9 minute read
ITV migrates post production to the cloud
ABOVE: On set with ITV’s Good Morning Britain ITV Daytime produces 7.5 hours of live television each weekday in the UK from 6:00am to 1:30pm, including Good Morning Britain, Lorraine, This Morning and Loose Women. It also handles a growing amount of post production for other ITV Daytime shows.
John Barling, head of technology for ITV Daytime, and his team had been working toward transitioning their massive tape-based library to a digital system for several years. Stored primarily on LTO tape, retrieving specific material within and across the many shows archived was manual, difficult and slow, and the mechanical tape robot represented a single point of failure in the system. The team felt that a cloud-based archive would enable them to take advantage of the performance, flexibility and resilience of newer digital technology. But like most broadcast operations, the 24/7 uptime required, coupled with five or ten-year capex cycles, and a ‘don’t fix what isn’t broken’ mentality meant taking small, measured steps. Then Covid hit.
A remote working mandate in mid-2020 accelerated ITV Daytime’s cloud transition since the group also needed a remote editing-solution with its Avid systems. ITV Daytime pulled together a steering group to explore options. The Avid remote editing solution worked with Microsoft Azure and the Telestream
solution could work with any of the public cloud vendors. This led to an effort by the ITV Daytime leadership team to invest in cloud workflows across the board to ensure business continuity and enable remote workflows. Telestream’s Kumulate content management solution was deployed to replicate content recorded on premises to the cloud. Kumulate also checked the assets and associated metadata into the Avid PAM system for ease of searching within the Avid ecosystem.
The ITV Daytime team also decided to move the ageing tape library to the cloud for better performance. In just 12 months, the team had a Kumulate system working in concert with the Microsoft Azure service which facilitated the migration of their massive tape library to the cloud.
“Telestream were very helpful and forthcoming in embracing the challenges we set before them which were two-fold,” says Barling. “First, the Kumulate product managed transfers of content between our on-premise and cloud-based post production systems. Secondly, we tasked Telestream with the job of overhauling our deep archive requirements away from the LTO 5 SpectraLogic Robot System, and Kumulate was used for that as well.
“One of the biggest gains that we’ve had is pure
speed and reliability. We used to get regular tape drive failures, including media read errors or tapes getting stuck in drives,” he adds. “If you imagine a breaking news story when you need content super quick, even when everything is working as designed, the old system had multiple steps for the tape robot to perform before it could even begin to spool the tape and look for the requested file. The new system is much quicker. There’s simply no comparison.”
Now in the final stages of a mirrored tape-plus-cloud trial, ITV Daytime is on track to move to a completely cloud-based archival workflow based on Telestream Kumulate in late 2022. One of the most significant post production projects ITV Daytime put through the new cloud-based workflow was John & Lisa’s Weekend Kitchen; a ten-episode cooking show, which aired at the end of 2021.
Media was ingested from camera cards using Telestream Vantage and automatically checked into the Avid on-premise production system. Telestream Kumulate also pushed the content to the cloud and made it available to all remote editing systems via the Avid Interplay system.
“It was completely edited in the cloud; a really big milestone and a huge victory,” says Barling. “There’s definitely a realisation here that you don’t need to build more physical edit suites to do more post work.”
TRANSCODING WITH VANTAGE In addition to getting more reliable and faster access to media via its Kumulate content management system, ITV Daytime also makes use of Telestream’s Vantage Media Processing platform whenever transcoding of video formats is required. ITV Daytime’s operations are based on an all-Avid environment for news gathering and editing, and a Telestream Vantage for encoding and media management.
Any ingested media that differs from ITV Daytime’s house format is automatically transcoded by Vantage into XDCAM50, before checking it into the Avid PAM so that editors can seamlessly work with the content.
Editors, librarians and traffic staff also benefit from Vantage orchestration for outbound file deliveries where Vantage flips content to the required export resolutions. “Our Vantage system has been solid and required very little attention,” states Barling. “When the ultra-attentive team from Masstech became part of Telestream, it was an easy choice for us to continue the relationship.”
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE Barling and the ITV Daytime team also tried out enhanced metadata injection using Kumulate in conjunction with Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services. This allows services such as AI-based facial recognition, speech-to-text and OCR (optical character recognition) to capture and tag media automatically with additional metadata for easy retrieval.
“We were very impressed with the advanced metadata tagging features of Kumulate and Azure based on sample media we tested,” explains Barling. “It’s certainly something we are investigating as our workflows evolve.”
For ITV Daytime, the economies of the cloud and an opex model with subscription services now make sense. “We looked to Telestream as a tried and tested partner of many years to help facilitate our migration to the cloud,” concludes Barling. “I’m happy to report they did not disappoint.” n ABOVE: A remote working mandate in mid-2020 accelerated ITV Daytime’s cloud transition
HOW COMPLIANCE MONITORING UNDERPINS OTT
By Rajesh Patel, VP, sales and solutions EMEA, Mediaproxy
Streaming video has been among the most successful and transformative media technologies of the last 20 years. Through by-passing traditional broadcast, cable and satellite TV platforms, what we now know as OTT (over-the-top) has become a genuine alternative – and potential replacement – for linear television.
Much of this is due to the variety of material offered by the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime and Disney Plus, coupled with instantaneous video-on-demand (VoD) access. The added bonus is the availability of most OTT programming in ultra high definition, high dynamic range and Dolby Atmos immersive audio, which gives these platforms a definite edge over most broadcast outlets.
OTT has not only changed how people watch TV, it has also called for new and different techniques in distribution and, perhaps most important of all, monitoring. In taking on the linear TV channels, streamed video platforms have to meet the same standards for picture and audio output. Consequently, compliance analysis and logging is now vital in ensuring OTT provides the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) viewers have come to expect.
To meet this pressing requirement, companies such as Mediaproxy have added new features to compliance systems so that broadcasters and playout facilities are better equipped to monitor the multiple video streams being sent to multiple devices. Because of this, comprehensive monitoring tools are crucial for not just examining the content streams but also processes such as targeted ad insertion, multi-language selection and event-based transmission.
While older detection methods, including time and date searches and predefined metadata, are still applicable, modern software-based techniques that operate under automated computer control, including watermarking and fingerprinting, are now providing more flexibility and capabilities. The physical means of checking video and sound output has also changed. Old-style display panels are no longer the best way for operators to view channel output, due to the plethora of OTT channels, many of which employ adaptive bit rate (ABR) streaming to maximise the quality and bandwidth of a stream.
Increasingly, modern master control rooms feature multiviewers, such as Mediaproxy’s Monwall, which are designed to only display a channel when faults are detected. This is called monitoring by exception, which allows operators to concentrate on other aspects of their work rather than constantly watching banks of screens. When an alert is triggered, the relevant channel can be brought up and analysed, with any problems isolated and dealt with using specialised tools within a compliance system like Mediaproxy’s LogServer.
OTT services proved popular in the years leading up to 2020 but it was during the pandemic that viewing figures and subscriptions grew to the point where the ‘new’ technology became a viable challenger to linear TV. This was not just in VoD but also live broadcasts. Streamers including Amazon and DAZN are now showing live sport, while the Roku Channel and others are streaming scheduled programming similar to linear broadcasts (which are also available through OTT). This additional aspect requires even greater scrutiny, as any break in transmission during a major football, tennis or cricket match would incur the wrath of viewers and sponsors alike.
Streaming is facing a post-Covid dip in fortunes. The harsh economic conditions that people are now enduring in the wake of the pandemic, including a cost of living crisis in the UK, have resulted in subscription numbers dropping dramatically. This has forced the big streamers to adapt, with even Netflix to look at moving towards a more advertising-based model (AVoD) by the end of this year.
Increased advertising on OTT services will also call for more efficient and automated dynamic ad insertion (DAI) technologies, with greater personalisation to match viewers’ interests. DAI systems are able to assemble video material and ads into a stream with no web page or app needed to control the process. In this way, the risk of faults when the stream is received, whether by a smart TV, computer/laptop, smartphone or other mobile device, is reduced. Through this technology, it is possible to create something that is more like conventional TV presentation rather than an OTT output, with no latency or buffering between programmes and commercials.
To keep track of what ads are going where and at what time, commercial breaks need to be identified using digital insertion triggers. These are based on three standards, SCTE (Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers) 30, SCTE 35 and SCTE 104, which create a comprehensive way of detecting insertion points for commercials. These can be easily monitored in a system such as LogServer to ensure that the right ad goes out in the right place at the right time.
Whatever the economic difficulties being experienced by streaming services right now, OTT has changed the way people watch video and is definitely here to stay. Behind the scenes, full monitoring capability will provide a solid foundation to keep it growing in the future. n
