Streaming media was a brave new world at the turn of the century. For broadcasters, it was generally uncharted territory that offered seemingly unlimited potential for reaching new audiences. Bandwidth was expensive, and consumer access was challenged by dial-up modems and inconsistent network conditions.
When StreamGuys was founded in 2000, one of our core missions was to establish an infrastructure that supported affordable pricing for 24/7 linear broadcast streams. Pricing landed between US$1–4 per simultaneous listeners per month for audio, and about four times the amount for video. This offered broadcasters a way to simulcast their terrestrial streams online — a foot in the door for a very reasonable cost.
Times have changed, and streaming is the common thread that brings traditional and new media broadcasters together. There is far more opportunity in streaming today, however, and broadcasters of all shapes and sizes are managing more feeds and working with larger amounts of media. The challenge for many of these broadcasters is how to operate more efficiently as they scale, and how to manage and move increasingly larger media workloads while maintaining affordability.
Confidence in “the cloud” continues to increase as the leading providers build more features into their offerings that broadcasters require, most notably feature parity with their on-premises systems. The cloud offers many advantages and components for producing large media workloads but feature parity with on-prem technology is still maturing.
The cloud offers many advantages and components for producing large media workloads but feature parity with on-prem technology is still maturing.
There is also the cost of doing business in the cloud, and those costs can quickly escalate. We recently conducted a test flow of media services with one of the major public cloud providers. The bill came to $720 a month to ingest a single media stream, with some light media transformation for varied end points.
Many different streaming and media functions are available in the cloud. One of the main reasons companies use cloud media services is the barrier to entry can be fairly small. But the affordability of the service is often less easy to justify.
Depending on the media services used, broadcasters that want to light up a new channel in the cloud with 24/7 availability will often see a hefty price tag from the ingest costs alone. Depending on which media functions are being implemented there can be a complex chain of costs for any given workflow. And then, when working at scale, the expenses of operating in the cloud can quickly push the boundaries of a streaming budget.
Meanwhile, there are a myriad of other options for streaming and digital media infrastructure that can help broadcasters achieve the same goals at a fraction of the cost, while still taking advantage of some opportunities afforded through the cloud.
The contribution network
Workflows for streaming media ecosystems rely on an extensive range of production steps as media moves through the network and on to consumers. Content contribution represents the first phase, ingesting the primary source-quality content produced in a studio and sending it into a broadcast and/or cloud infrastructure. As content moves through the network, it is often verified, reformatted, potentially time-shifted and repurposed in different ways, such as when offered as a live stream or podcast.
The final content renditions are then published into first-party websites and mobile apps, as well as provided to affiliate networks, popular aggregator platforms, or even social media platforms. There are many steps to preparing produced content for everywhere it needs to go. These represent just some of the workflows that happen along the way.
Many different streaming and media functions are available in the cloud. One of the main reasons companies use cloud media services is the barrier to entry can be fairly small. But the affordability of the service is often less easy to justify.
Some, but not all, production steps are achievable in the cloud. Traditionally, production occurred in an on-prem production studio, but there is a high price attached to maintaining a physical studio that is continually on and producing content. Yet, post-COVID, there are also limitations on remote working and production. Managing all these workflow phases in the studio can be quite complex.
New digital techniques require new knowledge and staffing. There is a big separation between the core content production and the digital delivery phases. That creates an attractive proposition for establishing a hybrid environment to move some of these studio workloads into the cloud.
Content delivery networks (CDNs) have the knowledge, power and reliable network infrastructure to help broadcasters reduce the costs and increase the efficiencies of offloading processes from the on-prem environment. Rather than moving everything wholesale to the cloud, one potential difference-maker is establishing an ecosystem for the broadcaster that begins at the origination point for source-quality production, and moving these signals through intermediary workflows that manage and prepare that original content for an array of consumer experiences. We call this a contribution network, which serves as an efficient and reliable on-ramp for moving content onto CDN streaming services.
The fundamental concept of the CDN-based contribution network is that the ingested media is paired with both the cloud for specific production workflow functions and the traditional CDN for delivery to consumers. The cloud and CDN ecosystems don’t need to be the same, and in fact shouldn’t be the same for most organizations.
In an ideal scenario, the contribution network is suited to the needs of the production team and the specific internal workflows for production requirements, and the parallel CDN infrastructure is tailored for final consumer delivery. The contribution network infrastructure handles a large portion of the services and stream management responsibilities prior to content delivery, including transmuxing, transcoding, ad-marker translations and audio/video conversions.
In the next edition, the second part of this series on balancing media will explore how the IT infrastructure favored by CDNs is optimized for the broadcast space; how emerging technologies like HLS make it easier to deal with adverse network conditions; and what takes place in the application layer of a contribution network versus what happens in the cloud.
The author is president of StreamGuys.
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