As the staggering growth of streaming viewership and consumption slows as indicated by Netflix’s meltdown at the start of 2022, and HBO's (Crash of the) House of Dragons Premier in August 2022, streaming operators face one major challenge: ensuring streaming workflows scale both up and down. At the center is flexibility to cope with changing viewer demand patterns, who expect high QoE and are well versed in cancelling subscriptions and switching to a competitor. Moving to the cloud is a popular and excellent solution, but what are the true benefits? Should you move all components to the cloud? How do you transition efficiently without jeopardising QoE?

Current state of live streaming workflows

A streaming workflow seems simple: capture the video, compress, package (i.e. CMAF, HLS, DASH), ingest and transcode, and deliver it to viewers. In reality, we know it’s much more complex than that.

Viewers demand high-quality streams with low latency and no buffering, and they’re not forgiving if you fail to deliver. One error anywhere in your streaming workflow negatively impacts QoS, which translates to churn and ultimately loss of revenue. Further complicating it are different technologies, a lack of standardisation leading (data fragmentation), and, everything keeps evolving and changing. Streaming operators struggle for competitive advantages, and one clear trend emerges: moving live streaming workflows to the cloud.

Benefits of moving your live streaming workflow to the cloud

The current approach to streaming monitoring isn’t flexible enough to track both hardware and software components; monitoring technologies need to be cloud-based as well.

Virtualised versions of technologies, like encoders, allow you to shift costs to operational expenditures, and now only pay for a server as it’s needed.

This contrasts with the industry’s past heavy reliance on capital expenditure - acquiring physical encoders, servers, etc (and maintaining them) - when video delivery was by terrestrial lines or through physical media. The elasticity provided by the cloud unlocks these benefits:

• Better scalability
• Service reliability for viewers
• Greatly reduced maintenance
• Updates at a lower cost
• Get to market much faster: critical for competition

Should you move your streaming workflow to the cloud?

Everything can be virtualised, but sometimes it makes sense to keep elements of the streaming workflow behind the corporate firewall.

Sometimes, it might make more sense to have initial encoding for a live stream happen on physical machines that can be more closely managed and aren’t subject to the potential latency of cloud resources. The workflow might look something like a rack of encoders producing a master stream, then sending it to cloud-based encoding resources for transcoding and repackaging.

How to decide what streaming workflow components to migrate

No streaming operator is equal; here is a step-by-step guide to how to assess which components to move, how, and when.

1. Assess where you currently stand

Some companies are more advanced than others; maybe you just learned to adapt the cloud better to your streaming needs, or maybe you're already employing the latest cloud technology to leverage its full potential. Understanding where you stand in cloud adoption and usage right now is key to planning.

Cloud KPIs: adoption vs. usage

Understanding to what extent your organisation is “cloudified” is important for two reasons. First, it’s strategic, because it helps you find how you can use cloud technology to improve the efficiency, resiliency, and performance of your streaming service long-term. Second, it’s tactical, because it lets you identify how you can employ cloud technologies right now to improve your engineering efforts.

For example, moving from specific hardware, such as encoders, to virtualised instances can expose APIs which provide programmatic control over encoding functionality, ensuring improved scalability, resilience, and lower cost. This can result in better-engineered software.

Adoption matters too. The decision to migrate from server-based to cloud-based technologies is a strategic one, but it doesn’t dictate the way the cloud is employed in engineering efforts. It could be virtualisation or it could be serverless functions.

Also consider usage. Even if the strategic decision hasn’t been made to migrate to the cloud long-term, individual cloud technologies can be employed immediately to solve specific challenges or gain efficiencies within the workflow. Measuring how well you adopt and use cloud technologies will give you a clear picture of your immediate and long-term opportunities.

Measuring cloud adoption within streaming workflows

Part of measuring adoption is technology selection. You could be virtualising components of the workflow or you could be embedding them within the very fabric of the cloud through serverless functions. They are both cloud technologies. To help you measure your adoption of cloud technologies, consider the following scale:

Measuring cloud usage within streaming workflows

Measuring usage is similar to measuring adoption. There are lots of ways you can utilise cloud technologies as part of the workflow – even if your adoption of the cloud overall is relatively low.

Using your scores to drive change

Combining the results of this subjective assessment with data from your streaming service, quantifies how cloud technology adoption and usage could impact your subscriber growth, user engagement, attrition, advertising revenue, and more.

If you see QoE and engagement data drop as simultaneous users increase, then by transitioning workflow components from hardware to cloud, from virtualised to serverless, or from traditional to microservice architecture, you can improve those metrics.

Assessing cloud technologies

Before applying cloud adoption to your strategy or implementing cloud technologies into your workflow, it helps to assess the landscape. The best way to do that is a tech radar.

Running a production department at a major news network can be a lot like sailing a ship. Both can push leaders to sink or swim. A seaman turned news executive knows what it takes to keep things running smoothly even when the seas turn rough and unpredictable.

Applying skills learned on capricious waters as a young French Merchant Marine, Laurent De Rodez, Euronews’ Head of Production & Post Production, has spent 20 years at the company running nimble operations, building strong crews and anticipating future needs to stay ahead of the curve and his competition.

Laurent De Rodez leads Euronews production and post-production and has worked at the network for 20 years.

When he decided to move on from the naval service, De Rodez found the career that continues to keep him pivoting and moving fast. He began taking classes in video production, and eventually started teaching those skills to others. Then, came ‘the business’. “I started in the TV business. And then I worked my way up to some responsibility in different companies,” De Rodez said. Spending time as a post-production manager, he was able to transfer those skills into television news, first aiding video editing teams and later moving into the job he has today.

Euronews is Europe’s leading international news channel, serving an audience of 400 million homes in 160 countries and available in 17 languages. With De Rodez’ leadership in production and technology, the network has been able to navigate worldwide crises and uncertainties with the help of hundreds of freelance journalists who collaborate around the clock with the Euronews team members.

With more than 400 journalists spread across 30 different countries, Euronews relies heavily on strong remote capabilities, collaboration over borders and time zones and seamless production tools.

​​​​​​​​Euronews has a massive international imprint, serving 160 countries in 17 languages.

In 2017, NBC Universal sold its minority stake in Euronews to the majority owner, Media Globe Networks. That was an opportune time for reinvention. The Euronews team carefully reconfigured its approach to broadcast journalism, but maintained its core operations. One of the most important areas for Euronews, though not fully appreciated at the time, was its remote capabilities. Long before many others in the business were harnessing technologies to make it possible, Euronews was making remote work part of their day-to-day workflow.

Accurately anticipating needs in the ever-changing news business has been a trademark for De Rodez and Euronews. Though they couldn’t have predicted the pandemic, their early reliance on freelance journalists across Europe helped them through a critical juncture. De Rodez says the strategy paid off. In the early days of the pandemic when news teams around the globe were struggling to figure out how to produce news outside of their traditional newsroom environments, Euronews was already comfortable with the tools they had been using for a few years. One of the most reliable resources they had, according to De Rodez, is latakoo.

latakoo provides a seamless workflow for journalists and efficiencies for news agencies. Getting news from the field and on air is the way freelancers get paid. Making the process as quick and efficient as possible is crucial to their work supporting a round-the-clock news cycle. Created by two former news reporters (Paul Adrian and myself) a little over a decade ago, latakoo provides simplicity to a historically complicated process. We saw a gap that prevented reporters from being more efficient in their work and radically improved the process. “latakoo was like a miracle. There is a cloud-based storage where everybody can send content, share it and organize it. The files are available immediately after the journalist sends from locations around the world, and they also show up in our asset management system,” De Rodez said. With latakoo, journalists can quickly upload their footage in the field from their laptop and smartphones. Within seconds, the entire Euronews team has access to the files, and can immediately share the content on-air and online.

“Euronews is a special type of company that hires hundreds of freelancers. So, on any given day they may have someone producing content who never previously worked for them,” said Paul Adrian, CEO and my co-founder at latakoo. “latakoo makes it super easy for freelancers to sign up for Euronews systems and to use their own technology to collect, shoot, edit, deliver and collaborate with their employer. latakoo meets these requirements.”

latakoo also offers an easy-to-use, but technologically robust mobile app for iOS and Android. Along with the LiveU app, LU-Smart, journalists who are working alone have the ability to create stories in the field with latakoo and go live from the field using LiveU. LiveU and latakoo are also integrated. That means a file can be sent using LiveU’s store and forward and land first in the latakoo cloud and end up in a user’s asset manager. According to De Rodez, his team pulls about 10 live shots per day from correspondents using the LiveU-Smart.

Today, Euronews is in good company. More reporters are working remotely than ever with a significant number of them increasingly being freelancers. Career website Zippia estimates there are more than 14,000 freelance journalists in the United States alone. The International Federation of Journalists says freelance journalism is no longer an “atypical” form of work. In some countries, the majority of journalists are freelancers.

Luke Hanrahan joined Euronews as a freelancer in 2019. Attracted to the network because of its huge footprint and reputation in the industry, he has continued to work for the company because of Euronews’ technological agility and prowess. “Using automation tools like latakoo puts Euronews in a good light for freelance reporters,” said Hanrahan. Hanrahan describes the latakoo experience in three parts: efficiency, intelligence and speed.

Efficiency:

“Every time I submit a package to Euronews as a journalist in the field, it automatically lands on their asset manager. Out of the news networks I have worked for, when you upload a file, whether that is a package or interview, often there is a person who needs to put that file where it needs to be. And that still happens at some major networks. Euronews has the ability to automatically put the file in the folder that it needs to be in for it to go on air. So, within a second of my package landing in the Euronews base in Lyon, it can be pushed on air. So, latakoo gives you the flexibility to do remote work and feel connected to the teams because they are able to access your material much quicker.”

Intelligence:

“latakoo itself is an intelligent tool. If you’re on a breaking story, you can upload material while you continue filming on your phone. So, say for example, there has been a major incident in central London and you just happen to be standing there at the time the major incident occurs, you can stop, pause and carry on. I can’t think of another kit that allows you to do that – to be able to film while you’re uploading. That is pretty intelligent.”

Speed:

“Because of the technology that latakoo has within it, which is pretty unique, you can upload on one bar. Like when I was out at sea last year. I had one bar, and occasionally no bars and then occasionally one bar. You can drop in and out-of-signal and you are not having to restart the send as you would with pretty much any other technology including like the Live-U’s. I could do that safe in the knowledge that I could leave it all uploading in the background as I continued with my work. By the time I got back to the shore, what I needed to upload had already been uploaded. I hadn’t had to monitor it at all and that is pretty intelligent.”

De Rodez shares Hanrahan’s excitement for intelligent technology. He and his network have weathered the pandemic and other storms by embracing uncertainty and relying on just that kind of technology and capable crew members, including freelancers like Hanrahan, who will continue to supply a significant amount of content to fill their 24/7 news cycle. Having put in motion a system that uses technology and people that can quickly shift and change based on the currents, De Rodez and Euronews can keep sailing through fair or fierce winds.

Business agility has become one of the most talked about organizational capabilities of recent years. Indeed, the ability to embrace new ways of thinking and reinvent businesses at pace and scale has become essential to success. Research suggests, for example, that the most agile companies outperform their competitors in terms of revenue and profitable growth by a factor of 2-3 times. The bottom line is there can be no doubt that agile business practices drive results across the organization.

But what does ‘agile’ represent? The Agile Business Consortium, for example, points towards “agility in an organization’s culture, leadership, strategy, and governance that adds value to all stakeholders who operate in uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environments.”

In practical terms, agile businesses can respond to external and internal opportunities and risks quickly, adapting faster and remaining customer-focused – key qualities in today’s fast-paced digital economy.

Fortunately, compared to just a few years ago, more businesses have direct experience of the role, challenges, and benefits of an agile model than ever before. Given the COVID-19 pandemic, this is to be expected – organizations had to move quickly, focusing on core business activities, collaborating online, and innovating to solve problems they’d never experienced before. Among the varied benefits that came as a result, many organizations achieved record technology and process implementation times as they rushed to deploy new solutions to keep their businesses alive. At CGI we want to be able to detect trends and realize those for our clients. We are setting up lean startup workflows to kick off development fast and constantly monitor feedback on our innovations. Misleading targets can be corrected with shorter reaction times and priorities can be adjusted due to high transparency within our organization and the well-cultivated alignment between Management and Development Teams.

In addition to this acceleration in decision-making and the assurance of maximum transparency to support alignment and collaboration across all levels and departments, there have also been significant advances in leadership. The rebuild of governance around new organizational structures and a cultural change support a growing trust in people - from all directions, as management and staff have to adopt new ways of working.
 

As part of our transition after the merge of OpenMedia into CGI, we invested a lot of effort to train and coach our members in new ways of working. We re-shaped our agile processes, increased transparency, and pushed interoperability of our teams in all areas (from management, over implementation, and project teams to support and development teams). This complete vertical and horizontal consistency assures the understanding of our product vision and provides possibilities to decentralize decisions – as we are all aiming at the same big picture and understand the business needs. Constant offerings for training, internal working groups, and communities of special topics ensure a dynamic view of necessities and possibilities. New collaboration ideas and growing alignment lead to a new culture and mindset within an organization. And this in return supports the intrinsic motivation of our colleagues.

Agility fuels resilience

Having experienced first-hand the benefits of business agility, and, in some cases, its crucial role in adapting to rapid, existential challenges, many successful organizations also view agility through an additional lens: how to become more resilient.

In the current challenging economic climate, this is even more relevant. Armed with the individual and collective lessons learned from the pandemic, for example, organizations are now focusing on sustaining progress and becoming more resilient. In doing so, they should focus on three key priorities: energy, security, and development.

In particular, drive, positivity, and energy are required to fuel and maintain the changes required to initiate and sustain business agility. This requires that organizations operate in a safe and secure ecosystem that provides a foundation for ongoing transformation, enabling individuals and teams to build the capabilities that allow them to thrive.

In doing so, they can address a wide variety of organizational objectives, from transforming for net zero, and delivering on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) goals to redesigning value chains and shaping the future of work, among many others.

Clearly, technology and data play an important role as commercial and government organizations continue to focus on improving their business and operating models. Recent research has revealed that organizations have modernized 37% of their applications, with 72% of this implemented on a cloud foundation. What’s more, they forecast that 72% of their applications will be modernized within the next 2-3 years.

This accelerating pace of tech infrastructure modernization is crucial, not least because it helps organizations deliver a faster time to value. The good news is that the burgeoning SaaS solutions industry will only accelerate the process even further, giving businesses the ability to quickly adopt new technology services without the need for significant capital outlay.

Agile digital leaders

In addition, today’s agile digital leaders understand the increasingly strategic role played by partners and business ecosystems. Whether they help develop new business or operating models, augment teams with flexible resources or bring prebuilt accelerators and best practices, partners bring the speed and expertise required to be agile that is virtually impossible to replicate in-house.

Among the main challenges faced by digital leaders when building agility into their culture, processes and technologies are creating value and growth. Although many executives (87%) say they have a strategy in place to become more digital, for example, only 20% say they are producing the expected results.

To address this gap, effective digital leaders pivot from predicting and planning to sensing and responding. This requires the ability to connect strategy, operating model, and execution and create greater transparency and alignment. In doing so, they must understand the need to sense and respond to change quickly – they can only do that successfully when they have designed their business and operating models to be agile.

Faced with the need to develop an agile business ethos, organizations must also recognize they cannot do this alone. Building a network of strategic partners is essential to long-term success and building the ability to adapt at pace and scale.