The Challenge: Background
Champions: BBC, Channel 4, BT Media & Broadcast, Sky, EBU, Vodafone Group, TV2
Participants: Zixi, LAMA, Techex, AMD & HP, TSL, Norsk, VizRT, Google Cloud, Singular.live
In late 2022, the BBC, DAZN, Sky Sport, Warner Brothers Discovery, BT Media & Broadcast, TV2 came together to identify an evolution of the challenge and called it a ‘Software Defined Production in a Bandwidth Constrained Location.’ Later renamed ‘Connect & Produce Anywhere’.
At that time concerns were that trends toward remote production, accelerated during the pandemic, were perhaps too reactionary and so, architectures had not always been well thought out. Also, there were many questions about the impact of available connectivity, a significant issue that can make or break production at smaller and niche live events.
Going forward, the project team wanted to maintain the remote operation capabilities but review the methods to optimise them.
Edge computing was seen as a set of technology sector buzzwords, which the team wanted to understand better. It was a proposition more often sold as the answer to latency and widely used in general IT. On first glance therefore, it looked like it was trying to solve an issue that was not worth the cost (a reduction of 20ms latency is 1 frame of video, so the cost and complexity of edge compute is not viable against such small benefits).
The team in discussion with wider industry partners such as OBS (Olympic Broadcasting Services) had identified that the real benefit is in bandwidth. If you can perform all of your media operations close to the cameras you don’t need the connectivity to bring multiple feeds i.e. Ground to Cloud workflows may work well for a single source, but for multi-camera events you need to scale up the connectivity/ bandwidth or compress heavily.
The team also looked at cloud native workflows rather than a simple lift and shift of existing solutions to virtual machines. This is a general trend we are seeing with discussions in the EBU’s work on Dynamic Media Facilities and products such as Nvidia’s Holoscan for media.
The team needed to look at scale-able infrastructure and interoperability that is normal in cloud deployments. Questions asked were ‘can I licence and deploy what I need, where I need it, when I need it?’
In 2023, the team explored the principles and identified many issues and started, to understand how and where to deploy different elements, as follows:
CLOUD EDGE FIRST: We aimed to deploy software based workflows on location in the same way as we do in a cloud or broadcast centre (note parallel work by EBU on Dynamic Media Facilities is important) to adopt cloud workflows, containers over VM Scale-able and flexible, to explore micro services and interoperability between applications
CONSTRAINED CONNECTIVITY: Live production events on location often have connectivity issues and by definition any available public connectivity is often saturated. For Tier 1 events or for often repeated venues, connectivity can be expanded but this is not an option for many types of location. As demand grows for more coverage of more live events with increasing outputs beyond traditional broadcast channels, if we operate on EDGE and control remote, we can cut bandwidth requirements
WORK ANYWHERE: where teams work from should be an editorial/production decision not a technology one. We aimed to allow operations from location, from home or a broadcast ops centre, support from anywhere.
All of this is underpinned by SUSTAINABLE PRINCIPLES which we needed to find ways to measure this and report.
The POC Objectives:
At IBC2023 we showed the core principles and ideas but recognised there was a lot more to do and wanted to deploy on location and learn by doing.
Working with partners new and old we have taken out the technology to a number of events and deployed new capabilities – these included Kickstart at the IET in London (March 24), the Media Production Technology Show (May 24) the EBU’s Network Technology Summit (June 24), Formula E (August 24) and IBC of course (September 24).
For 2024 the team wanted to explore other codecs and workflows but with a key aim in mind: This is a platform built on a set of principles - individual codecs and workflows don't matter - as long as the software you deploy can support them.
Other key aims explored in the project this year have been:
Containerisation over Virtual Machines (VMs): A move to lighter weight applications built on ICT methodology VMs work well for large single vendor monolithic solutions but licensing and deployment can be costly and complex. It is easy because it feels recognisable to just lift and shift existing application to the cloud (and as such you have a new marketing message about all IP workflows) but it is not really cloud native.
We also explored interoperability between applications to build flexible and modular production capabilities. The EBU DMF reference architecture is a good point of reference to help understand the concepts.
We also explored to enable multi-vendor solutions, but this may require some APIs defined by end users or System integrates rather than manufacturers which tend to work well in a single vendor stack.
The POC Results:
The Demonstration at IBC2024 showed a full remote production with the location end on the BT media and broadcast booth and the operations on the IBC accelerator stand connected the internet.
We had common media facilities such as vision and audio mixing, Multi-viewers, tally and comms as well as various elements of IP management, transcode and orchestration all running in software on the Google distributed cloud cluster at the location end with more familiar and traditional control hardware operating the software to highlight the core concepts of Edge first, Constrained bandwidth and Work from anywhere
See the project discussion at IBC2024 and the PoC presentation.
See also, the press coverage during trials and demos in 2024, including Formula E in August 24
IBC 365: Accelerator Special Incubator Project: Connect and Produce Anywhere, Phase II
IBC365: CAPA II Accelerator project: Revolutionizing live broadcast for Formula E
SVG Europe/ Formula E: Connect and Produce Anywhere: Teamwork makes the dream work on a living lab test at Formula E for both project partners and champions
SVG Europe: Evolving Process: Connect & Produce Anywhere: IBC Accelerator on using a live Formula E test to push the use of edge compute and containerised applications forward
SVG Formula E: IBC Accelerator Connect and Produce Anywhere: Understanding where it is on the journey towards a containerised workflow utopia
SVG Formula E – 4: Profile of broadcast engineer apprentice Sean Jones (part of the CAPA team)
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