The New Paradigm of Software Architected Broadcast Facilities: An Asynchronous Media Framework Running on IT Infrastructure

Software and IP technologies have fueled many great innovations in the broadcast of live events in the past decade. Modern media consumption habits, however, continue to outpace the technical and commercial capabilities of bespoke hardware-centric broadcast infrastructure. Broadcasters and media producers are facing the challenge of further market fragmentation and having to produce significantly more content with less resources. The technological innovations of IT and cloud computing, fueled by many different markets, look compelling as a means of addressing these broadcast market requirements. However, the transition from traditional hardware-centric approaches to IT-based architectures presents challenges. Unlike broadcast, which relies heavily on clock-driven real-time signal synchronization, IT equipment operates in an event-driven, asynchronous manner. This necessitates a fundamental re-evaluation of how live video is managed and presents opportunities to create a new paradigm of software infrastructure that not only bridges the broadcast and IT worlds, but also meets broadcast pedigree and requirements for quality. In this software infrastructure, all processing executes and interconnects at significantly faster than real-time and real-time constraints are pushed to the edge with synchronous interconnects found only at the boundaries-as close as possible to glass (a camera or a monitor). In broadcast, synchronous interconnects like SDI and SMPTE ST 2110 have set the bar high-where systems are responsive and offer low latency, redundant, routable, and deterministic operations with frame accurate control at large scale. This is the bare minimum that cannot be compromised. This paper delves into this new paradigm of software broadcast infrastructure, whether it be on-premises or in the cloud. It describes an asynchronous media framework that not only matches the capabilities of traditional hardware infrastructure but surpasses it by enabling the benefits of IT infrastructures. This paper will cover: •Foundational concepts of synchronous vs asynchronous operations •System architecture, including framework design, media microservices deployment, timing, and application control •Empirical measurements highlighting considerable time savings by processing streams asynchronously compared to real-time •Benefits and implications for live production, such as scalability, reliability, agility, and composability

Published

2024-10-21

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

software-defined media facilities, virtualized media facilities, event driven architecture, it equipment, cots, faster than realtime, asynchronous processing, uncompressed transport, transfer fabric, media database, libfabric, frame accurate control, distributed architecture, scale out capability, media microservices, stateless, cloud computing, public cloud, on-premises datacenters, hybrid, virtual machines, availability zones, smpte st 2110, high availability, best of breed choices

DOI

10.5594/MOO/3008

ISBN

978-1-61482-965-2