April 23, 2012
Volume XXXIX, Issue 3
Cloud Eases Storing and Computing
Excerpted from NAB Show Daily Report by Craig Johnston
In addition to being the largest television, radio and film production equipment exhibition in the world, the NAB Show is also an educational forum where industry professionals can keep up on the latest technology.
As the organization did for technical revolutions such as digital broadcasting and high-definition (HD) video production, the 2012 show is tackling cloud computing with a one-day CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE, as well as a special equipment and services CLOUD COMPUTING PAVILION in the North Hall.
Cloud computing can roughly be defined as incorporating an off-site data center for storage and computing power, rather than purchasing or leasing the equipment necessary to provide those services at the studios. Access to these remote resources is via the Internet or a private network.
While many of the companies providing cloud computing services may be unfamiliar to the media industry, cloud services are also offered by companies whose names have been familiar to NAB Show attendees for decades, including Chyron and Avid.
"A good cloud application doesn't really scream out that it's a cloud application," said Greg Lennon, Director of Product Management at Chyron. "It's just another application, another way of running an application. It's a program, just a web-based program, and they're out there everywhere these days." Among Chyron's cloud services offerings is the sharing of graphics, stored at a central point, among stations in a broadcast group.
Broadcasters' biggest "value proposition" to use of the infrastructure out in the cloud, according to Avid Chief Technology Officer Tim Claman, is "flexibility to scale their infrastructure, adding capacity when they need more, reducing capacity when they need less; flexibility to connect teams together across departments, facilities and geographies so they can create more compelling content, more quickly and efficiently; and flexibility to add new capabilities to their operations, without having to upgrade or replace all their existing equipment."
To the financial types, purchasing cloud services is an operating expense rather than a capital expenditure.
Chyron's Lennon chuckled as he noted that "There's a certain percentage of the industry that sort of views the cloud as being almost like a research project for their company. And it's really not."
Monday's CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE offers sessions to help clear up notions like that. The conference, now in its second year, is being produced in partnership with the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), an international trade association.
The DCIA's CEO Marty Lafferty said the sessions will take aim at a pair of major concerns media professionals have expressed with cloud-based solutions for audio/video delivery: reliability and security.
"Experts will provide insights into how cloud computing impacts each stage of the content distribution chain, from collaboration to storage and delivery, all the way through analytics."
Among the misconceptions that will be cleared up at the conference is that utilizing cloud-based services is an all-or-nothing proposition.
"What a lot of companies are doing is they're creating a hybrid model, where their hot data, their most active data, is still stored locally. But the data that's less frequently accessed, you push that to the cloud because that turns out to be a cheaper place to keep your data," said Mike Alexenko, Senior Director of Market Development, Cloud & Mobility, at G-Technology, a speaker at the conference.
He pointed to not only the expense one might encounter for the physical equipment to store "tons" of data, but also the cost of operation. It's not only the amount of electricity to fire up the equipment and the expensive IT talent to operate and maintain it, but the attendant cooling costs and the floor space needed.
"The other piece of the cloud that's really coming into importance for content creators is the whole concept of a render farm," said Alexenko. "You can do your rendering up there in the cloud, because you don't need to go buy 100 or a thousand high-powered servers that potentially are spending a high percentage of the time idle in your shop. With the cloud compute model, you end up paying just for the time that you're using the servers."
The CLOUD COMPUTING PAVILION in the North Hall is a totally dedicated area to cloud computing. Exhibitors include Aframe, CloudMediaHub by Strategic Blue, CloudSigma, the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), Production Minds, Rackspace Hosting, Reelway, and Scayl.
The Pavilion is open all four days of the show. In addition to the eight companies exhibiting in the pavilion, DCIA's Lafferty said there will be dozens of companies exhibiting throughout the halls, both new exhibitors and familiar names, offering cloud computing services.
The agenda for Monday's CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE, 10:30 AM - 6 PM, opens with "Latest Trends in Cloud Computing Solutions for the A/V Ecosystem," followed by "Advanced Capabilities, New Features, Cost Advantages of Cloud Computing Solutions" and "The Pitfalls Associated with Cloud Computing in High-Value Content Implementations."
The conference will then explore privacy issues, security concerns, post-production clouds, media storage, and planning for what lies ahead in cloud computing.
Report from CEO Marty Lafferty
 Congratulations to NAB President & CEO Gordon Smith and the entire management team upon their completion of a highly successful 2012 NAB Show.
While solutions have changed to keep pace with consumer habits and technologies, aspirations to produce and deliver memorable content have remained constant, and the NAB has led its ever-changing industry throughout a period now spanning eight decades.
We are especially grateful to John Marino, VP, Technology, for the leadership and support of his group that literally made our involvement possible.
And most of all, thanks to everyone who participated in the DCIA's inaugural CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE within NAB.
This very timely conference demonstrated how software developers are addressing two major concerns with respect to cloud-based solutions for audio/video (A/V) delivery - reliability and security.
We could not have done it without our sponsors, Aspera, Avid, Chyron, Front Porch Digital, and Rackspace. Our standing room only (SRO) audience was keenly interested in the subject matter. And our speakers did a terrific job. All of which made for a very stimulating and valuable event.
In addition, the DCIA's presence in the CLOUD COMPUTING PAVILION, a first-ever special section of the NAB Exhibit Floor, brought our message of advocacy for enlightened adoption of cloud-based solutions to numerous additional delegates throughout the week.
The presentations of all keynote speakers are now online here and links to audio tracks of each session are highlighted below. The Conference Brochure is posted here. Photos are on Picasa here and on Facebook here - please "Like" us on Facebook.
After our brief welcome on behalf of the DCIA, which is archived here, Bill Kallman, CEO,Scayl, presented KEYNOTE 1 - The Latest Trends in Cloud Computing Solutions for the A/V Ecosystem. Bill's presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
PANEL 1 - Advanced Capabilities, New Features, Cost Advantages of Cloud Computing Solutions featured Mike Alexenko, Senior Director of Market Development, Cloud & Mobility, G-Technology; Scott Campbell, Principal, Media, Entertainment, and Telecoms, SAP; David Frerichs, Strategic Consultant, Pioneer Corporation; David Hassoun, Founder, RealEyes Media; Michelle Munson, CEO, President, and Co-founder, Aspera; Samir Mittal, CTO, Rimage; and Robert Stevenson, EVP, Interactive Entertainment, Gaikai. The audio track of their panel can be found here.
Jim Burger, Member, Dow Lohnes presented KEYNOTE 2 - The Key Pitfalls Associated with Cloud Computing in High-Value Content Implementations. Jim's presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
PANEL 2 - Privacy Issues, Reliability Questions, Security Concerns in the Cloud Computing Space featured Dave Asprey, VP, Cloud Security, Trend Micro; Graham Oakes, Chairman, Digital Watermarking Alliance (DWA); Rajan Samtani, SVP, Sales & Marketing, Peer Media Technologies; Dan Schnapp, Partner & Chairman of New Media, Entertainment & Technology, Hughes, Hubbard & Reed; Yangbin Wang, CEO, Vobile; Vic Winkler, Author, "Securing the Cloud"; Marvin Wheeler, Chairman, Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA); And Tom Mulally, Consultant, Numagic Consulting. The audio track of their panel can be found here.
Mark Davis, CEO, Scenios presented KEYNOTE 3 - Various Ways that Cloud Computing Is Being Applied to the Content Creation Process - from Pre- to Post-Production. Mark's presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
PANEL 3 - Audio/Video Pre-Production, Production, Post-Production Clouds featured Tony Cahill, Chief Engineer, Constellation Solutions Group; Guillermo Chialvo, Gerente de Tecnologia, Radio Mitre; Gerald Hensley, VP, Worldwide Entertainment Sales, Rovi Corporation; Ajay Malhotra, EVP, North America, Prime Focus Technologies; Todd Martin, SVP, Strategic Solutions Group, Chyron; Kirk Punches, VP, Business Development, Sorenson Media; and Jostein Svendsen, CEO, WeVideo. The audio track of their panel can be found here.
Jonathan King, SVP, Joyent, presented KEYNOTE 4 - Alternative Approaches for Implementing Cloud Storage of Content Catalogs and Libraries and Leveraging Cloud-Based Distribution. Jonathan's presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
PANEL 4 - Cloud Media Storage & Delivery was moderated by Brian Campanotti, CTO, Front Porch Digital and featured Bang Chang, VP, Server and Storage, SeaChange International; Stephen Condon, VP, Global Marketing Communications, Limelight Networks; Thomas Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates; Gianluca Ferremi, VP Sales & Marketing, Motive Television; Corey Halverson, Product Director, Media Business Solutions, Akamai; Kshitij Kumar, SVP, Mobile Video, Concurrent; Kyle Okamoto, Sr. Mgr. Product and Portfolio Mgt., Verizon Digital Media Services; and Mark Taylor, VP, Media and IP Services, Level 3. The audio track of their panel can be found here.
Scott Brown, GM & SVP Strategic Partnerships, Octoshape, presented KEYNOTE 5 - New Levels of Media Performance Data Enabled by Cloud Computing -- and Impact on Other Sectors . Scott's presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
PANEL 5 - Cloud Measurement, Analytics, Implications featured Sean Barger, CEO, Equilibrium / EQ Network; Steve Hawley, Principal Analyst & Consultant, TVStrategies; Jonathan Hurd, Director, Altman Vilandrie & Co.; Monica Ricci, Dir. of Product Marketing, CSG International; John Schiela, President, Phoenix Marketing International (PMI); Nick Strauss, Director of Sales, Verizon Digital Media Services; and Mike West, CTO, GenosTV. The audio track of their panel can be found here.
Jean-Luc Chatelain, EVP, Strategy & Technology, DataDirect Networks, presented KEYNOTE 6 - Navigating the Current Cloud Environment and Planning for What's Next. Jean-Luc's presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
PANEL 6 - Years Ahead for Cloud Computing featured Saul Berman, Lead Partner, IBM Global Business Services; Ian Donahue, President, Great American Television; Chris Haddad, VP, Technology Evangelism, WSO2; Wayne Josel, Counsel, Media & Entertainment, Hughes, Hubbard & Reed; Steve Mannel, Senior Director, Media & Communications, Salesforce.com; James Mitchell, CEO & Founder, Strategic Blue; David Sterling, Partner, i3m3 Solutions; and Chuck Stormon, CEO, Attend. The audio track of their panel can be found here.
James Hughes, VP & Cloud Storage Architect, Huawei, presented KEYNOTE 7 - Disruptive Effects of Cloud Computing Will Continue. James' presentation can be found online here and its audio track is archived here.
Finally, we commend Adam Marcus, DCIA Technology Advisor, for doing a terrific job as conference emcee along with his many other duties.
In our closing comments, archived here, we invited all participants--sponsors, attendees, and speakers alike--to join us in November for CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012, a first-ever event featuring three co-located conferences.
CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers. Share wisely, and take care.
NAB: Cloud Computing Is Ready for its Close-Up
Excerpted from GigaOM Report by Barb Darrow
Few industries are better suited to the cloud computing model than film and TV production. Show business is project-oriented with myriad production shops and contractors collaborating on short-term jobs that can be compute intensive. Instead of scaling up their own infrastructure to meet those spiky needs, why not rent the capacity they need when they need it?
That's why cloud vendors including Amazon, CloudSigma, Microsoft and Unitas Global are converging on Las Vegas this week for the National Association of Broadcasters convention- which features a special CLOUD COMPUTING CONFERENCE track.
"We've reached an inflection point in the industry where the studios - which have made do with just enough compute capacity that they could keep up [till now] but now that more of their work is going digital, scaling that infrastructure is difficult and expensive," said Grant Kirkwood, CEO of Los Angeles-based Unitas Global which will be showing off its new cloud-based rendering technology at the show.
"With the increase of resolution from 2K to 4K being the standard, the amount of data to be rendered is through the roof. If I'm a visual effects studio, I'm going to have to render a film at 24, 25 and 30 frames per second for TV, Blu-Ray, and movie formats. At the resulting 79 frames per second, using 4K resolution, each frame is 24 gigabytes of data. Imagine what that means for a two-hour movie," Kirkwood said.
Media companies have better things to do than building and running infrastructure, said CloudSigma CTO Robert Jenkins. "For them this is not an area where they add value - it's more a necessary evil."
And, media companies face the double whammy of working with many external partners and a ton of data. "If you're Warner Bros. or whomever, you deal with an ecosystem at each stage of your project. You have shooting offsite, then that digital data has to be ingested and managed, then posted to be edited, encoded, transcoded and distributed," he said. That's quite a supply chain - very little of which is owned and operated by the content creator. Movie makers because of the sheer amount of digital data they end up with, often end up flying or driving physical disks around because uploads can be so slow.
Given that context, here's some of what to expect in terms of cloud activity at NAB:
CloudSigma, the Swiss cloud computing company, will launch what it's calling a Media Services Ecosystem, an alliance of industry service providers, that will use its solid-state storage; 10Gig networking and high-performance cloud capabilities. Nativ, a specialist in delivering digital media to a variety of endpoints, is among the first members.
"This data is so big, even with the cloud, ingest can be slow, but once you have your rendering and editing companies all using the same cloud infrastructure you can streamline the process," Jenkins said. After all, in cloud as in traditional data centers, proximity of compute and storage resources is key to reducing latency.
Many media companies - the UK's Channel 4, PBS and Fox Entertainment Group - already use Amazon's public cloud services. Amazon, which started staffing up for a renewed digital media push in January, will be at the show pushing its cloud. AWS partner Aspera, a leader in media file transfer technology, will be at NAB to show off its new "Direct-to-S3" software for moving content around using Aspera's fasp transport technology with cloud-based storage including Amazon S3.
Amazon will host NAB seminars on its Cloudfront CDN services, demonstrate live streaming, and talk about using AWS for media storage, processing and delivery.
Microsoft will talk up its upcoming Windows Azure Media Services, a promised set of digital media production and distribution services based in part on Microsoft's existing on-premises Microsoft Media Platform. Now, there is no one-stop shop for such services, said Brian Goldfarb, director of product marketing for Azure.
The Azure media services will include uploads and encoding that supports Microsoft, Android and Apple formats; content protection including DRM if desired; on-demand and live streaming options; analytics to help content owners see who is consuming what, and what issues they might encounter. The service will go to beta soon, he said.
Microsoft will host third-party vendors, including Aspera, which will talk up the use of its fast I/O technology with Azure as well as Amazon.
Amplidata will show off its new AS30 storage module which ups the capacity of its existing AmpliStor XT Storage System to 30TB of capacity in a 1U form factor. The Redwood Shores, Calif. company said the new module boosts previous capacity by 50 percent but uses 30 percent less power, requiring 2.2 Watts per TB (while idle) and 3.3 Watts per TB (under load).
This is just a small sampling of what will be a deluge of cloud-related news out of Las Vegas this week. Look for the established cloud giants and newbies to continue vying for these high-value Hollywood workloads even after the show ends.
Broadcasters Jump on Cloud to Fend Off Netflix, Amazon
Excerpted from Wired News Report by Victor Cruz
Teri Hatcher of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" fame was the MC on the opening day at this week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas, which is expected to attract 90,000 people. And NAB's President and CEO, Gordon Smith, gave his annual state of the industry address. But it would behoove NAB to have handed Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff the honors instead - a cloud advocate relentless in his 12 years of "say no to software" campaigning.
NAB organizers would show forward thinking to nab Benioff. But in all fairness, the cloud is not off the NAB agenda. It's just not stealing the spotlight like the lovely Ms. Hatcher or the unmanned military-issued drone flying overhead.
Thanks to the efforts of the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA), this year marks the first time that NAB will showcase a separate cloud pavilion. This area will look at how the cloud relates to the A/V ecosystem at each stage of the content distribution chain, from collaboration to storage, delivery and analytics.
And it looks like Salesforce.com and IBM Global Services will both have talking heads on the panel, "Years Ahead for Cloud Computing," ending the single-day event with "Disruptive Effects of Cloud Computing will Continue."
There are no ostriches here with heads buried in the sand. Cable TV execs know that the mainstream is tapping into the online stream. Leichtman Research surveyed 1,250 homes and found 38 percent of them had at least one TV set hooked online.
Broadcasters can easily be seen as old-school chumps too stubborn to embrace new cloud applications in the face of mounting competition from the likes of Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime, but it's just not the case. The entrenched broadcasters and cable companies are not sitting idle for the world to pass them by, much as the music industry did before Steve Jobs polished its core.
It's no surprise that today's consumers of entertainment content want anywhere-anytime access to their favorite dramas and reality TV shows. For news and sports content, they want it live, and they want it on second and third screens, namely laptops, smart-phones and tablets.
Nielsen just reported how 88 percent of US tablet owners use their tablet while also watching TV at least once a month. And 45 percent of tablet owners watch the tube while using their tablet at least once a day.
Another group also not sitting idle is venture capitalists. VCs broke a 10-year high in 2011 investing $30 billion in 3,000 companies, of which 1,000 were Internet-relate. Last week Endplay, a cloud-based content management vendor for the video industry, announced additional funding to their $21 million pool, and today they announced a partnership with Anvato to give local broadcasters ready access to web and video content management they have not seen before. Media firms may expect video editing and publishing time cut by up to 60 percent through a process that publishes web videos from live broadcasts.
In other news, Panasonic is teaming up with Aframe to create a network of "upload centers," scattered in all major metropolitan centers from New York City to Los Angeles, that will give professionals the ability to rapidly upload and view HD videos from dedicated cloud servers, making the management of production processes easier. These upload centers will link to Aframe's cloud video production servers in the United States.
Avid announced cloud-based video editing tools that lets users edit footage shot on location from anywhere with an Internet connection, then upload cut and finished stories to web servers. Dubbed "Interplay Sphere," the services relay more flexible options for broadcasters to connect with their newsrooms.
On the production side, cloud-based collaborative tools have been growing in popularity, with services like Quantel's QTube and Chyron's Axis World Graphics.
"Proponents point to the efficiencies, while others point out that bandwidth is not consistent everywhere and could result in limitations," said Carolyn Giardina of The Hollywood Reporter. How about those recent Azure and Amazon outages?
Staying abreast of these trends, Journal Broadcast Group, a Midwestern operator of 14 television stations and 33 radio stations, is using the Anvato cloud application to speed its broadcast-to-web video transfer. The technology involves the installation of boxes at local stations. These boxes allow Journal to capture HD videos from live broadcast signals and publish these to websites, mobile devices and syndicates within moments of video airing in broadcast.
Used as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, video feeds can be accessed remotely through a browser, to cut out and edit video clips such as TV shows and news reports and publish them from anywhere. Patented technology called Perceptual Signature can detect scene and context changes to automatically segment the live broadcast stream. An auto-segmenter tool utilizes computer vision to locate television commercials and replace these with localized commercials.
These cloud applications are replacing not just hardware and stodgy modes of accomplishing a business process. They are also changing how management can literally think outside of the box and forget, or at least put aside, their previously habituated legacy-thinking. And that is always good news for innovators who are willing to challenge the status quo.
Media and Cloud Businesses Evolve to Same Economic Model
Excerpted from ZDNet Report by James Staten
While the bulk of the enterprise information technology (IT) market grumbles about the maturity and security of cloud computing services, it looks like the media and entertainment segment is just doing it.
At the annual conference for the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) in Las Vegas, NV, myriad technology vendors are showing off their solutions that are transforming the way video content gets to us and behind the scenes there appears to be a lot of cloud computing making this happen. And there is a strong fit between these two industries because their business and economic models are evolving in complementary ways.
Sure, we all know that video streaming to your phone, tablet, and TV is the new normal, but how this is accomplished is changing under the covers and cloud computing brings the economic model that maps better to the business of media and entertainment.
You see, while broadcasting is a steady state business, the production process and eventual popularity of any particular video segment or show isn't. The workflow behind the scenes is evolving rapidly - or more appropriately devolving.
Back in the 1920s, film production was a vertically integrated business. Studios like Columbia Pictures and Warner Bros. employed everyone from set builders, camera men, actors, writers, directors, editors, and distributors. They kept them all busy by maintaining a pipeline of films and contracts that committed top talent to multi-picture deals.
Today that vertical integration has been completely blown apart and nearly everyone is a freelancer. Rarely do whole teams move from one picture to the next. Instead studios form mini-corporations for each film or series they produce and these entities hire all the freelancers on a contract basis and rent everything they will need.
And when the film is done everyone scatters looking for their next gig and the corporation essentially dissolves. This change in the industry has created a much more dynamic market that reflects the ever more fickle and narrow-banded tastes of empowered consumers, as reflected in our Forrester Consumer Technographics Surveys.
It has also changed the IT model as well, making it far less attractive for studios or other media conglomerates to own the capital assets needed by these bursty projects. If a studio owns a series of IT assets used for storing media files, applying effects to them, editing them, then transcoding them for delivery to the over 100 separate platform and bandwidth combinations, then is fully burdened with the total capital expense associated with maintaining these assets through each stage and at the end into perpetuity, that's a lot of capital given that the typical motion picture can generate in excess of 250 TBs of digital files.
On top of this you have to add the bandwidth consumption charges that come with shooting video in locations around the world, having pre- and post-production work such a special effects, color correction and editing done by a divergent set of freelancers who are spread all across the world. And, oh yeah, you have to secure these connections but only for the life of the film. Cha-ching, cha-ching.
In such a bursty, elastic business you would think a bursty and elastic approach to procuring IT would help. And it turns out it does.
Attend is one of the many cloud service providers who are assisting this market. It has a video ingestion and content collaboration service specifically designed for this market that is contracted in a pay-per-use fashion and resides on the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings from CloudSigma. Rather than a studio buying capital equipment to facilitate the next motion picture, they can contract with Attend which brings compression and acceleration technologies along with secure transmission and storage of content during the life of the film.
All the set-up, collaboration, security, and management is handled as a service. Attend partnered with CloudSigma because it needed an IaaS provider that could deliver a high-performance platform. CloudSigma's IaaS uses high-performance compute and storage fronted by solid-state disks all connected over a full 10GbE network and could scale to the needs of a motion picture production fast. "They let us spin up a 100TB instance for a client in less than 24 hours," said Attend CTO Afsheen Bigdeli.
After working with NBC Sports on the Winter Olympics in 2010, Microsoft realized that if it was going to partner again for broadcasting London 2012 (outside the US - Google locked up the US rights) it needed to get the economics right as well so it's moving everything to its cloud platform Windows Azure.
This week at NAB 2012, the Redmond, WA, cloud provider announced Windows Azure Media Services, a full suite of video pre- and post-production services that all reside on its pay-per-use cloud platform and can be built upon by the greater media & entertainment software and services community. This suite of foundational tools is specifically geared toward the media market and provides core capabilities for transcoding, encrypting, storing, streaming and commercializing content. And it's already signed on marquis industry partners including Aspera, Movideo and Dolby.
Windows Azure Media Services carry the same pay-per-use model as Azure itself so that video producers of all sizes and frequencies can take advantage of the platform - democratizing video production if you will. Even traditional enterprises can now leverage these same tools on a pay-per-use basis for training, executive addresses and other purposes.
While anyone doing video will still need the cameras, professional lighting and people with the many other skills that go into quality video production, the capitalization of IT assets in support of these actions can now be shifted to flexible operating expenses that stop when the production ends and flex with the popularity waves of the content in distribution.
Joyent Brings its Public Cloud to Europe
Excerpted from TechWeekEurope Report by Tom Brewster
Joyent is introducing infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to Europe, taking it into competition with big cloud hitters like Amazon and Rackspace.
Joyent Cloud Europe will provide compute services out of its Amsterdam-based data center, running it over the company's proprietary cloud infrastructure platform SmartDataCenter, which is seen by the company as its key differentiator.
Helping run the SmartDataCenter is SmartOS, which Joyent claims provides tough security and uses Node.js, the server-side Javascript language that "is making machine-to-machine and big data computing more efficient than ever before". SmartOS is based on the open source operating system Illumos.
Customers can take the software that powers the Joyent public cloud to their own data centers. For hybrid cloud users, this means for much-needed consistency between data centers, Joyent believes.
Joyent's General Manager for Cloud, Steve Tuck, told TechWeekEurope the company has only ever seen 11 seconds unplanned downtime and its service level agreements (SLAs) promise to deliver 100 percent uptime.
"One important thing for companies to look at is, as they are evaluating providers, that they get statistics on availability," Tuck said. "We've got the only full copy-on-write file system in the cloud with Z File system (ZFS). ZFS is a well-documented file system out of Sun that ensures that everything is on a write it is copied, that means you can't lose data. In the cloud world, losing data is one of the fundamental sins.
"Now we've got data centers on the east and west coasts of the US, central Europe, Japan and Singapore, it'll give people a much bigger footprint for where they deploy."
For those worried about having a data center on their own shores, Joyent is planning to work with telecoms providers in the UK to provide services within those ISPs. This would give greater guarantees around latency and should allay some fears over data transfer, Joyent believes.
As for what's in the company's data centers, Dell boxes are used to power the infrastructure. "Our model is very large compute nodes that almost resemble a storage appliance from five years ago. There are huge volumes of DRAM, lots of CPU, 24 cores and then lots of spindles. So it's a very high-performance server," Tuck said. "We serve all production data locally for performance reasons. So it's not an architecture with a storage area network (SAN) behind it purposefully. We use shared network file system (NFS) storage for Tier 2 data."
The vendor believes its infrastructure is ideal for providing the compute required for applications where people need real-time updates. "A lot of platforms are moving to Joyent because they really need an enterprise-robust infrastructure underneath so they can deliver the SLAs and quality of service to their customers," Tuck added.
The company is also planning to open data centers in Singapore and Tokyo in the next 90 days.
Octoshape Launches Multicast for Federated Linear Broadband TV Platform
Excerpted from Yahoo Finance Report
Octoshape, an industry leader in cloud-based global streaming technologies, announced today an industry-first service offering that deploys Multicast over broadband for high quality linear video delivery using its unique Infinite HD-M technology.
The Infinite HD-M service was developed from a proof of concept where Octoshape powered the First Global Internet Multicast Event, as noted in AT&T CTO John Donovan's blog.
"At the event, AT&T and Octoshape, a next-gen streaming technology provider, delivered an instant-on high quality viewing experience to a wide range of connected devices and operating systems," wrote Donovan. "Bringing this capability to the open Internet could fundamentally change the rules that govern online distribution today."
Infinite HD-M leverages and enhances industry-standard Multicast infrastructure allowing carriers and operators to utilize existing hardware and capital deployments instead of investing in new proprietary content distribution platforms. This new service enables the most predictable, affordable, and scalable prices for linear broadcasters by being the first technology to enable reliable Multicast over best effort networks combined with a pricing model that is easy and simple to understand.
The benefits for large content owners and broadband TV operators are game-changing. Until now, broadcasters were discouraged from increasing quality since it directly impacted cost of delivery. They were equally discouraged from aiming to reach large audiences since it stretched budgets beyond profitability. As a result of resolving infrastructure capacity problems, Octoshape will introduce a 'flat-fee per channel' pricing model that removes the variables - bit-rate, audience size and consumer view duration - that historically have made traditional OTT business models both unpredictable and cost prohibitive. Broadband providers and wireless carriers now have the capability to rapidly execute on cost avoidance measures, as well as launch broadband TV services.
"The Octoshape Infinite HD-M service opens up new opportunities for any broadcaster that is focusing on linear OTT delivery," said Jim Davis, Senior Analyst with 451 Research. "The service mimics the broadcast efficiencies of traditional satellite, cable, and IPTV systems over broadband. Just as important, Octoshape's pricing aligns with broadcaster's goals for a more predictable cost for OTT video."
In addition, Infinite HD-M provides the ability to serve global audiences, and greatly increase the quality of the consumer video experience. Octoshape's technology drastically improves video start up times and virtually eliminates any buffering resulting in a viewer experience that is equal to watching traditional television.
"Octoshape continues to blaze a path towards enabling sustainable TV-scale distribution and quality over the Internet," said Michael Koehn Milland, CEO Octoshape. "Our technologies uniquely position carriers, broadcasters and content owners to build a profitable online business and places Octoshape as the global provider of choice for high quality, OTT video delivery. Together with our clients we are aiming to set a new economic direction and scale function around linear Over the Top content delivery."
Octoshape's federated linear broadband TV ecosystem will continue to expand globally throughout 2012 in carefully planned phases adding content contribution partners, Tier 1 broadband providers, connected television manufacturers and conditional access providers.
DDN Enables Accelerated Performance for Media Workflows
DataDirect Networks (DDN), world leader in massively scalable storage, announced the release of a collaborative non-linear editing (NLE) solution that will enable workgroups in broadcast, post-production, and special effects houses to share Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Media Composer, and Adobe Premiere Pro projects on a single, cost-effective and high capacity storage solution.
DDN's collaborative solution will offer editors real-time collaboration, unparalleled performance, and the ultimate workflow flexibility, unlike current proprietary video editing storage solutions. It is the only highly scalable enterprise workflow solution to provide frame-accurate quality of service, mission-critical availability, and central storage consolidation.
The tightly integrated solution was developed in partnership with FilmPartners of the Netherlands, combining FilmPartners' advanced MXF server workspace virtualization tools with DDN's real-time, highly concurrent shared file access storage solution. As the NLE market evolves and editing workgroups demand a variety of products from different vendors, the DDN/FilmPartners solution enables customers to connect all of their NLE products with a single, high-performance solution.
"Teaming with FilmPartners BV enables us to provide the most integrated collaborative editing solution possible, and gives editors the highest level of shared access, collaboration, and performance," said Jeff Denworth, Vice President of Marketing, DDN. "This solution enhances workflow quality, flexibility, efficiency and, most importantly, creativity."
"The collaborative editing solution we have developed with DDN enables editors to connect all of their editing tools with a single, high-performance solution," said Pieter Hornix, managing director at FilmPartners BV. "The competitive advantage this will provide customers across the entertainment industry is significant and measurable in both production time improvements and reduced costs."
Aspera at NAB with Cloud Solution
Excerpted from Post Magazine Report
Aspera was at NAB, demonstrating what is now possible in the cloud for digital media companies. The company introduced its Direct-to-S3 transfer software, which allows for seamless, high speed and secure data transfer of file-based digital content at any global distance through a combination of Aspera's fasp transport technology with cloud based "object" storage, such as Amazon S3.
The cloud's promise of virtually unlimited, instant increases in compute, network, and storage resources, is tempered by significant technology challenges in getting large media data to, from, and across remote infrastructures at long distances. Until now, the full potential of the cloud to transform IT processes for digital media - such as transcoding, archiving and distributing entertainment content - has been limited by the inherent bottleneck in moving the data.
"Aspera pioneered the high-speed enablement of data-intensive workflows throughout the enterprise, and has now brought the same level of innovation to the cloud with its high-speed transport capabilities, available on-demand," said Bhavik Vyas, Director of Cloud Services at Aspera. "We believe that big data should move at the speed dictated by business requirements, and not be bottlenecked by conventional technologies."
Aspera is one of the first to offer seamless, line-speed ingest and distribution of very large media files to and from cloud-based object storage such as the Amazon S3 service, independent of distance, and completely secure. With digital supply chains now spanning the globe and the complexity associated with transferring ever-larger file sizes over longer distances increasing exponentially, digital media companies can now realize the full benefits of the cloud with Aspera On-Demand solutions for the high-speed transfer, processing, and storage, of their digital content.
From a service perspective, cloud-based video encoding specialists Zencoder have built their offering on the AWS infrastructure and integrated Aspera fasp transport technology to further speed up their customers' content delivery workflows.
NAB: Avid Debuts New Asset-Based Workflow Solutions
Excerpted from Broadcasting & Cable Report by George Winslow
Avid announced a number of new solutions to stream newsroom and media production Sunday at the NAB Show, including new solutions for multiplatform distribution, media asset management, cloud-based distributed production and graphics as well as new server and storage products.
In a briefing before the market with B&C, CEO Gary Greenfield called the offerings "the richest" since he took charge of the company in 2007 and noted that the new offers reflect the company's focus on providing integrated production technologies for customers in news, sports, TV, broadcast and post-production that could streamline workflows and offer them great flexibility in the production process.
"Media organizations need to be able to reuse their existing media assets more effectively, collaborate easily, and find ways to monetize their content across digital and social distribution channels," he noted in a statement accompanying the product announcements. "With the capabilities we're announcing today at NAB, we're helping our customers solve these challenges by letting them create content wherever they are, manage complex production workflows, and distribute their media everywhere."
In a notable example of how vendors are looking to used cloud-based technologies to help streamline workflows, Avid announced Interplay Sphere, a cloud-based distributed production system. Using a cloud-based architecture, users of Sphere-enabled applications like Avid's Media Composer and NewsCutter would be able to edit, share and quickly get content to colleagues and facilities in multiple locations.
Avid executives positioned the product as a way to "break down the walls of the newsroom" by expanding what journalists and news organizations can do, regardless of their location.
Greenfield also highlighted multiplatform distribution as one of the key challenges facing broadcasters and TV companies. At the market, Avid launched its new Multi-Platform Distribution (MPD) solution that streamlines the processes for journalists and editors who are creating and distributing content across multiple traditional, digital, and social platforms.
The solution is being pitched as a way of removing the complexity of multiplatform distribution from the creation of content, through transcoding, and then delivery to Web content management systems, online video platforms and social media.
Avid also introduced new service and storage solutions, including new Avid ISIS 2000 near-line storage solution works across multiple Avid Interplay installations; the Avid ISIS 7000 v4.0, which effectively doubles its storage capacity with the new i4000 blade; and the AirSpeed 5000 video server that features new codec flexibility with Avid DNxHD playback.
Finally, the company launched the Avid Motion Graphics systems, which is built on an advanced real-time 2D/3D rendering engine that is accelerated by the latest GPU and I/O technology.
Also at NAB, Avid will be demoing upgrades to a number of its products, including the Interplay Production 2.6 production asset management solution, NewsVision 2.5, Interplay MAM 4 media asset management solution, Media Composer 6 video editing system, Pro Tools 10 platform for audio and music recording and Interplay Central 1.2 Web-based news creation application.
NAB: Chyron Goes Social
Excerpted from Broadcasting & Cable Report by George Winslow
Responding to the growing interest in social media and social TV applications, Chyron launched several new products at NAB that were designed to offer broadcasters low-cost ways of using their existing graphics and production workflows to expand their second screen or social media offerings.
The development of simplified solutions for social media is important to broadcasters because they want to capitalize on the growing popularity of social media but want to do it in a way that doesn't increase costs because second screen efforts are not, as yet, producing much, if any, revenue.
"It is one of the most important trends we're seeing in the marketplace," noted Michael Wellesley-Wesley, President and CEO at Chyron in a chat with B&C following their press conference.
As part of that effort, Chyron has introduced its new Engage platform. It provides users with a way of integrating second screen, social media and social TV data into live TV broadcasts as part of their existing Chyron graphics systems and workflow for news and sports.
"Social media is a natural for sports because everyone wants to give their opinion of the referee after a big call," Wellesley-Wesley added.
In addition, Chyron also announced the launch of Shout, a stand-alone software application that enables broadcasters to bring social media commentary into their live broadcasts quickly and easily.
"As a flexible and comprehensive software-based tool for bringing moderated social media content to air, Shout fits in nicely within our expanding range of social media offerings," noted Bonnie Barclay, VP and chief marketing officer at Chyron in a statement. "Simplifying handling of tweets and custom moderator messages all the way through to broadcast, Shout makes it easy for broadcasters to integrate social media content into programming conveniently and according to the workflow that best suits their operations."
While second screen and social TV applications are still a relatively nascent phenomena, Chyron also announced a number of partnership with social TV players that would integrate its new Engage platform into their applications.
As previously reported, these partners include ConnecTV, which will offer its companion app polling technology and Never.no, which will provide technology for an end-to-end social TV platform, synchronized companion apps and participation TV.
In addition, Vibes will offer its text, Twitter and Web voting technology and Mass Relevance will supply a curation platform that is licensed to resyndicate Twitter content and data.
The ConnecTV partnership is particularly important because the company is working with the Pearl Group, which is made of a number of large station groups, and other broadcasters covering 45 of the 50 largest DMAs to deploy second screen applications tied to their broadcasts on June 1. The effort is probably the largest effort to date by stations to expand their social TV efforts.
Because about 40% of the stations in the US use Chyron's graphics platforms, Wellesley-Wesley argues that they are the logical partner for stations looking to expand their social TV efforts.
NAB: Rovi Shines Light On UltraViolet Encoding Tool
Excerpted from Multichannel News Report by Todd Spangler
Rovi expects to show off one of the first commercially available production solutions to support the preparation of movies in the downloadable UltraViolet Common File Format (CFF) -- the "digital locker" standard backed by major Hollywood studios and others.
In addition to UltraViolet support, the vendor's TotalCode Enterprise 2.0 server-distributed encoding solution features a "disc-to-digital" capability designed to convert content owners' DVD catalogs into a variety of advanced formats, including DivX Plus Streaming and UltraViolet's CFF.
TotalCode Enterprise 2.0, to ship in June, also is to include an automated quality-control workflow that enables segment re-encoding, or the fine tuning of specific areas without re-encoding an entire title, via a project handover to TotalCode Professional.
In addition, Rovi is debuting the MainConcept SDK (Software Development Kit) 9.5, an updated version of its video and audio codec library.
MainConcept SDK 9.5, expected to be available in June, is slated to deliver an enhanced H.264 encoder; new format support including DivX Plus Streaming, 4K decoding and AVCHD 2.0; and compatibility with new hardware encoding technologies such as Intel's second- and third-generation of core processors with Quick Sync Video.
Is IPTV Fundamentally Anticompetitive?
Excerpted from Multichannel News Report by Todd Spangler
The FCC has said that a facilities-based service provider's own broadband-delivered video is probably - but not necessarily always - kosher under the network-neutrality rules it adopted last fall.
To some people, however, cable or telco providers shouldn't be allowed under any circumstances treat their own IPTV differently from over-the-top (OTT) services (e.g., by giving it priority over other Internet services or excluding it from bandwidth-usage caps).
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings complained via his Facebook page on Sunday that "Comcast is no longer following net neutrality principles. Comcast should apply caps equally, or not at all."
His beef? Comcast doesn't count usage of its own Xfinity video-on-demand (VoD) app for Xbox toward the 250-Gigabyte cap on Internet subscribers, whereas other video apps on Xbox - including Netflix's and HBO Go - do keep the meter running.
"In what way is this neutral?" Hastings asked rhetorically.
Comcast has defended itself by arguing that the VoD content doesn't go over the Internet (see Hey, Keep Your Hands Off Your Network!, PK Slams Comcast In Push For Data Cap Inquiry and Comcast To Activate HBO Go On Xbox This Week).
But it looks odd, doesn't it?
Hastings obviously has an interest in promoting totally unfettered usage of Netflix, but he makes a good point: "If I watch last night's 'SNL' episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all."
Note that AT&T is basically in the same boat here, and has been since last summer. The telco uses IP to deliver its entire TV lineup, including VoD, to subscriber set-tops (and since October 2010 to Xbox 360s). Last summer, AT&T imposed usage caps on all broadband customers - but of course, U-verse TV viewing does not count toward those limits.
So should Comcast and AT&T be forced to change their policies? Is it prima facie unfair for a broadband provider to carve out a piece of the network for its own video and offer toll-free usage, relegating everyone else to the proverbial "slow lane" that is subject to usage limits?
As cable operators migrate toward full-IP video delivery, the industry may find itself under increasing attack by Netflix and others who argue that MSOs (or telcos) should not be allowed to give their own video services any kind of preferential treatment under the FCC rules.
The FCC certainly leaves the door open for additional regulations if it determines operators' managed services "supplant the open Internet," but that's pretty vague.
"We recognize that broadband providers may offer other services over the same last-mile connections used to provide broadband service," the FCC says in its "Open Internet" order. "These 'specialized services' can benefit end users and spur investment, but they may also present risks to the open Internet. We will closely monitor specialized services and their effects on broadband service to ensure, through all available mechanisms, that they supplement but do not supplant the open Internet."
From a policy perspective, you want to give broadband providers incentives to make money from their capital investments (i.e., through IPTV value-added services). But you also want to foster competition from OTT guys.
So what happens when content available over the "open Internet" starts looking like traditional TV? And what, in the Internet age, constitutes a "multichannel video programming distributor" anyway? (See What's a Multichannel Video Provider?)
The lines are about to become blurrier.
Coming Events of Interest
Cloud Computing World Forum - May 8th in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Cloud Computing World Forum Africa is the only place to discuss the latest topics in cloud, including security, mobile, applications, communications, virtualization, CRM and much, much more.
Data Center + Network: The Converged Cloud - May 17th Webinar. By making data centers more agile, increasing provisioning speed, and reducing capital expenditures, cloud is forever altering the way enterprises deploy technology.
Cloud Expo - June 11th-14th in New York, NY. Two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in New York at the tenth annual Cloud Expo being held at the Javits Convention Center. A vast selection of technical and strategic General Sessions, Industry Keynotes, Power Panels, Breakout Sessions, and a bustling Expo Floor.
IEEE 32nd International Conference on Distributed Computing - June 18th-21st in Taipa, Macao. ICDCS brings together scientists and engineers in industry, academia, and government: Cloud Computing Systems, Algorithms and Theory, Distributed OS and Middleware, Data Management and Data Centers, Network/Web/P2P Protocols and Applications, Fault Tolerance and Dependability, Wireless, Mobile, Sensor, and Ubiquitous Computing, Security and Privacy.
Cloud Management Summit - June 19th in Mountain View, CA. A forum for corporate decision-makers to learn about how to manage today's public, private, and hybrid clouds using the latest cloud solutions and strategies aimed at addressing their application management, access control, performance management, helpdesk, security, storage, and service management requirements on-premise and in the cloud.
2012 Creative Storage Conference - June 26th in Culver City. CA. In association with key industry sponsors, CS2012 is finalizing a series of technology, application, and trend sessions that will feature distinguished experts from the professional media and entertainment industries.
CLOUD COMPUTING WEST 2012 - November 14th-15th in Santa Monica. CA. CCW:2012 will zero in on the latest advances in applying cloud-based solutions to all aspects of high-value entertainment content production, storage, and delivery; the impact of cloud services on broadband network management and economics; and evaluating and investing in cloud computing services providers.
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