Streaming Forum Preview: Building a Scalable Live Event Workflow
Cloud encoding is at the core of more and more on-demand video workflows, and it's now becoming increasingly viable for live video workflows as well. Duncan Burbidge, CEO of StreamAMG, the pan-European advanced media group which includes StreamUK, will offer tips for "Building a Scalable Live Event Workflow" at a session of the same name at this year's Streaming Forum in London. He'll draw from his own experiences working with the Football League, Liverpool FC, and The Guardian, among others.
"The diversification of devices has meant huge challenges for encoding," says Burbidge. "This session will look at how content owners can evaluate the ROI of cloud-based solutions for ingest and global distribution of multiple formats."
Key issues addressed will include the following:
- the total cost of ownership for onsite versus offsite encoding solutions;
- how to minimize the problems of ingesting (live) content from remote locations;
- the extent to which a solution can be future-proofed and metrics for predicting important devices before they become ubiquitous; and
- the service level agreements that can be realistically used on such a service.
"The session will bring in to focus how best to utilise the cloud for online video needs," Burbidge says. "It will include an ROI analysis of cloud computing versus maintenance of 24/7 hardware and examine how well-suited the cloud is to the need for geographically-dispersed ingest points. Scalability and reliability of service will be tested in terms of how an SLA can be built and how appropriate disaster-recovery procedures are essential to this."
If you're delivering live content and haven't yet moved to a cloud-based workflow, now is the time, Burbidge says.
"Attendees can expect to save money by utilising the cloud (appropriately) themselves, and they will be able to see savings and/or increased reliability/scalability passed on by their suppliers," he says. "On the other hand, they will also hear a breakdown of what the cloud is: debunking the notion that it is ubiquitous and analysing what it means to be delivering services from a managed but largely unsupported datacentre in Dublin—and how this compares to the traditional options available.
The 2014 Streaming Forum will be held at the Park Plaza Victoria in London on 24-25 June. "Building a Scalable Live Event Workflow" will be at 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday, 25 June.