AEG Digital Media Addresses Multiformat Workflow Simplification
As the video landscape becomes more fractured, how can content creators simplify the workflows they use to produce that video? Speaking at a panel during the recent Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles, Joe Einstein, vice president of production services for AEG Digital, first told about the challenges his company creates is streaming an event.
"Our biggest challenge is timeframes," said Einstein. "The client comes to us and says I want to deliver Coachella, and I want to deliver 3 different streams on 7 different devices. Our biggest challenge is we have about 60 days typically to turn up that service for them. The desktop experience is relatively straightforward. The mobile connected device market is changing so much that, for us, the updates to phones, updates to devices, it's a constantly evolving and always in development process with network changes, device changes, and codec changes. I think that's our biggest challenge around delivering to those devices."
Einstein then guided attendees through the process AEG uses to create those streams, and told how the workflow could be simplified.
"Right now on our normal events we're generating 8 to 10 different encodes, and then rewrapping those 24 to 36 different ways for Android, iOS, desktop, whatever devices there are. So, on a large event we're pushing 200 to 500MBs out of our encoding facility data center into our CDN. And that's just on one event. If we've got three events running, four events running over a weekend simultaneously, we're pushing 1 to 2GBs per second. If we could get the encodes into the CDN and then rewrap those at the edge or at some intermediate, we're going to save a lot of egress bandwidth from our facility into the CDN, and probably a lot of setup and complexity on our side," Einstein noted.
To view the entire panel discussion, scroll down for the video:
Simplifying the Multiformat Video Workflow
A variety of streaming formats - Silverlight, Flash, HLS, WebM - are generally required to serve the multitude of screens through which content is consumed. Each format can include separate workflows, storage components, and strategies. Network-based media processing offers an increasingly popular approach to simplifying these workflows. How does packaging of media elements in the network (versus on the encoder) work? What are the benefits? What additional features are possible with network packaging (DRM, CAS, ad insertion)? Does this approach work for both small and large operations? This session answers these questions and shares various approaches to this new workflow methodology.
Moderator: Matt Smith, VP, OTT Strategy and Solutions, Envivio
Speaker: James Sherry, Senior Product Manager, CDN, Level 3 Communications
Speaker: Joe Einstein, VP, Production Services, AEG Digital Media
Speaker: Cyril Rickelton-Abdi, Sr. Director, Content Security & Piracy Management, Turner Broadcasting System
Speaker: Robert Longwell, VP, Video Operations, Digital Media, Disney/ABC Television Group
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