Cerberus Tech – Orchestrating Live IP video delivery: reducing complexity to enable highly scalable workflows
Chris Clarke, Chief Revenue Officer and Co-founder, Cerberus Tech
The shift toward live IP video delivery has unlocked new possibilities for broadcasters, content providers, and production teams. This transition is enabling greater flexibility in content distribution by supporting delivery of high-quality video across multiple platforms with lower latency, improved scalability, and reduced infrastructure costs. However, with greater flexibility has come greater complexity.
Sophisticated coordination is a must in managing multiple transport protocols, adapting to different network conditions, and ensuring reliable delivery across platforms. This is where orchestration plays a vital role.
Defining orchestration in Live IP video workflows
Orchestration is already familiar to most broadcasters and content producers, as it has long been a mainstay of file-based workflows, where automation tools execute predefined actions on media assets stored in watch folders. But live content in the IP domain presents very different requirements and challenges. To overcome unpredictable network conditions and distribute live IP video to multiple endpoints with real-time adaptability, broadcasters need tools and capabilities built for the challenge. Cloud-native orchestration of live video delivery offers a solution.
Transforming a series of repetitive manual processes into a highly automated workflow driven by dynamic and intelligent control, orchestration makes IP-based workflows viable — even optimal — for live video delivery. Managing multiple interconnected tasks such as encoding, transcoding, routing, and monitoring within an automated system, a well-designed orchestration framework links each processing stage to ensure that the output of one task feeds into the next. This approach significantly reduces the need for manual intervention, as well as operational overhead and the potential for human error.
Unlike traditional systems built on static, on-premises infrastructure, cloud-based orchestration enables live workflows to be provisioned dynamically and adjusted as needed. Orchestration platforms can deploy and scale resources instantly, leveraging real-time monitoring to ensure optimal performance for any live event. Rather than manually configure and monitor each process, engineers can rely on modern orchestration layers to automate these functions.
Because modern IP video delivery platforms are designed with user-friendly interfaces and API integrations, orchestration is accessible even to teams with limited technical resources or know-how. With orchestration enabling real-time scaling, intelligent decision-making, and dynamic responsiveness to changing conditions, a single operator can manage processes that previously required inter-departmental teams.
The elements of a modern orchestration solution
A robust orchestration framework for live IP video delivery should include several key elements if it is to help broadcasters and other content producers to realize many of the benefits promised by IP — most notably, the benefits of greater efficiency, scalability, and reliability.
To start, automated deployment and cloud-enabled scaling allow resources to be provisioned only when needed, preventing idle infrastructure costs. Rather than keep expensive encoding hardware running 24/7, broadcasters can spin up workflows temporarily for an event and then shut down afterward. For continuous operations, workflows can adapt dynamically based on demand, ensuring stability even during peak events. By automating these processes, broadcasters can maintain high availability without overprovisioning resources.
With support for multiple transport protocols, such as SRT, Zixi, RIST, and RTMP, an orchestration platform can perform protocol-agnostic processing that accommodates a wide variety of workflows and delivery requirements. By effectively decoupling the payload from the protocol, the platform ensures content is properly formatted regardless of the transport method.
Intelligent decision-making enhances system responsiveness by facilitating automated adjustments based on real-time conditions. Such adjustments might include modifying encoding parameters, switching between redundant streams, and rerouting feeds as necessary. If, for example, a broadcaster needs to send a high-bitrate SRT feed to a satellite uplink while simultaneously delivering a low-latency WebRTC stream for social media, these workflows can be dynamically adjusted without manual reconfiguration. The orchestration platform can maintain optimal performance for live video delivery, even in fluctuating network conditions.
When integrated into an orchestration solution, centralized control and monitoring provide a comprehensive view of active workflows, network performance, and delivery statuses through a single pane of glass. Real-time logging and alerting ensure that operators can quickly identify and address potential issues, minimizing downtime and disruptions. An effective orchestration system continuously monitors stream health and automatically switches to backup paths if needed. This ensures uninterrupted delivery, whether for a global sports broadcast or a corporate webcast.
Finally, business intelligence and cost optimization support broadcasters and production companies in managing operational expenses. Detailed analytics provide insights into usage patterns, helping users optimize costs by selecting the most efficient cloud regions, transport methods, and compute resources. Automated billing tools track usage on a granular level, simplifying financial reconciliation and forecasting so that organizations can be more cost-effective in resource allocation.
As live IP video delivery continues to evolve, so too will orchestration — further improving scalability, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. Future advancements may include AI-driven orchestration, where machine learning algorithms predict optimal encoding settings, dynamically adjust bitrates, and proactively reroute streams based on network conditions. Greater edge integration will also be key, with lightweight orchestration agents deployed at the network edge to enhance real-time processing capabilities and reduce latency for live sports and remote production. Tighter business intelligence integration will enable organizations to leverage enhanced analytics for data-driven decisions on content distribution, monetization, and audience engagement.
Orchestration enables broadcasters and content producers to redefine their video delivery workflows. Thanks to intelligent automation, real-time monitoring, and cloud-native scalability, they can bypass the complexities of live IP video delivery and focus instead on delivering high-quality content.
