In Broadcast - CABSAT 2015 - 14

14

www.inbroadcast.com | CABSAT InShow Guide | 10-12 March 2015

End-To-End Live Video
Streaming Through the Cloud
Broadcasters are providing content to a generation of mobile consumers used to viewing
high quality, live or near live streams, on any device...

B

roadcasters and event organisers
need to quickly manage, transfer,
process, and distribute video content
across a range of devices. As they
look to extend their customer base
by offering new viewing experiences,
their ability to deliver premium content
to consumers, broadcast partners,
and digital outlets at high speed,
while maintaining broadcast-quality
standards, is critical. As they face
these challenges, turning to IT-based
infrastructures, high-bandwidth WANs,
cloud processing, and storage for
content delivery seems like the right
way to go, but without modern digital
transport technologies, these solutions
lack the real life performance, security,
and scale needed to distribute content
to internet-connected devices, in realtime.
Recently, Aspera technology has
been successfully proven to power
live streaming applications to second
screens - in which video feeds captured
from multiple cameras are transferred,
in real-time to the cloud, into multiple
formats and bit rates, through a scaleout cloud video platform, using high
performance WAN transport across
continents.
Challenging the World's Network
Infrastructure
Global live and near live viewing
experiences are now expected
by consumers all over the world,
without delays, at the highest quality.
International sporting events, such
as the Olympic Games and Football
World Cup, gather massive audiences,
and have the highest volume of online
streaming content - in 2014, the World
Cup delivered 66,000 minutes of live
streams content to about 35 million
Aspera FASPStream
technology allows
end-to-end live video
streaming via the cloud

fans around the world.
The diversity of IP networks creates
multiple challenges, with different
media, bandwidth rates, and overall
conditions. While bandwidth capacity
available to businesses and consumers
continues to increase at decreasing
costs, variable bandwidth rates still
need to be accounted for, from slow
connections to superfast, multi-Gbps
access. Network media remains
diverse with terrestrial, satellite, or
wireless infrastructure. Conditions
vary greatly, with all networks being
prone to degradation over distance.
The audience is worldwide and can
be located far from the broadcast
or delivery infrastructure, often
in locations with poor network
connectivity. Without the right
transport technology, moving video
over the WAN can prove impractical, or
at best yield mediocre quality.
The Cloud's Promise
From a business perspective, the
cloud offers a few key advantages:
* Ability as a company to grow as
customer base increases.
*	 Reduced	 overheads	 and	 expensive	
	
real estate investments.
*	Worldwide	capabilities	to	reach	new	
	
and unknown customers.
*	 Delivering	 on	 demand	 content	 to	
	
consumers, while maintaining control
over revenue and quality.
*	 Flexibility	 to	 serve	 the	 need	 of	 the	
content providers for short periods of
time, without continuous investment,
once the event has ended.
Providing a near live viewing
experience to consumers is a
challenging
proposition,
where
processing and distribution need to

instantly respond to unpredictable
bursts in demand. Video transcoding
alone is expected to generate
hundreds of varieties of bit rates and
formats, to match a multitude of target
devices. Audiences peak to millions of
concurrent streams and die off shortly
after the event.
Consumers are now accustomed
to the utmost quality of service and
a near "zero delay" in the viewing
experience is expected. The success of
Second Screen video delivery depends
on near instant access and instant
replay capabilities.
Linear video transcoding approached
simply cannot meet such demands,
and are simply too expensive for short
term use, hence the need for parallel,
cloud architectures.
Also, investing in on-premises
network
bandwidth
for
mass
distribution is simply impractical, as
millions of streams would require
terabits per second of available
bandwidth.
Aspera's
New
FASPStream
Technology
Traditionally, dedicated satellite
feeds have been the only available
solution for live ingest and delivery
of broadcast quality video, but this
method remains costly, difficult
to maintain and deploy. For some
regions, it might be impractical due
to budget constraints. IP distribution
shows promise, but over distance,
network conditions degrade, and even
the most contemporary TCP-based
streaming solutions can't deliver
broadcast quality media to massive
audiences, making Content Delivery
Networks (CDNs) an essential part of
any IP delivery workflow.

Aspera FASP transport technology
already plays a key role in enabling
global content workflows, where
content can be accessed and
distributed practically, wherever it is
created, transformed or stored. But
until now, regardless of the radical
speed improvement provided by
the Aspera software, digital content
distribution remained a non-live
proposition.
Aspera FASPStream technology
provides breakthrough capabilities
that are critical enablers of end-toend live video streaming through
the cloud. Transfers no longer need
to start and end with a file system;
they can be performed to and from a
custom process running in memory,
such as live video capture and parallel
video transcoding. Aspera FASPStream
enables operations to be performed
on data being received, before the end
of the file is reached, facilitating the
implementations of proxies, transcode,
sequential access file systems, and
other "middleware" applications.
With the right combination of
network
infrastructure,
scalable
cloud resources, and efficient digital
transport, it's now possible to achieve
effective data transfer that matches,
or exceeds, the live video capture
rate, despite heavy round-trip
latency and packet loss (over 200 ms
and 10% peak packet loss over the
WAN). The result is a consistent, high
performance delivery of live feeds and
near live broadcast quality video. In
conjunction with solutions from EVS,
Elemental Technology, and the use of
the AWS cloud, Aspera FASPStream
powered the new second screen
experiences provided during 2014's
World Cup.
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://asperasoft.com/technology/transport/faspstream-api/ http://asperasoft.com/technology/transport/faspstream-api/
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