Broadcast Beat Magazine 2017 NAB Show NY/SMPTE Special Edition | Page 27

EMBRACING THE CLOUD
REVOLUTIONIZES MANAGED
BROADCAST SERVICES
By K.A. SRINIVASAN,
CO-FOUNDER OF AMAGI
T
he global media landscape is changing
rapidly with the advent of new technol-
ogies and evolving audience needs. The
boundaries are blurring between the tra-
ditional TV broadcast and new-age platforms like
Amazon Prime Video and Netflix. Also, as the mil-
lennial generation takes over the mantle of largest
audience group, the geographical demarcation
of content might also vanish. For example, a U.S.
politics-focused drama such as “House of Cards”
or, for that matter, “Game of Thrones,” today has
a substantial audience following in countries out-
side the U.S. To keep up with this changing real-
ity, TV broadcasters and content owners need to
scale up rapidly and make their content available
simultaneously across platforms. Unfortunately,
traditional, physical data center-oriented playout
services might not be fully equipped to respond
to the scale and speed requirements of such
transition. Apart from this, the traditional services
come at higher costs owing to their capex expo-
sure and higher opex driven by physical, manual,
and people-intensive operating models. What’s
more, most of these traditional managed services
have operations that are opaque, offering clients
no real-time insights into or control over their
broadcasts. So, TV networks are left to make
programming adjustments after the fact, based
on month-end reports. Further, many traditional
managed broadcast service providers fall short
of expertise to deliver both TV and OTT playout
services under one roof, leaving broadcasters
further constrained just as multiscreen viewing is
catching fire.
Replacing traditional managed broadcast ser-
vices with a cloud-managed approach can over-
come many of these limitations. By implementing
an end-to-end managed services platform in the
public/private cloud that encompasses content
preparation, channel playout, content delivery,
and monetization for both linear TV and OTT,
broadcasters can scale up rapidly and deliver
content innovatively.
Automated, Full-Service Content
Preparation
Today, one of the biggest challenges to rapidly
expanding broadcast operations is content seg-
mentation. Preparing playout-ready content from
thousands of hours of audio-video content is a
labor-intensive process. Moving the content to
the cloud makes it possible to integrate new-age
cognitive capabilities and machine-learning tech-
niques to reduce human intervention wherever
possible, thereby driving scalability and increas-
ing broadcast efficiencies. It also eliminates tech-
nical challenges such as converting content from
one format to other. Unlike traditional managed
service providers, a cloud-based broadcast plat-
form also provides complete visibility into the
status of content assets in real time.
Besides the benefit of automating manual and
error-prone processes, a cloud-managed broad-
cast platform gives TV networks a wide choice
of third-party service providers and on-demand
Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 27