KRIS BARKER
Head of Connected Solutions at Arqiva
Today many broadcasters are moving live workflows such as playout, live news rooms and news production into public cloud environments from the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The migration of live workflows to public clouds come with great benefits by allowing broadcasters and producers focus on creating great content instead of managing infrastructure. But it doesn’t come without challenges. The key hurdle is getting live media to the these cloud environments reliably and securely, but also cost-efficiently. All while retaining quality and keeping complexity to a minimum.
Connectivity to public cloud providers can be accomplished over the internet, but all the major cloud providers also offer dedicated leased lines. The former provides a high degree of flexibility and reach, while the latter provides a higher degree of reliability, some level of bandwidth guarantees, and a higher degree of service isolation and security. But experience shows that even dedicated leased lines do not provide the lossless performance required by live workflows without adding reliability enhancing technology such as retransmission.
Regardless if cloud connectivity is accomplished over the internet or through leased lines, there is bound to be some level of impairments due to continuous loss and occasional link failures. To mitigate continuous loss, reactive and repairing technology such as retransmission (commonly known as ARQ) is typically applied. With more reliable connections available, forward-error correction (FEC) can be used instead. To handle link failures, technologies like hitless protection and bonding of multiple connections can also be applied. Both of which can be paired with FEC or retransmission for utmost reliability.
Therefore, ingesting content into public cloud environments requires a toolbox that consists of retransmission, FEC and link bonding. This toolbox makes up the foundation of Net Insights Emmy Award-winning Nimbra-based cloud ingest solution.
But to complicate matters further, there is not one single retransmission technology that everyone uses. There is a multitude of different options available, with the top three being the standards-based Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST), the open source Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) and the widely industry adapted Zixi protocol. The reality today is that different cloud environments and different cloud-based applications support different retransmission technologies. That’s why the Nimbra cloud ingest solution has taken an open approach and supports all three retransmission solutions, letting you to pick the technology that is compatible with your cloud environment and cloud applications.
With the Nimbra cloud ingest solution you can mix several retransmission technologies, for example letting you bridge between cloud environments that supports different protocols. Furthermore, you can connect physical encoding and decoding equipment that supports one transport technology, with cloud environments that support another. Using an encoder that only support SRT, while your cloud application only supports RIST? The Nimbra cloud ingest solution can connect the two together.
The Nimbra cloud ingest solution gives you the toolbox you need to provide lossless broadcast quality transport into public cloud environments, over the internet as well as over leased lines. And it does so with an open approach that lets you pick any transport technology you need.
The solution can of course also be used for your private data center needs, where challenges and requirements are similar or sometimes even the same as in public cloud environments.
NEWS
Net Insight is honored by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (NATAS) with a Technology & Engineering Emmy® Award for its pioneering achievements in reliable Internet streaming.
PRODUCTS
In a world where best-effort is the norm, we created the Nimbra portfolio to enable reliable long-distance media networking across any infrastructure.
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