Today, we can see that the traditional TV players are facing huge challenges, which haveemerged from the leading OTT services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube TV, who are offering a vast array of compelling services and delivering access to them at unprecedented speeds. We can see that IP is responding to the very-industry specific interfaces that we now have. But while TV (both broadcast and IP-based services) are merging into IT-centric infrastructures, these infrastructures are still adapting to the needs of TV/broadcast. Although IT infrastructures are far less costly than those used in broadcast and bring a level of flexibility that has not yet been seen across the media industry, we have a number of technical and cost barriers that we need to address in order to scale and evolve.
The world of TV used to be very specialized; whether standards, networks, or computing, it was always defined within a broadcast-specific mindset. Generic servers were unable to provide the necessary power, so dedicated appliances dominated the landscape. But as these generic servers have become more powerful, workloads have been integrated into servers, including that of TV-specific standards and interconnects. When you think about it, TV operators are like any other business in that they demand operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency and cost optimization. So, while early adopters have moved to the cloud to deliver OTT services, we are now seeing public clouds being adopted for more and more workloads.
In fact, today’s modern TV services require multiple types of computer system architectures. But in order to meet consumer demands, they must all work together! While Kubernetes is the cornerstone of cloud native solutions and provide excellent methods for delivering transactional services such as web portals for buying movies and SVoD services, service providers also need to respond in areas where Kubernetes is not as effective. This includes flow-oriented ecosystems, which are a staple of the TV ecosystem, or storage-based architectures, which require petabytes of data that are accessible at scale! For me, the most important area around the development of cloud technology lies in delivering flexibility, while ensuring we do not denigrate the quality of experience that the media industry already enables and prides itself on. TV service providers must modernize and accelerate their operations, moving from dedicated hardware in datacenters to embracing hybrid cloud technologies, DevOps and orchestration, while considering constraints including cloud frameworks – which aren’t often natively designed for real-time media – and issues such as high processing & storage performance, network (latency, bandwidth, multicast), high availability and reliability.
The media industry needs to complete building a consensus around all-IP standards and specifications. If we don’t align on standards, we will begin to lose the ‘network effect’ of interconnected, best-of-breed devices. In addition, we will also lose the solid foundations that will enable the media
industry to deliver higher levels of standardized capabilities. At MediaKind, we have completely refreshed the way media software is constructed by embracing new ‘cloud native’ standards. Our industry, which has been traditionally very conservative in its approach to deployment models and closed intellectual property rights, is now moving towards a mindset that is driven by cloud and Open Source.
Tomorrow at KubeCon + CloudNative Con Europe, I will be joined by my MediaKind colleague Jerome Champetier, Senior Technology Architect, to discuss how we can deliver TV Everywhere services with cloud native solutions. We will look at a range of market trends and challenges, which helped drive MediaKind’s cloud native journey since 2015, showcasing how our architecture migration to microservices, containers, Kubernetes and Helm has helped to lay the foundations for our global development team. In addition, we will also share our architectural designs and explain how we overcame challenges such as K8s deployments, CNI, monitoring and packaging with Helm. Join us to discover the multiple, tangible benefits offered by cloud technology and a full range of cloud native media strategies.
We hope to see you tomorrow in Hall 8.0 F1 (16:45-17:20), at Fira Gran Via in Barcelona!
