Speaker video interviews from TVBEurope’s fourth IT Broadcast Workflow conference held at BAFTA last month are now available online. Hear from ITFC’s Lesley Marr, Aspera’s Bhavik Vyas and Sony’s Fred Wood.
The conference opened with a keynote presentation and panel discussion led by Lesley Marr, senior operations director, ITFC. Marr spoke about ‘next-generation workflows’ and she sees the changes brought about by file-based environments as revolutionary not evolutionary.
The days of tape were very comfortable, she said. Yes, there were a few tape formats, but the same piece of media that came out of the edit suite could be played to air, and could be archived. Workflows are now more complex. Designing workflows is about more than wrappers, codecs and connectivity. Do it right and it is a positive benefit; do it wrong and the operation can grind to a halt.
In a point which was reiterated by speaker after speaker, she said that doing it right critically involved taking the people with you.
Bhavik Vyas, director of Cloud Services at Aspera, discussed enabling the cloud for large-scale broadcast workflows with high-speed transport. Explaining what the Cloud is, Vyas separates it into infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service and software as a service.
Focusing on IaaS, he concentrated on Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the largest and well known infrastructure as a service. “You do get the ability to simply use what you need when you need it and then turn it off. It’s that access to matching demand and actual consumption when needed that becomes very compelling.
Aspera can assist with storage and its expertise is in moving, managing, processing and distributing files. “We’re all about getting files from A to B.”
To illustrate the workflow in use, Vyas discussed a cloud case study on a major European football tournament that has just ended. Aspera’s fasp technology was used to move files across the WAN.
As London counts downs to the Olympics, Fred Wood, Business Development, Sony Professional America, spoke about the NBC Highlights Factory: Nonlinear content delivery through effective workflow control for London 2012. He discussed the role of Sony’s Media Backbone Conductor.
“London 2012, Russia 2016 and Brazil 2020 — that’s the scale of the project. They’re exploding, on the content side and on the platform side. YouTube distribution is new; they’re going to differentiate the experience in the online space markedly from the last Olympic Games. It has exploded since then.
“The goal is to create an attractive and unique offering for consumers to drive traffic. NBC paid $4.4bn for the broadcast rights; they’re going to try to get some of it back through this project, north of $100 million revenue projected.
“NBC are going to deliver 3000-5000 pieces of new media over the 17 days. Up to 200 finished pieces will be processed simultaneously each day.
“In Beijing they used spreadsheets and a lot of blood sweat tears and pain. They had an army of people with desks and phones tracking media: where are the files and are they going to make it to their destination?
“That’s when they came to us. The solution? Metadata complexity. It’s workflow and integration orchestration, that’s what we do.
