Cerberus Tech’s Livelink: driving efficiency and agility in live video delivery
Chris Clarke, CRO and Cofounder, Cerberus
The media industry has been focused on cloud and IP adoption in recent years. With that shift, more and more vendors have been offering virtualized services in the cloud, enabling broadcasters to reduce their reliance on hardware-based on-prem infrastructure. For many operations, however, always-on hardware maintains its appeal, despite being overprovisioned or underutilized. And even in the cloud, broadcasters have continued to build siloed workflows dedicated to specific projects, then start all over again each time they launch another project. Using a series of disconnected services, they’ve had no incentive to consider creating comprehensive, repeatable workflows.
With the Livelink self-service cloud platform for live video provisioning and orchestration, Cerberus Tech has set a new standard, giving broadcasters the ability to spin up and spin down entire IP delivery workflows on demand, with confidence, in a repeatable way.
Designed as a broadcast-first platform, Livelink connects cloud services to create familiar workflows that operators can fluidly and fluently scale up when needed, shut down when not in use, and then rebuild and launch once again in a matter of minutes. When operators spin up a workflow to transport live linear or OTT content from point-to-point or multi-point, they’re using “running resources” within Livelink. When they spin down again, “stopped resources” preserve the data, connections, and functionality in a dormant state and can be used to recreate and start that workflow up again when needed. As a result, the operator has confidence the workflow will work every time. The broadcaster reduces both resource usage and operational costs, particularly as compared with traditional on-prem workflows, becoming more efficient while moving closer to internal sustainability targets.
Cohesive and comprehensive capabilities
Cerberus Tech’s provision for cloud-based processing and transport isn’t unique, but Livelink’s utilization of third-party best-in-class integrations and other technology solutions is. Livelink makes it easy for broadcasters and other content owners to create workflows that do exactly what they want them to do, and to fire them up with the click of a button. This self-service model is intended, in part, to help democratize the broadcast industry, giving businesses the tools they need to leverage cloud workflows for themselves rather than remain beholden to large-scale service providers. The result is a first-rate product that allows operators to experience the familiarity of a traditional broadcast workflow that operates as if on premises, but in the cloud.
Complicated transport setups can be created once by an engineer and turned into presets and templates that allow operators to manage complex distribution projects with efficiency and low risk of error. Tier 1 transcoding and conversion services are available within the platform to ensure global delivery of content in the right profile and format, without compromise. New push and pull packaging functionality supports OTT workflows by first creating versions of content in all required bit rates, resolutions, and frame sizes, then conforming those versions to meet various specifications, such as Apple’s HLS spec, so they can be fed directly to an OTT CDN platform. Advanced monitoring tools built into the Livelink platform provide the visibility, monitoring, and measurement capabilities essential to ensuring service quality across linear broadcast and OTT content delivery.
These components all look as though they fit together within Livelink because they do; the platform was designed that way. Freeing the broadcaster from all the legwork involved in deploying other companies’ software and toolsets via API so they work together smoothly, Cerberus Tech has crafted it all into Livelink with a cohesive look and feel. And through collaborative development and ongoing integration of industry-leading technologies into Livelink, Cerberus Tech brings ever greater efficiency and convenience to cloud-based broadcast workflows.
Flexible scaling and optimization
Central to the Livelink self-service offering is the ability of users to decide, at every stage, what resources they need, whether they really need them, and if or when to stop or delete them. One size does not fit all, and the platform accommodates the full range of use cases. After a broadcaster or another user creates a Livelink account, they launch an environment which becomes the logical and physical container for everything they want to do for any purpose.
Each environment is priced and scaled according to how much the user can put through them. While some users need gigabits per second of throughput on a regular basis, others need just megabits out on an occasional basis. This approach allows broadcasters to deploy the exact footprint they need, sizing the system and resources appropriately to prevent excess power usage or, crucially in the macro-economic environment, avoid unnecessary overspend. Should the scale of a particular workflow shrink, for example, the broadcaster can downsize to a smaller instance while retaining all necessary connections and settings. They can maintain the same familiar broadcast workflow while tailoring operations to be more sustainable.
Commitment to sustainability
Sustainability is a key part of the design process as Cerberus Tech develops “future-proof” solutions for the broadcast and media industry, ensuring customers can make environmentally conscious purchases. The company is also committed to continually improving its own environmental credentials by setting and achieving, even exceeding, target metrics around waste generation and energy consumption.
With its Livelink platform, Cerberus Tech offers a cloud-centric, broadcast-first solution that maintains for users the same look and feel, the same SLAs and uptime standards, that have been established over decades of on-premises operations. Enabling that functionality and experience in a self-serve model has been the company’s primary objective, but a close second has been to put forward the best possible product and give users the freedom to scale their workflows as needed and to spin up and down those workflows for efficient resource usage that’s reflected in their bottom line and environmental footprint.
