Going remote: enhancing production workflows with cloud-native technologies

James Wilson 

Head of Engineering

IBM Aspera

It’s probably an understatement to say that 2020 has been a year of change for media companies. Faced with the widespread disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, they’ve quickly embraced remote production to cater to a fully work-from-home environment and ensure business continuity.

Production teams of all sizes have been challenged to adapt to a new operational reality that centres around being as agile as possible. As well as collaborating on projects remotely and seamlessly sharing content and assets between disparate team members, they’ve had to find ways to quickly roll out different services to different sites and significantly reduce their dependence on physical data centers.

While many trends have been accelerated by this shift, one that has stood out is the growing interest in cloud-native technologies and container-based deployments. Container orchestration platforms based-on Kubernetes, such as OpenShift, offer reproducible, high-availability, fault-tolerant infrastructure solutions that allow media businesses to move their workflows to or from any public or private cloud environment without having to rearchitect the infrastructure.

The rise of remote working is also shining a spotlight on high-quality IP-based streaming and cloud security. With production teams working on assets remotely, it’s now more important than ever for media companies to secure their workflows to protect their content and revenues. When it comes to operating effectively and efficiently amid the ‘new normal’ that we now find ourselves in, media companies have a huge amount to consider.

Containers take center stage

Containers are a virtualisation technology that enable users to package and isolate discrete application components with the precise dependencies and configurations required to run, thereby providing a streamlined way to build, test, deploy and redeploy applications on multiple environments. This offers many benefits for media organizations. For example, containers provide the flexibility to efficiently manage new remote workflows and infrastructures consistently across all applications, such as encoding, transcoding, graphics rendering and video transport.

Most importantly, they allow businesses to very quickly scale up workflows automatically and on-demand to meet fluctuating requirements and leverage the power of the cloud to apply additional resources when needed. Although there are costs associated, the flexibility means workflows can be scaled up and down to meet spikes or dips in demand for production traffic. Media businesses haven’t traditionally had access to software-based autoscaling solutions that allow them to run a lean IT environment, but also scale when needed. This is now increasingly being offered thanks to containers and the orchestration platforms that manage them, most of which are based on the open source Kubernetes project.

Containers and their orchestration platforms also have a key role to play in ensuring availability within the media industry. Media workflows are highly time sensitive, meaning the availability of services is a key concern for production teams in terms of delivering content to tight deadlines. Kubernetes offers a consistent way to ensure an ultra-high level of availability, while removing the complexity associated with traditional, vendor-specific approaches.

In the past, businesses had to engage with all their technology vendors independently when developing a strategy for high availability. This required additional resources for infrastructure management, as businesses would have to learn the nuances of each product when monitoring for availability. Evolving to a container-based model streamlines and consolidates the monitoring of critical workflow resources, thereby reducing both complexity and cost. Critical workflow resources are always available and are monitored in the same way.

The key for businesses is to make sure that they don’t end up with a bespoke set of tools that’s harder and more complex to manage. This can be avoided by embracing the communities around platforms such as OpenShift. These communities often spearhead new innovations, so staying abreast of the latest trends in the community when building a container-based environment – especially one that comprises different technology vendors and providers – can help guide the process. As a result, businesses will be more likely to adopt a standard toolset that makes it easier to manage the lifecycle of the tools and service in their workflows.

Workflows for a remote world

With all these factors in mind, it’s no surprise to see more media businesses dedicating a growing amount of effort and investment towards Kubernetes and the consolidation of media offerings onto a single platform powered by containers. Although the media industry is usually at the forefront of technological innovation, it has actually been relatively slow to adopt containers compared to other sectors. This is now changing. There is a growing interest in working with external partners to evolve public cloud resources – which continue to be the most strategic aspect of modern workflows – into container-based environments.

But container technology isn’t the only innovation enhancing remote production workflows. IP-based streaming is also taking on a growing importance, particularly in the current climate where remote productions have fewer office-based IT support staff than ever before. Media businesses are operating on skeleton crews, and IP-based streaming offers a flexible and cost-efficient way of operating remote production sites without requiring a full IT staff, while also ensuring a more streamlined workflow.

Finally, the issue of security can’t be overlooked. While security has long been considered as a central part of any end-to-end workflow, the emergence of increasingly remote productions with employees working from different locations means it is more important than ever. For example, there is now a growing need to integrate technologies such as intelligent authentication, credentials encryption and secure key management integration with BYOK (bring your own key) capabilities in order to ensure proper identity management.

BYOK enables businesses to easily and cost-efficiently rotate their encryption keys, and can be supplemented with other cloud security innovations such as forensic watermarking-as-a-service to counter piracy. This all can help businesses ensure security by following the principles of zero-trust environments when auditing key workflows, providing a high level of control and protecting valuable content in the most effective way possible.

It might have taken a while for the media industry to catch up, but container-based deployments are now quickly becoming the dominant infrastructure solution in a remote and hybrid cloud world. These cloud-native technologies are vital to supporting agile and secure operations. Amidst uncertainty and change, they can empower media businesses to enhance their remote production workflows, while providing the flexibility to quickly adapt to any future disruption.

Genelec – Four Decades of Sustainable Innovation

Howard Jones 

PR Director

Genelec was founded in Finland back in 1978, by childhood friends Ilpo Martikainen and Topi Partanen, who shared a love of music and then a passion for acoustics.

The catalyst for the formation of the company was an acoustician called Juhani Borenius, who worked for the Finnish national broadcaster YLE, and in 1976 was searching for an active monitoring loudspeaker for their new radio house. Juhani had a very clear idea of what YLE needed from a speaker, which included consistent performance, total reliability, easy serviceability, and the ability to adapt to the acoustic environment they were placed in.

Students Ilpo and Topi accepted Juhani’s challenge, produced a prototype, and after two years of intense R&D, launched Genelec with the S30, the company’s first monitoring loudspeaker. Juhani’s very demanding technical brief really set the scene for the way we would approach our designs, and that close connection with the world of broadcast has remained to this day – it’s in the very DNA of the company!

The first decade was undoubtedly a very tough period, but with the arrival of the 1035A main monitor in 1989 and the now-legendary 1031A nearfield model in 1991, Genelec really made its mark on the industry, with a string of technically innovative monitors and a brilliant design team. Ilpo and Topi brought talented designer Ari Varla on board, and the genial Lars-Olof Janflod headed up the international sales team and became a familiar face to audio professionals around the world. So in parallel with the R&D team always pushing the boundaries of what a studio monitor could do, Genelec’s distribution network grew and strengthened, culminating in our current representation in over 70 countries and regional offices in the US, Japan, China and Sweden.

Ilpo and Topi had set a clear goal of designing monitors that would as much as possible compensate for a room’s negative acoustic influences. What you hear from a studio monitor is a combination of the performance of the monitor itself, its interaction with the room, and your listening skills. By designing monitors that could be tailored to the acoustic properties of the room itself, Genelec monitors could help audio engineers compensate for any unwanted room effects and produce mixes that they could truly rely on. This method of room compensation appeared on the original S30 monitor - via a simple set of room EQ controls - and has gradually developed into the very sophisticated set of room correction tools available in our GLM loudspeaker manager software. GLM enables the user to optimise the playback level, frequency response and distance delays of every Genelec Smart Active Monitor in the system – thereby achieving performance that is totally optimised for the room.

The benefits of this approach have become really important for broadcasters – who often are having to work quickly in pressurised studio environments that may not always have the finest acoustic properties. The OB truck is a classic example of an environment that is often cramped and compromised in terms of acoustics, yet this is an environment where Genelec can thrive due to the compact nature of the monitors and their ability to adapt. And as more complex immersive formats become increasingly popular, the accuracy of the monitor becomes even more essential for delivering consistent, reliable mixes. The unfortunate pandemic situation has also made GLM a godsend for those who are currently working remotely in ad-hoc home studio environments.

Hand-in-hand with technical innovation has been a total company commitment to sustainability, that was rooted in Ilpo’s experiences growing up on a farm in Finland. He was familiar with the annual cycle of seeding, fertilising, weeding and harvesting, and he saw first-hand how the country’s huge timber industry constantly replenished its forests to ensure that the business was sustainable. Additionally, that tree cover absorbs huge amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere, so maintaining it was not only sensible business but was also kind to the environment. Ilpo himself became actively involved in tree planting programs each year and his understanding of running a company in a holistic, sustainable way became embedded in his thinking.

And so it was that all Genelec monitoring products from the original S30 onwards are built to provide longevity and reliability, even in tough, demanding professional environments – and coupled with a commitment to long term technical and spare parts support, we are still able to service and repair monitors after many decades of use.

Fast forwarding to 2008, we entered a previously unwritten part of the company’s philosophy and heritage directly into our strategy, namely that environmental issues are just as important as profitability.

Since then, our efforts to follow this path have been unwavering. The heating of the Genelec factory transitioned from oil to renewable energy some years ago, and our most recent factory expansion in 2019 now brings solar energy to the mix courtesy of over 450 roof-mounted solar panels which will supply 30% of our annual power. This decision to continue developing and manufacturing all of our products under the same roof in Iisalmi means we can guarantee the use of environmentally efficient solutions. In our own factory, we can ensure that the highest quality thresholds are maintained in terms of operations and products, and that spare parts are available to support our users for the long-term. Ultimately, our choice has helped us to view productivity from a new and far more healthy perspective.

The use of recycled materials in our monitors has also been a long term commitment. More than 80% of our professional two-way monitors use recycled aluminium, saving 95% of the energy required to produce the material compared with virgin aluminium, and after much research into the use of composites in injection moulding, we started a program in 2009 to develop monitor enclosures which comprised of at least 50% mouldable wood fibres – which are recyclable and do not require painting.

 We believe that the secret of our success is in really recognising our customer’s challenges and designing technology that allows them to do their job better, be more creative, and brings joy to their daily lives. That very first interaction with YLE back in 1976 really was a blueprint for Genelec’s future – ‘what problem does the customer have, and how do we solve it?’. Certainly in the broadcast world, which demands precision tools with total accuracy and reliability, Genelec is a natural fit. That kind of demanding use has always been a benchmark for us, and it has helped us to raise our game to match.

We’ve been long time IABM supporters, and we’re pleased to have upgraded our membership to Platinum status this year. This is a recognition that with the rapid changes in modern broadcasting, understanding our customers and their challenges has never been more important – so we look forward to the role that IABM can play in helping us continue our very close relationship with this key market segment.

Overcoming the remote fear factor to deliver live productions from anywhere

Sébastien Verlaine 

Head of Marketing & Communications

Before the outbreak of Covid-19, transitioning to remote workflows was generally perceived as a desirable yet intimidating process for many broadcasters, and one that could be best addressed again later in the future. Those that did produce content remotely tended to focus on either lower tier sports where the audiences and expectations were smaller, or supplement traditional broadcasts of top tier or primetime events. However, the pandemic we’ve faced in 2020 has changed everything. The way live sports are produced has had to be completely rethought during the lockdown, and we’re seeing very different production models appear as we prepare to hopefully return to some semblance of normality in 2021.

Remote production workflows have therefore quickly become an absolute necessity. While many technologies have emerged in recent years to facilitate these, questions still remain about how best to develop, deploy, and manage them in a reproducible, flexible, scalable and secure fashion.

Creating more efficient ways to capture live events and enhancing collaboration between production crews working together in multiple locations have become top priorities. And, with much of the world still facing tight restrictions, this will only increase as we head into next year.

The remote model

Those who have implemented remote workflows have reported positive experiences. Indeed, recent feedback to EVS has shown that our customers don’t appear to be worried about working with remote team members, proving the resilience of the industry in adapting to this new landscape and also suggesting that remote working isn’t as daunting as many expected. Reduced costs, less travel, greater scope of events to cover, the ability to do more with less and delivering more consistent high-quality programming are all cited as benefits that this new approach can bring about.

The travel restrictions and social distancing measures brought on by Covid-19 meant crews needed to be relocated from studios and centralised production facilities where possible. Despite the limited window they had to do this, many broadcasters found new and creative ways to adapt their existing setups so that some of their production crews could work from the safety of their own homes, ensuring essential social distancing measures were followed. These distributed remote workflows enabled organisations to carry on producing and delivering content while protecting their staff and helping to reduce the chances of the virus spreading. The result was that almost overnight, this ‘operator at home’ production model became the prevalent form of remote production, ensuring that programmes could get back on air as quickly as possible.

Unlike sports productions, which have been among the most severely hit by the pandemic with live events ceasing for a prolonged period, it has proved easier for the creators of news programming and talk shows to adapt and find workarounds to continue operating with less disruption. The absence of live games however, has given those who oversee live sports broadcasting the opportunity to take a step back and rethink their production models for the future.

A “new normal” for live productions

Transitioning to remote production models doesn’t necessarily mean having to perform a complete overhaul of existing in­frastructures. The good news for broadcasters is that the main elements that are already in place today will allow them to easily adapt their own pro­duction setups to accommodate and support remote workflows – while still being able to extract a return on their current technology investments.

By leveraging IP-based toolsets, software-defined technologies, and cloud-based solutions, broadcast­ers can switch to production models where location is no longer a bottleneck. Whether it’s REMI, GREMI, centralised, at home or distant remote, broadcasters are all looking for a way of doing live production anywhere.

As an example, the delivery of live replays usu­ally involves multiple operators working together in a compact envi­ronment. But, with new replay systems that now exist and a secure IP connection, operators can work in low-latency from literally any location. It’s now quick and easy to set up a re­play controller and a multiviewer either in the broad­cast centre, or from the comfort of their own homes, connect to a server deployed at the event location, and begin working immediately. They can build their replay and highlights packages from a distance, sometimes even thousands of miles away, in a similar way to how they would normally do back at the venue.

Producing a live event is a collaborative process. The dispersal of crews now means that it’s critical to find ways to facilitate the exchange of content between remote sites. This ensures that the same level of efficiency in the production process is maintained. File accelerators and cloud inte­grations let users access content from any­where for real-time collaboration and contribution. And, by adding a layer of monitoring that provides complete control and visibility of exchanged content, a streamlined distributed workflow can be ensured.

Looking to the future

Covid-19 has shown the entire industry that working remotely is now not only a viable option, but also likely to be central to the future of live production. Once we emerge from this pandemic, broadcasters must ensure they make the right technology choices to further enable this, while keeping business continuity in mind.

There are still a lot of unknowns out there. But as we head into 2021, we should anticipate an acceleration in innovation that will further enhance the remote production experience, enabling crews to collaborate in real-time no matter where they are located.


For more information please go to https://evs.com/en/live-production-anywhere

Media Distillery – one year on from winning Dragons’ Den

Geert Vos 

Founder and CTO

One year on from winning at the Dragons’ Den session at the IABM Annual International Business Conference in 2019, we followed up with Geert Vos, Founder and CTO at Media Distillery, to see how things are going. Its winning proposition was a solution that guarantees deep content understanding in real time at large scale using AI.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought tremendous challenges to our industry, but also accelerated the move to cloud/virtualization and remote operations. You said at Conference that you were planning to double or even treble your staffing in 2020 to cope with your growth. How has Media Distillery fared in the face of the pandemic?

For Media Distillery, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a lot of changes and challenges, but it worked out really well. Due to local government regulations, we have closed our office twice already, and we work totally remotely. For a scale-up company such as Media Distillery, it was a simple switch, and now I am happy to say that all of our employees are used to it. The biggest challenge is probably in reaching out to our customers. All the industry events have been cancelled or organised online now. That meant we had to adjust our commercial strategy as well.

With virtually no live events since March, media companies have been exploiting their archives to provide entertainment. Has Media Distillery helped any media companies with this?

We see that there is a lot of attention for media companies and that translates directly to more interest in our solutions. Indeed, many new conversations with global TV operators and broadcasters have started this year and especially about our solutions that help to improve the viewing experience on TV platforms, such as EPG Correction™, and Episodic Images™.

You talked about developing technology to underpin the Next Generation Replay Experience for TV operators to be able to compete with the native digital giants. What progress have you made on this?

We believe that the next generation replay experience is based on a deep understanding of what's inside video. Our latest developments are exciting AI solutions for advanced topic detection on video. Not only the entire videos but also small parts or sections of a video. It allows us to automatically fill the home screen of a user with the content of his liking. Topics can be a favourite soccer club or more complex like the COVID pandemic in Europe or the elections in the US. We are now testing this technology with different large TV operators to perfect the algorithms and train them for specific user groups. This deep content tagging technology can be used in different ways to improve the user experience. For instance, it can be by populating the home screen with relevant content, it can be used also for targeted advertising and viewer profile collection or to solve the 'zero results found' problem in the search engine.

What new capabilities have you added to your platform this year, and how are these benefiting your customers?

We have extended our platform in multiple ways. First of all, we have connected numerous customers all over the world to our cloud solution, enabling them to leverage all our products. And this year, we have developed our unique Episodic Images solution which, as a part of the Next Generation replay experience, allows to provide a better content discovery experience with a real-time personalisation of the user interface. Finally, our EPG Correction star solution is now able to analyse 20 000 hours of content per day, which means that this solution saves 4,796,802 seconds of our viewers' precious time per week! These impressive figures show how we can impact the user experience on TV platforms and on a large scale.

Your solutions leverage AI. Have there been any marquee advances in AI in the last year that you will be tapping in future products/services?

OpenAI recently demonstrated the power of a new algorithm called GPT-3. This algorithm has a deep understanding of the text and can answer simple questions, write emails for you and even tell you a story. Media Distillery is working on integrating algorithms as such in the platform to offer a similar level of understanding for videos. For example, you will be able to talk to your remote, ask a question and get a smart response with matching videos so the viewer can start watching.

What is the Future of News Production?

Stephane Guez 

Chief Technology Officer & Co-Founder

To answer this question, we need first to look at where we come from. What Dalet has done in the last ten years is to provide a very distinct approach to news production by combining the Newsroom Computer System and Media Production into a single platform. The result is one system – essentially an NRCS with a Media Asset Management core – that provides end to end workflows from Ingest to Production and Playout. It is built on a story-centric approach that allows for easy content sharing and re-purposing. A unified interface gives the reporter and the producer a comprehensive set of tools to access and transform the objects managed by the system: scripts, media pieces, wires, feeds, rundowns…

Today, we see a proliferation of digital-only news channels and fierce competition across the board. To compete, news operators must lower their total cost of ownership (TCO). They also must have digital-first workflows. Today, many news operations prepare digital content at the end of the workflow. Content is prepped for TV before other platforms. But now, news has to be everywhere at any time on all screens with the content adapted to what the viewer wants simultaneously. We cannot accomplish this with rundown-centric workflows. 

The old way of shooting news, with a full camera and reporter crew in the field, is gone. Media is expected to be delivered in near real-time with editing and storytelling done on any device from any location. The same goes for developing storylines. There are multiple contributors and thus multiple storylines. They need ways to collaborate and share content beyond the confines of the newsroom.

Audience habits have changed too. They want frequent updates on stories with rich graphics and relevant context that help paint the full picture.

The future newsroom needs to be able to deal with more news sources and have a far greater control over editorial and media sources to prevent the spreading of fake news. They need tools to assist and give timely, contextual recommendations on content use.

So, where is this going?

Current news production systems still heavily rely on physical equipment and interfaces with hardware. While Dalet is a software company, the end-to-end solution includes integrations with many other components.

The IT revolution of the last 20 years has been about the digitization of data and content and the virtualization of applications and infrastructure. The future of news production will be the virtualization of the newsroom. What does that mean? It means that the newsroom is going to become that virtual space, accessible from any device or location, where journalists and producers collaborate in the production of content. The newsroom is no longer a physical room but a digitized platform that allows content professionals that may or may not be working together to produce stories and media that will be distributed in a variety of ways.

This is not completely new – a reporter that works in the field today to cover the elections can send their content over the internet and can interact with the systems hosted at the station to produce and post their contributions. Some newsroom functions are already accessible from outside the newsroom. But this notion of a virtual newsroom will bring this experience and content production work practices to a completely new level.

We need to invent how media professionals work together in a virtualized environment 

The keywords of that approach are Collaboration and Mobility. The objective is to provide operational and business flexibility that will allow a distributed workforce to adapt to the fast-changing expectations of the audience. To achieve those goals, are innovative user tools with modern interfaces – that will be the visible part, the applications that the members of that virtual newsroom will use from wherever they are. These systems will be deployed on public, private clouds or hybrid environments to power agile backends and will rely on AI-powered automation to take care of technical and non-creative steps.

At Dalet, we have been working on the next-generation of our Unified News Operations solution that features the NRCS, news production system, media asset management core, all wrapped around a collaborative, digital-first workflow. The brand-new digital editorial and editing tools enable resources to collaborate in a virtualized environment with access to the assets and modern capabilities that enable storytelling across all platforms from a single source. The cross-collaboration enriches storytelling, with many perspectives, angles and formats to deliver it in. All of the activity is well-managed through a centralized dashboard that simplifies monitoring of resources, assets and stories in progress. This is 360-storytelling: a new story-centric approach that enables teams to collaborate together at the story level.

The virtualized environment leverages cloud, enabling new levels of mobility and service including the extensive use of AI to better manage and utilize millions of assets. Agile SaaS models mean shorter release cycles and transparent upgrades that ensure operators have the very latest capabilities. Combined with the increased usability, operators will be able to lower their TCO.

Why now?

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the need for media organizations and especially news outlets to be more flexible and allow a distributed workforce to continue to be productive and deliver the content expected by the audience, even if they could not be in the same room. This crisis is dramatically accelerating the transformation I am illustrating in this article. 

During these last few months, we have helped many of our customers adapt to the new conditions and adopt different work practices to cope with the challenges of lockdowns and social distancing. But it is time now to embrace this approach in a more systematic way: build the platforms and invent the new applications that will allow media organizations to positively transform their business and work practices for the long term. Not just to address the recent crisis, but explore new work models, and deal with the challenges of an industry that sees rapidly changing news media consumption habits. 

Let’s talk about Mobility and Collaboration

These are key aspects of the virtual newsroom of the future. Mobility means that all functions can be accessible from anywhere with web-based interfaces and mobile devices: wires, planning, script editing, audio and video editing, playout and publication. The virtual newsroom is also a collaborative space: whether you are planning, editing the stories of the day or preparing a show’s schedule, everything can be worked on by people from the same team at the same time. And, whether you are working from a train, a coffee shop or home, you have all the newsroom capabilities on all your devices.  

Automation and AI

The complexity of producing and distributing news in the modern world is not decreasing but increasing. The news cycle has become a 24x7 cycle for everyone in the news business – not just the 24-hour news channels – and that means being present on so many platforms at the same time. The technical process of producing and distributing news – whether live playout or multiplatform publishing – requires thousands of small steps. Fortunately, a lot of those can be automated so that reporters and producers spend time on creative tasks and writing compelling stories.

As it is already today, the virtual newsroom is built on the foundation of a Media Asset Management system and is powered by a workflow engine – at the end it is both a creative space and a set of organizational tools that orchestrate human tasks as well as automated technical tasks to optimize news production and distribution.

AI technology can contribute to that revolution: today there is a constant flow of information that comes in – wires, press briefings, recordings from reporters in the field and even user generated content (UGC). Organizations need resources to process, index and catalogue – this can be done automatically, at least in part. 

Technology is increasingly improving how to perform these tasks. But more importantly, the data produced by this processing and analysis need to be part of the virtual newsroom platform, the exploitation of this data needs to be part of workflows that effectively help the journalists and other people in the newsrooms to perform their job. For instance, if a journalist works on a political story, finding the recording of a statement or a relevant picture should be automated for the most part.

As we move into the virtualized news world, these automated processes can be enhanced with an abundance of data captured and analyzed in a much more efficient manner. Cloud-based newsrooms allow operators to leverage the power of AI to automate indexing of content and recommend relevant content for story development. AI, as it matures, will also help with fake news detection. This type of agility will expand exponentially as AI models learn and accelerate automation workflows.

Collaboration Drives the Future
Cloud technologies and SaaS business models enable full experimentation of workflows and allow organizations to benchmark potential ROI and TCO. This changes the way news organizations can onboard enterprise solutions, reducing the need to invest in physical infrastructure and minimizing risks before overhauling their business strategy.

In this environment, vendors need to pivot and refocus internal efforts. They need to employ customer success managers and environment managers to partner with their customers more closely. Combined with a solid DevOps approach, vendors are in a unique position to provide the agility and adaptability that 360-storytelling news operation requires.

A virtualized newsroom with its ecosystem of tools will change the way journalists work to produce compelling stories: this is what newsmakers and vendors can achieve together.

How the media and entertainment industry can protect media asset libraries against ransomware

David Phillips

Principal Architect, M&E Solutions

The media and entertainment industry has quickly developed into a prime target for ransomware. Organizations as large and diverse as Disney, Sony and France’s M6 Group have all been affected by cyberattacks in recent years.

Research from Forrester Consulting indicates that more than half of organizations (51%) in the M&E sector experienced three or more cyber-attacks in just 12 months, while Sophos’ ‘State of Ransomware 2020’ report found that media and entertainment is among the industries most affected by ransomware, with 60% of organizations hit last year.

With the average cost of a TV show on a major network or streaming service at nearly $6 million dollars per episode, the inability to access even a small portion of key files can be financially disastrous for production companies.

So, what is putting M&E businesses at risk and how can they effectively protect their media assets against the growing ransomware threat?

Data at risk

Arguably the main reason why M&E companies are so susceptible to ransomware attacks is the large number of people involved in music, movie and TV production. Large scale media productions often involve a considerable amount of people working on a single project, in addition to a plethora of third-party experts employed in outsourced roles such as music production, special effects, or post-production.

With so many people having access to business-critical systems and content, this creates an extensive array of potential attacks vectors, or inroads, which hackers can potentially exploit. It’s virtually impossible for an organization to enforce cyber-hygiene practices across such a wide range of employees and freelancers, and it only takes one security hole for hackers to gain access.

But it’s not just about the personnel involved. Factors such as an increasing reliance on technology and the growing number of digital content formats have quickly increased the complexity of production processes, thereby making it harder – not to mention more expensive – to protect against attacks such as ransomware.

This is especially true for small, specialty post-production and visual effects companies that often don’t have the resources to employ full-time IT and security staff.

And what’s particularly worrying is that ransomware attacks can be disastrous for M&E companies. The phrase ‘content is king’ is more relevant in media and entertainment than in any other sector. Content is the revenue stream, the crown jewels and the key differentiator that distinguishes an M&E organization from its competitors. Losing access to these media assets is therefore a nightmare scenario.

Given that nearly three quarters of ransomware attacks (73%) result in data being successfully encrypted, there is clearly an urgent need for M&E businesses to be more resilient in protecting their valuable media content.

Responding to ransomware

The first step for media and entertainment companies should be moving beyond established methods of stopping ransomware, as these produce unreliable results. For example, many businesses have traditionally focused on employee training and awareness, but some elements of human error are likely on large content production projects involving numerous third parties.

What’s more, solutions designed to prevent ransomware or reactively contain an attack’s impact rapidly become obsolete as threats and their identifying signatures continue to evolve.

Finally, encrypting data is a common bulwark against ransomware. However, while this can prove effective where cybercriminals want to access and share the data, with ransomware the data can simply be re-encrypted to prevent the rightful owners from accessing it.

This is where WORM (Write Once, Read Many) and Object Lock storage technology can make all the difference. WORM technology allows media producers to make unchangeable “locked” backups of their data, giving the media and entertainment industry a viable way of protecting media asset libraries from ransomware.

While these “locked” copies can still be read, they can’t be changed for a fixed amount of time, even if cybercriminals do manage to slip through the net. Instead of ransomware being able to encrypt the data and lock the victim out, data can be restored through a simple recovery process.

The even better news for M&E businesses is that object storage solutions equipped with new “Object Lock” functionality have made WORM technology more accessible. Object Lock provides WORM functionality on enterprise storage systems, removing the need for specialised storage solutions and protecting data at the device level instead of requiring an external layer of defence.

Object Lock also enables ransomware protection to be automated for simple management as part of the standard backup workflow. This removes the burden from M&E businesses, delivering a level of security that is comparable to offline storage without the labour-intensive manual steps involved.

With the security threats facing the media and entertainment industry continuing to increase, M&E businesses simply can’t afford to ignore the importance of comprehensive ransomware protection. Object Lock storage can provide a long-term, reliable solution to stopping the effects of ransomware, protecting the valuable media asset libraries that are the industry’s lifeblood.

Creative Collaboration: ATEME TITAN Powers TVUp OTT Services

Pablo Rodriguez de Tembleque

Director of Solution Engineering EMEA

Francisco Sáez 

CTO

TVUp is a Spain-based company that has created TIVIFY OTT platform, a PayTV as a service with premium channels and content for both Spanish and international markets (B2B2C). TIVIFY runs via an Android TV set-top-box as the main device. The platform is distributed via two commercial models: Tivify (B2C) and Tivify PRO (B2B2C), enabling operators to give the best offer of linear and non-linear TV and to offer viewers the same advanced functionalities such as applications and games that big players in the market can provide.

The TVUp platform offers clients access to its own TV platform and channel bouquet and a wide variety of content through the Play Store, including YouTube, Spotify, Disney +, HBO, Amazon Prime and DAZN.

In setting up this service, TVUp required a partner with considerable OTT delivery expertise to ensure, above all, a premium viewing experience for its customers. As the leader in video delivery solutions for Broadcast, Cable TV, DTH, IPTV and OTT, ATEME’s expertise in delivering similar projects and best of breed technology in the form of its TITAN solution made it stand out to TVUp. “We have been closely following the evolution of ATEME and its encoding solutions for some time now. With a huge amount of experience and a strong local presence in Spain, ATEME was an obvious choice for us,” comments Francisco Sáez, CTO, TVUp.

Delivering flexibility and high quality

In order to obtain the flexibility and high video quality it desired, TVUp has deployed ATEME’s TITAN - a high video quality and high density video processing solution which it will use to deliver TV content, premium channels and apps via OTT. Thanks to this, TVUp is able to provide operators and users with myriad benefits, such as more efficient encoding and transcoding, leveraging ATEME’s adaptive encoding technology to do so.

With video bitrate impacting storage and delivery, many operators aim for bitrate to be reduced as far as acceptably possible in order to save costs. However, adopting a ‘one size fits all’ streaming approach to coding profiles lowers the quality of the viewing experience, especially when bandwidths are low. In such a fast-moving competitive environment, operators can’t afford this compromise. ATEME’s adaptive encoding and profiles optimization provides a solution to this, saving TVUp close to 50% of bandwidth, which has a considerable impact in lowering the CDN cost and the resultant total cost of ownership for live and VOD applications, all whilst ensuring high video quality at lower bitrates.

“Ultimately, the video quality is king for our customers,” comments Sáez (TVUp), “The flexibility in the creation of coding profiles for the setup of our live OTT TV channels allows us to provide a line-up of channels at very tight maximum bitrates with a magnificent quality of experience for our clients.”

Furthermore, ATEME’s dynamic chunking further optimizes the OTT delivery. Instead of the traditional approach of keeping chunks at fixed lengths, enabling the switching between shorter or longer chunks, which improves the playback efficiency and ensures low latency. A smooth viewing experience is critical for the viewer. Therefore, for TVUp, to ensure the lowest latency possible enables it to deliver on its promise of the best possible viewing experience.

A true partnership

Beyond ATEME’s superior technology offering, the two companies also share a common vision for the future of Pay TV, and this synergy has resulted in a close working relationship from the start. “Our work with TVUp is like a partnership,” comments Pablo Rodriguez de Tembleque, Director of Solution Engineering EMEA, ATEME, “We began by working closely with TVUP’s solutions architects and engineers on the proof of concept, and subsequently the deployment has been an incredibly smooth process.”

Sáez (TVUp) adds, “For us, ATEME’s expertise is invaluable. As part of the support the team offers us, they have undertaken a profile optimization review, bench marking our OTT layer to recommend which profiles could be removed, and where resolution could be lowered, for example. It is this kind of added value which has set our partnership with ATEME apart.”

Looking to the future

With success already achieved, there are more exciting plans to come from the partnership. Sáez (TVUp) comments, “We are very happy to have TITAN integrated in our ecosystem, it was a very straightforward process with great support from the local technical team. We clearly have a common understanding of the expected evolution of PayTV leveraging OTT technologies, and ATEME is the right partner for this amazing journey.”

With the platform currently deployed on a private cloud infrastructure, future plans involve a migration to a hybrid cloud solution. This will enable even greater flexibility for TVUp, and ensure it is able to continue delivery best of breed technology to its customers, with a competitive and innovative offering through TIVIFY.

Rodriguez de Tembleque (ATEME), adds, “Providing TVUp with our transcoding solutions demonstrates our capacity to address all opportunities and customers with the same passion and quality of support. Our local teams have been engaging with the TVUp team for a while, defining the best possible solutions to fit both their technical and business model needs. We trust that this is only the beginning of a long-term story and a solid partnership.”

View the Case Study video from BaM Live!™ here.

Virtualizing broadcast operations

Matt Westrup 

Vice President of Technology and Operations

Srinivasan KA

Co-Founder

How A+E Networks UK partnered with Amagi to transition its entire EMEA operations to a cloud-managed service.

A+E Networks® UK, a joint venture between Hearst and Sky, is a leading media network reaching 58 million homes across 100 countries. With its global portfolio of popular, high-performing and creative brands - HISTORY®, Crime+Investigation®, Lifetime®, HISTORY2® and UK free to air BLAZE® - A+E Networks® UK has entertained and inspired audiences for over 20 years; telling the stories that need to be told. They currently partner with over 360 operators broadcasting throughout the Nordics, Benelux, Central Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

In Q4 of 2019, A+E Networks® UK faced a serious business continuity situation with their then existing managed broadcast services provider. This placed the operations of their entire portfolio of 30 channels in Europe at unprecedented risk but without a clear idea of the likely outcome. A typical technical broadcast operations transition of this magnitude is planned and executed over the course of 6 to 9 months. And, it takes nearly 18-24 months in the case of issuing fresh RFPs. The company found itself in a conundrum. “On one hand, we had to build a backup option to ensure business continuity in response to the evolving business situation at our service provider. But, on the other hand, in case the service provider’s business situation improved, we wanted to stay on,” explains Matt Westrup, Vice President of Technology and Operations, A+E Networks® EMEA. The actual business risks and aforesaid constraints meant that A+E Networks® UK needed to be ready for a full-blown playout transition but needed to do this at very low costs to address a business continuity eventuality.

“The unique situation faced by A+E Networks® UK required a solution that was reliable, flexible, quickly scalable, and yet very cost-effective. It was a challenge that was tailor-made for cloud technologies,” says Srinivasan KA, co-founder at Amagi, a global SaaS leader in broadcast and streaming TV. Amagi is a pioneer in cloud-based broadcast of live linear content. “We are truly cloud-born! We started investing in cloud technologies as early as 2012, and deployed our first cloud playout solution in 2013 for a UK-based equestrian TV network. We have built all our broadcast solutions on the cloud enabling our clients to fully leverage the power of cloud.” Today, the company manages 400+ channels on its cloud platform, with deployments in over 40 countries, working with large TV networks, content owners, new-age digital networks, and streaming TV/OTT platforms.

Teams at A+E Networks® UK and Amagi collaborated and designed a two-phased approach to adequately respond to the evolving business situation. In the first phase, Amagi put together a ‘Cold business continuity playout’. If the situation arose, in the second phase, A+E Networks UK® would undertake a full playout transition. “This way, we would have moved and tested all the basic workflows to the cloud in Phase 1 ready to go if needed. We then would have had to manage minimal transition going into Phase 2. It meant we created a full shadow operation that could go live pretty easily but without the commercial commitment until that point. It was an ideal position to be in and only possible by using the cloud this way,” says Westrup.

Phase 1: Cold Business Continuity Playout

Business goals

  • Technical: Have the basic workflows rapidly ready for a Go Live scenario
  • Commercial: Limited cost commitment for implementation and ability to step everything back down

Implementation

  • Set up systems and workflow integration and media ingest workflows
  • Set up non-redundant playout, test the playout, and make playout dormant to save costs
  • Set up public internet (Zixi) based channel delivery, test the delivery, and make delivery dormant to save costs

Phase 2: Go Live – Full Playout Transition

Business goals

  • Technical: Deliver full channel portfolio to affiliates at short notice (in days, rather than months as is the norm) with no interruption to viewers

  • Commercial: Minimal transition cost from Phase 1 to Phase 2; Meet market-norm for playout and fibre delivery costs

Implementation

  • Start the non-redundant playout and IP delivery immediately

  • Setup redundant playout and move to traditional fibre-based delivery in parallel

The Amagi solution included a fully virtualized broadcast infrastructure based on AWS, CLOUDPORT cloud playout platform, dynamic graphics, scheduling, automated monitoring, multi-country distribution across IP, satellite, and fiber deliver models, and a 24x7 managed service to broadcast 30 channels across Europe.

Amagi’s innovative cloud-based broadcast infrastructure and adaptable workflows allowed A+E Networks® UK and Amagi to complete Phase 1 in about 6 weeks for all 30 channels. The cloud based on-demand infrastructure on cloud naturally lent itself to meet the technical and business goals in Phase 1. When the business situation demanded, A+E Networks® UK and Amagi triggered Phase 2 of the project. Within 10 days, all pay TV operators were moved to the Amagi solution!

Solution Highlights

  • Over 50K hours of content were ingested into the Amagi cloud instance of AWS demonstrating scalability and stability of solution as part of Phase 1
  • Highly localised channel playout supporting subtitles and local language audio for different countries in Europe
  • Fully automated process across broadcast workflow – ingest, scheduling, playout, and monitoring with complete control and visibility to A+E Networks® UK
  • Multi-redundancy cloud architecture to guarantee uninterrupted broadcast during natural disasters, pandemics or technical downtime
  • 24x7 monitoring and managed services aided by comprehensive L1, L2 and L3 support
  • Integration with ad-network partners in individual countries and workflows for management of ad schedules from ad-partner

“Now, we are able to access our entire broadcast operations from any remote location through a simple web UI, control and manage all aspects of the workflow. When the pandemic erupted and preventive measures across Europe were put in place, our channel operations continued with no extra risk, while safeguarding health and safety of our personnel allowing them to manage operations from remote locations,” says Westrup.

Through this engagement, A+E Networks® UK and Amagi have demonstrated to the industry that large broadcasters, in spite of their wide scale of operations and complex workflows, can virtualize their entire broadcast operations within a short time, and manage it from any remote location with full visibility and control. This could well usher a new thinking in the European broadcast circles as companies look to innovate adapting to emerging technologies such as cloud.

How Cyclevox covered a major growth season with LiveU

The UK cycling production company uses LiveU’s remote production solution to bring British Cycling races live to fans across the country

The Challenge

British Cycling, the main national governing body for cycling in Great Britain, approached Cyclevox to find a more cost-effective way while maintaining quality and to help them satisfy viewers who didn’t want to watch a half hour TV show about each event.

Cycling is not an easy sport to cover: it’s high-speed and can be very close racing; the terrain/style of racing varies hugely, from inner-city criterium (crit) races to much longer road races and then there’s the track too; and connectivity options vary greatly, even across a single event. Additionally, when an event closes down a city center production companies don’t have all day to lay the fiber cables needed for full coverage of the race.

The Solution

​Cyclevox used between five to seven LiveU units depending on the location of each race. One was fitted to a motorbike, which followed the action from the front of the race; another LiveU was used with the presenting team to feed back interviews, live links and additional content, which was either played out live or fed into EVS for later use. Further units were supplied for cameras at the start/finish and specific corners or positions around the circuit. A final unit was used at their Surrey MCR for uplinking to social media. LiveU servers brought the feeds from each remote camera into a gallery where vision and sound was mixed. The feed was both delivered online and transmitted back to site for display on LED video screens at the start/finish line.

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