How to Maintain Production Control in Cloud-Based Production

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Learn more about remote and cloud-based live production at Streaming Media East Connect 2021.

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Steve Nathans-Kelly: On the production side, which is obviously something that's changed almost as dramatically as the audience experience for live events, as production moves out of the studio and into remote locations, how do you maintain visibility and control over remote production and cloud-based workflows?

Eric Bolten: We certainly saw a lot of that as we went into 2020 in the pandemic, and I would say that, live production and live control were always slated to virtualized, but it was going to take a lot longer. Then that had to happen overnight. You saw some emergency things--people trying to use Zoom in a variety of fashions. But now we've seen the media and entertainment business in a very steady and now accelerated virtualization mode. You use different data rates like do take in very large streams in chunks, and sometimes it's in strange protocols like NDI, and the idea that you can bring that to the cloud, the groups can be disparate. So you're going to have a producer, a director, a graphics operator, and we're working on how you do the switching in the cloud, but we've been watching that happen pretty successfully and being able to bring out four, five, or six feeds of a given venue. We do work with the NHL and they're able to bring out 4K feeds that you can see and pan and scan on. You can see end to end. That gives it to a number of delivery partners that can now go to cloud Meet Me rooms and acquire this content.

(01:42)
So you've got a lot of different monetization options. People can use both radio and other things while they're watching real-time feeds. So the technology has definitely evolved. And I think part of this now is that the idea that, your production trucks--there's a lot of pressure on that and on those cost models. And also, to hold a variety of audiences from your traditional broadcast audience to now trying to find younger, more mobile audiences, and basically being able to showcase many, many more facets of any given event, whether it's a concert, a live show, or any sports. I think we advanced probably three years in the last 12 months.