Video: Google Next 19 – Building a Next-Generation Streaming Platform with Sky

Google Cloud, also called GCP – Google Cloud Platform, continues to invest in Media & Entertainment at a time when many broadcasters, having completed their first cloud projects, are considering ways to ensure they are not beholden to any one cloud provider.

Google’s commitment is evident in their still-recent appointment of ex-Discovery CTO John Honeycutt, this month’s announcement of Viacom’s Google Cloud adoption and the launch of their ‘deploy on any cloud platform’ service called Anthos (official site)

So it’s no surprise that, here, Google asked UK broadcaster Sky and their technology partner for the project, Harmonic Inc., to explain how they’ve been delivering channels in the cloud and cutting costs.

Melika Golkaram from Google Cloud sets the scene by explaining some of the benefits of Google Cloud for Media and Entertainment making it clear that, for them, M&E business isn’t simply a ‘nice to have’ on the side of being a cloud platform. Highlighting their investment in undersea cable and globally-distributed edge servers among the others, Melika hands over to Sky’s Jeff Webb to talk about how Sky have leveraged the platform.

Jeff explains some of the ways that Sky deals with live sports. Whilst sports require high quality video, low latency workflows and have high peak live-streaming audiences, they can also cyclical and left unused between events. High peak workload and long times of equipment left fallow play directly into the benefits of cloud. So we’re not surprised when Jeff says it halved the replacement cost of an ageing system, rather, we want to know more about how they did it.

The benefits that Sky saw revolve around fault healing, geographic resilience, devops, speed of deployment, improved monitoring including more options to leverage open source. Jeff describes these, and other, drivers before mentioning the importance of the ability to move this system between on-premise and different cloud providers.

Before handing over to Harmonic’s Moore Macauley, we’re shown the building blocks of the Sky Sports F1 channel in the cloud and discuss ways that fault healing happens. Moore then goes on to show how Harmonic harnessed their ‘VOS’ microservices platform which deals with ingest, compression, encryption, packaging and origin servers. Harmonic delivered this using GTK, Google Cloud’s Kubernetes deployment platform in multiple regions for fault testing, to allow for A/B testing and much more.

Let’s face it, even after all this time, it can still be tricky getting past the hype of cloud. Here we get a glimpse of a deployed-in-real-life system which not only gives an insight into how these services can (and do) work, but it also plots another point on the graph showing major broadcasters embracing cloud, each in their own way.

Watch now!

Speakers

Jeff Webb Jeff Webb
Principal Streaming, Architect
Sky
Moore Macauley Moore Macauley
Director, Product Architecture
Harmonic
Melika Golkram Melika Golkram
Customer Engineer,
Google Cloud Media

Webinar: Transforming creative workflows: Making great content in the cloud

Join IBC365 on Thursday 25 April at 4pm BST to explore why creators are turning to cloud to transform the way they make great content and how virtualised workflows are unlocking the ability to work in new ways: faster, more collaborative, more efficient and more creative.

This webinar goes inside some of the world’s leading content creators, production and post-production operations to hear how they are embracing cloud technology to transform the creative processes used to make, produce and deliver video.

The webinar will cover ways in which cloud is enabling more collaboration, access to more talent, round-the-clock working, more content security, and slicker workflows. There’s also a dose of reality, as the human and technology challenges and the potential pitfalls of virtualising creative workflows are explored.

Case studies focus on using cloud for:
•Streamlining content creation in the field
•Transforming production and post-production processes
•Efficient content delivery and backhaul

Register now!

Speakers

Jeremy Smith Jeremy Smith
Chief Technology Officer,
Jellyfish Pictures
Laura Cotteril Laura Cotterill
Founder & Managing Director
LCTV
Spencer Stephens Spencer Stephens
TechXMedia

Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric from Pexels

Webinar: Edge Computing and Video Delivery

Date: Thursday 28th March, 2019
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 17:00 GMT

Whether or not edge computing is the next generation of cloud technology, the edge plays a vital role in the streaming video experience. The closer a video is stored to the requesting user, the faster the delivery and better the experience. But, streaming also provides a lot more opportunity for interactivity, engagement, and data collection than traditional broadcast television. That means as the edge grows in compute capacity and functionality, it could enable new and exciting use cases, such as AI, that could improve the viewer experience. In this webinar, we’ll explore the state of edge computing and how it might be leveraged in streaming video.

Speakers

Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

Webcast: 3-Part Webcast – Resilient Live Streaming Video

Date: 26th March 2019
Time: 8am, 9am & 10am EDT – 15:00, 16:00 & 17:00 GMT

AWS is synonymous with cloud computing and whether you use it or not, knowing how to do things in AWS reaps benefits when trying to understand or implement systems in a cloud infrastructure. Knowing what’s possible and what others are doing is really useful, so whilst I don’t usually cover heavily product-specific resources here on The Broadcast Knowledge I still believe that knowing AWS is knowing part of the industry.

Here, there are 3 consecutive webinars which cover building a live streaming channel from the fundamentals through to making it operational and ongoing monitoring and maintenance.

Session one at 3pm GMT looks at end-to-end workflows and strategies for redundancy. It looks at both contribution of video into the cloud as much as what happens when it arrives and the delivery.

Session two at 4pm GMT looks examines the more complex workflows where you spread processing/failover across multiple regions and other similar situations.

Session three is the last of the day at 5pm GMT looking at setting up end-to-end monitoring to take the guesswork out of delivering the service on an on-going basis.

Register once to watch one or all of these sessions!