Production Media Data Centers: Scalable Computing, Networking, Virtualization, and Adaptive Bit Rate Encoding

The Internet has brought with it dozens of new opportunities and experiences for the delivery of television content originating from thousands of new venues via hundreds of new platforms, devices, and carriers. Media content delivery terminologies now include Over-the- Top (OTT) television,¹ the “Second Screen Experience” (2nd SE),² the “companion device,” “social television,” and a variety of “video-on-demand” and “streaming” applications. Added to these and many others is the “TV Everywhere” (TVE) experience, adding yet another formulation of must-have requirements to the media and entertainment industry. TV Everywhere offerings, for one, are driving the consumption of content, resulting in significant needs that have developed for addressing the requirements of digital media supply chains. For content providers and service providers, architecting and implementing solutions to serve “TV Everywhere” require flexible and agile infrastructures, ones that can adapt to rapidly changing needs, not only in technology but for business performance. This paper describes the testing approaches and procedures used in examining the ways in which this new form of infrastructure can leverage the capabilities of virtualization (comparing bare metal vs. virtual machines approaches) as users transition from traditional program and interstitial content production to Internet Protocol (IP)-centric workflows and technologies. Framed as a “Virtualized Production Media Data Center,” this new approach to the compute-infrastructures combines scalable computing, dense networking, and adaptive bit rate (ABR) encoding, thus leading to the virtualization of media applications that address technology and business process changes for the media and entertainment industry.

Print ISSN

1545-0279

Electronic ISSN

2160-2492

Published

2013-07

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/j18303