Cloud Ingest

When live media workflows move to the cloud, broadcast quality transport to public cloud environments become a key challenge. Net Insight’s Emmy-award winning Nimbra cloud ingest solution provides the toolbox needed for providing lossless transport over any type of cloud connection. With an open technology approach, letting you pick the transport technology your cloud environment and cloud applications support.

Lossless over any connection

Providing lossless, broadcast quality, transport over any infrastructure and cloud connection. From the public internet to private and dedicated leased lines.

Complete toolbox

Handling link failures and any level of continuous loss with a complete reliability toolbox consisting of retransmission, FEC and bonding.

Open technology choice

Allows you to pick the retransmission technology you need for your cloud environment and applications by supporting all three common alternatives; RIST, SRT and Zixi.

Trusted by global customers across many industries

“We see a clear trend where our customers expect a higher degree of flexibility, both in terms of service adaption and a quicker service turn-up, and also in terms of business models such as occasional use, as a provider of media services, we believe NFV and SDN technology such as the virtualized Nimbra VA will not only help us to serve our customers better and more rapidly than anyone else, but will also enable us to continuously reinvent ourselves and stay competitive.”

KRIS BARKER
Head of Connected Solutions at Arqiva

Challenges

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.

Our Solution

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.

CONTACT

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Related Resources

NEWS

Net Insight Received Emmy® Award

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

Nimbra Product Portfolio

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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