Live content delivery must be both agile and reliable. This is no small accomplishment, particularly in the realm of live sports, where content producers and rights holders increasingly face changing commercial dynamics, unfavourable global macro-economics and an unsettled corporate landscape.
As we’ve detailed in a prior post, these challenges sit atop continual pressure to address diverse viewing habits and deliver content that raises the bar for fan engagement.
By enabling greater flexibility and agility, IP technologies and the rise of remote production have opened up valuable opportunities in live video delivery. And platforms such as our Livelink cloud-enabled solution for IP video content management, orchestration, and delivery offer straightforward, cost-effective access to the benefits of IP-based contribution and distribution while removing the complexity from working with various formats and protocols.
In fact, Livelink goes a step further to ensure reliability, as well. With support for multicloud deployment, the platform empowers users to ensure the resilience and reliability of live video delivery. Able to leverage a single orchestration platform across multiple cloud providers, users improve both reliability and cost efficiency while eliminating their dependence on any one cloud provider’s services.
How does this multicloud model for live video delivery translate to a win? Let’s take a closer look at this approach and its benefits.
The Multicloud Model
Multicloud-capable platforms such as our Livelink self-serve provisioning, orchestration, and automation platform bring together the strengths of different cloud vendors and services, allowing broadcasters to avoid the risks of vendor lock-in while increasing service resilience. With a multicloud strategy, organizations can deploy across multiple providers, ensuring that if one goes down, the other will be unaffected, in turn preventing disruption of the viewing experience.
When users log into any of today’s leading cloud offerings, they gain access to a fairly uniform set of services. So, whether an organization deploys our Livelink platform for live cloud video transport and processing workflows on AWS, DigitalOcean or Google Cloud infrastructure — or a combination of those services — the user experience remains consistent. Interacting with a single interface, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, the operator typically is oblivious to the fact that they’re working within a multicloud model.
Working with just one cloud provider can introduce unwelcome limitations. For instance, while AWS offers some advanced tools for media services, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. AWS augments its database services and EC2 instances with a unique variety of media-focused toolsets, but these individual tools do not come together neatly in a coherent end-to-end service offering; rather, they must be stitched together to meet specific requirements, often without the backing of an SLA. For many organizations, this approach is fine for smaller, single-feed projects. But as their needs grow, such as during live events with multiple simultaneous feeds, the complexity of scaling these services efficiently can become a burden.
Livelink addresses this need for straightforward scalability by providing a unified UI that allows single operators to build coherent workflows that can be easily managed in a single pane of glass — regardless of the volume of simultaneous feeds, diversity of protocols required, and number of target destinations.
Running on multiple cloud services, the Livelink platform offers an alternative by which broadcasters and other media organizations retain their independence and take greater control over their destiny. They can establish main and backup redundancy — by virtue of using different independent DNS services across multiple cloud infrastructures — while breaking free from reliance on any one vendor’s development roadmap or pricing schemes.
The Multicloud Advantage: Cost-Efficiency and Flexibility
Cost is naturally a key consideration for broadcasters and media organizations as they select a cloud vendor. While AWS offers the benefit of robust services, it’s also known for higher egress costs, particularly for broadcasters delivering 24/7 linear content across multiple regions rather than on-demand content. Some alternative cloud platforms, such as Digital Ocean, offer substantially lower egress fees for similar services without specific commitments being made.
So, while smaller cloud providers may not support the scale needed for larger projects, they do play an important role when implemented within a multicloud strategy. By mixing and matching cloud providers, broadcasters can optimize for both cost and performance, scaling where necessary on a provider like AWS while thoughtfully leveraging infrastructure offered by less-expensive alternatives when convenient. This very scenario occurred last summer, when a broadcaster covering a high-profile sports tournament found itself responsible for multiple matches happening simultaneously, with dozens of destinations across a wide geographic area. A multicloud-capable management and orchestration platform built independent of cloud provider or vendor toolsets enabled a single operator to manage those feeds with confidence from a single UI.
Livelink supports this cost-efficient, flexible multicloud strategy. Moreover, the platform’s architecture — developed to enable deployment into multiple clouds without a complicated “lift and shift” process — lends itself just as well to hybrid models. Because Livelink deploys readily across various infrastructure options, it gives media organizations the flexibility to establish main and backup video delivery across on-prem, private cloud and a leading public cloud service.
With the freedom to deploy live IP video delivery on the cloud infrastructure of their choosing, broadcasters and media organizations can address not just evolving technical requirements, but also changing commercial pressures. If, for example, a new commercial deal or a change in sponsorship dictates a change from one cloud provider to another, the organization working with a multicloud-capable video delivery platform can make that pivot without overhauling its entire infrastructure. Livelink caters for this scenario with a complete cloud switch where the only thing that changes is the underlying IP addressing.
Future-Proofing With Multicloud
Organizations that have opted to build an IP video platform on their own often find themselves, over time, financially and operationally responsible for running and maintaining a system that no longer meets their needs. At that point, they may be inclined to put all their eggs in one basket with a single cloud vendor. But this approach presents its own challenges, as the organization is beholden to a development roadmap aligned with the rest of the broadcast industry’s timescales, not its own evolution.
Using an IP video platform that supports a multicloud approach, broadcasters and other media organizations can not only maintain their agility in the moment, but also future-proof their operations. They can respond to changing customer and technical requirements without being locked into any single provider’s ecosystem. They can realize the redundancy, cost savings, and flexibility that enable success today while positioning themselves to meet the demands of tomorrow’s broadcast marketplace.
Get in touch with the team to find out more, or head to Livelink and sign up today.
