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Remote production in the cloud is open for business

Cost, speed, volume and Covid have accelerated the broadcast industry’s move to remote production as whole swathes of workflows for live events and beyond are moved to the cloud.

Just consider cost alone. It is estimated that the NFL Network spends roughly $1 million for each game it produces with TV operating costs approximately $200 million a year.

In the UK, the BBC estimates that one-off live events and performances cost between $50,000 and $500,000 per hour to buy in from third-party producers.

The costs in both examples are made up of multiple elements, including logistics, staffing, facility, talent, production and content distribution. Critically, the pandemic has highlighted the need to run many more of these workflows remotely – enabling not just safe social distancing but better efficiency and unprecedented flexibility.

Broadcasters doing so include the largest free to air TV network and media production conglomerate in Latin America.

For over a year now this major broadcaster has been producing regular weekly live events – notably indoor soccer games – with a REMI infrastructure including multi-camera feeds switched in the cloud.

What began as a relatively small scale experiment in remote production for lower Tier events has been so successful that the model is being expanded to live entertainment and Tier 2 events.

Indeed, the broadcaster has vowed to end investment in expensive large mobile facilities to concentrate on smaller footprint flypacks, the core of which is Net Insight Nimbra video transport gateways.

The Nimbra is the essential component of the workflow quickly and easily plugged in on-site to encode and reliably send video signals into the cloud.

The broadcaster’s operators then work on the feeds wherever they are – which could just as easily be home as at a centralized production hub – using familiar control interfaces for Multiview, switching and graphics provided by Grass Valley’s cloud native platform AMPP.

This simple highly cost efficient and radically flexible solution has proved a game changer for the broadcaster. No longer do they have to send (or pay for) large number of technicians and editorial staff into the field along with banks of hugely expensive kit. Instead, they can produce more content with a workflow that involves fewer personnel and using the minimal resources of flyaway pack that can be carried from venue to venue in a small van.

This is also another example of the way in which Net Insight as a member of the Grass Valley Alliance is taking cloud and IP media delivery workflows to the next level.

Net Insight’s platforms are designed to bring media delivery solutions for cloud, IP, and virtualized networks, allowing broadcast industry players to create frictionless, high-quality, low-latency live video workflows.

Our scalable, open, and standards-based video infrastructure enables media organizations to spin new channels and workflows up or down in minutes and deliver content in any format.

This is not theory. This is already happening, at scale, across the Globe.

Remote production in the cloud is open for business

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