁcant cost savings.

Data network centre infrastructure

Stable Service
Finally, the cloud allows for stability.
As the cloud works 24/7 and media
service providers are required to be
available at all times, cloud services
offer a reliable solution that keeps
everything working day and night.
Our IZO platform does just this:
combining the public internet uniquely
engineered for predictable routing,
together with enterprise private
and public cloud connectivity and
interconnected data centres to meet
this demand.
This allows broadcasters to deliver
compelling content to their audience,
regardless of the time.
The result: stable cloud services
teamed with a reliable and secure
Internet
connection,
meaning
broadcasters can count on the cloud
in our increasingly "always on" media
landscape.
So, the cloud is good news for
broadcasters, making operators' lives
easier through collaboration with
anyone, in any location and at any
time, with a ﬂexible solution that can
be scaled to ﬁt requirements.
This new era of cloud broadcasting
is developing rapidly and is a gamechanging technology in such a
competitive market.
While still in its infancy, the cloud is
an opportunity for forward-thinking
broadcasters to pave the way to the
future of broadcasting.
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In Broadcast - April 2015

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