Video: How the IP-Only Model Democratizes Content Delivery
In this excerpt from his presentation at Live Streaming Summit, TourGigs Managing Director Casey Charvet discusses the IP-only content delivery model and how it enables smaller outfits to do large-scale event streams once the exclusive province of major networks and content providers.
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Casey Charvet: Delivery over IP really shakes things up. It allows us to go directly from a baseband video and audio to an IP format that we can deliver to consumers and cut out a huge swath of the pieces in between. This allows content producers to participate in creating video content and distributing video content without the resources of a major network. It's no longer limited to just an ABC, or NBC, or ESPN. It levels the playing field. We're also leveraging the massive investment in the Internet that's been made by governments and carriers, such as Level 3 and Cogent and the like, and the massive distribution that we see with the Internets in the home.
Overall, I see this as a democratization of broadcast tools. This is similar to what I saw happen with music, where we saw a lot of independent production happen, maybe two decades ago, and we've also seen it in the film industry, and the publishing industry with things like eBooks and publishing. Now small independent producers can produce live content in much the same way that only large broadcast networks used to be able to.
The other interesting thing that's happening is that the spread between the big content producers and major networks and the independents is now shrinking. The production quality that an independent producer can hope to achieve is continually growing and approaching what used to only be accessible if you had a really large budget.
It's easy to just draw an arrow, and a diagram, and say, "Okay, we're going to just encode and go directly to IP." But, there's actually quite a few devils in the details in this step right here, which I will refer to as the backhaul side. If you're doing a live production in the field and you're encoding in the field, what is standing between your content and getting it into data center infrastructure, Cloud infrastructure, and then out to the rest of the world? In many cases, that is the public Internet. There's quite a number of pitfalls there.
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