Faster time to market (multi-platform reach at lower TCO), resource optimization (more content production from less), lower dependencies on traditional costly prerequisite infrastructure (satellite, and OB vans), scalable version creation (live to clipping), and reduction in technical debt (i.e. future proof infrastructure, and workflow deployments) remain the top five priorities for live content owners, and aggregators globally[i]. Historically, media companies have followed a siloed architecture led build for peak on-premises infrastructure procurement strategy, insufficient (higher maintenance and support overheads), and inefficient (lower utilization rates) to meet today’s business priorities as highlighted above.
Furthermore, as investments into live content libraries continue to surge (50% revealed an increase in value by 6-10% in the next 12 months[1]), Grass Valley and Pixitmedia’s tightly integrated workflow is addressing crucial growing file and archive pain points across the distributed live production ecosystem. This instigated both teams to recently join hands for a webinar together in showcasing a) drivers and need for embracing remote production, b) value proposition of the integrated solution, and c) key functionalities and use cases.
Event specific agile live production environment to accelerate multi-platform reach
Simon Wocka, Regional Sales Manager Pixitmedia, revealed that, as the cost of live content acquisition and legacy infrastructure (on-premises) TCO continues to rise, content owners, especially broadcasters, need to streamline their media production workflows to not only accelerate efficiencies but also exploit newer monetization avenues (i.e., creating more versions from a single media asset at scale). Also, as investments into tier-2 and tier-3 live events explode, the discrete high capital value infrastructure will yield lower ROI and utilization rates in the long-run. Grass Valley’s cloud native live production platform (AMPP) in a close tie-up with Pixitmedia’s software defined (Pixstor), and orchestrated (ngenea) media archiving solution to facilitate flexible event-specific compute, resourcing, and creative collaboration anywhere, everywhere.
Also, as Adam Marshall, Chief Product Officer of Grass Valley, asserted that accelerating time to air (market) along with delivery of personalized single media asset versioning to every audience base on multiple platforms, devices, and locations is becoming crucial for today’s content owners and aggregators. This is eventually pushing content owners, especially broadcasters, to embrace software-defined, cloud-based remote production (IP) roadmap, assisting in:
- Tightly integrated pre and post-production ecosystem
- Real-time file, data, and metadata access, sharing, and repurposing
- Adaptive, sustainable, standard, and cost-effective content versioning
- Intelligent, orchestrated, and interoperable live media logistics environment (from capture, contribution to affiliate CDN head-end)
Watch the integrated solution key functionalities demo here by Jamie Bean, Solution Architect, Pixitmedia
Furthermore, the new age content owners such as enterprise video (i.e. product launches, investor & town hall meets etc), sports federations (i.e. FAST pop-up channels), reality TV (i.e. remote location live feeds) and house of worship (i.e. social live to clipping of large gatherings) are also enhancing adoption of remote production on IP as stated by Ronny Van Geel, Director Product Marketing Grass Valley during the conversation.
Towards a sustainable, collaborative, and cohesive live production platform
The Grass Valley and Pixitmedia solution not only lowers the integration complexities but also provides real-time collaboration, faster time to air (content throughput), and reduced TCO (live media acquisition to distribution). A good example showcased during the webinar was the live demo of recorded content from London (United Kingdom) and moving (1Gbps line) these to a remote production hub in Oregon (United States) for versioning (Edius/Adobe), scheduling (Framelite X), and multi-platform distribution (linear, non-linear, OTT linear etc). The file format and live content data remain intact while the raw feeds are duplicated at the remote production hub, resulting in real-time editing and version creation, offsetting the data transfer delays from the origin (in this case, London).
Also, creatives can customize project-based media assets (including files, data etc) clusters (blocks) along with a hybrid backbone, which lowers both the egress and local archiving costs. Finally, a cohesive user interface (UI) not only eases the single media asset enrichment lifecycle but also enhances distributed workgroup collaboration at scale.
Here is a brief overview of the Grass Valley and Pixitmedia offering. Click Here
[1] As part of an interactive polling question during the webinar
[i] Sports, concerts, news, and other time bound events.
