By Keith Wymbs, Chief Marketing Officer, Elemental
Video consumers have the power today, deciding when, where, and how they watch video. This intense demand is invigorating the confidence of new over-the-top (OTT) providers – and acts as a competitive motivation for pay TV operators to accelerate their IP-based video services. But there’s an Achilles’ Heel in many operators’ TV Everywhere game plans: few live channels delivered beyond the TV set.
Industry studies show that consumers – even cord cutters and cord nevers – put a premium on having access to the live streamed linear sports, news and entertainment content they love. Pay TV operators need a strategy that enables them to easily prepare their technology infrastructures for live linear streaming without breaking the bank. Choosing newer infrastructure based on fixed-function hardware might offer good performance initially, but can be quickly surpassed by more cost-effective and highly-adaptive software options that keep pace with the pace of change in the industry.
As the TV Everywhere era unfolds it is clear that hardware-based approaches won’t be able to withstand accelerating innovation. They simply lack the agility to get the job done in many modern applications where the pace of change is accelerating. Pay TV operators need a new weapon to win the TV Everywhere battle.
Accelerating TV Everywhere With Software-Defined Video
Software-defined video is an infrastructure agnostic approach to implementing flexible, scalable and easily upgradable video architectures. Unlike legacy solutions, this advancement allows video providers to deploy software across an optimal combination of dedicated and virtualized resources in both private and public data centers. They are ready-built for evolving global IP video applications and can be accessed independent of the chosen processing architecture (serial, parallel) or deployment model (ground, virtualized, cloud).
The flexibility of a software-defined video approach allows Pay TV providers to offer premium live content while extracting unmined value from that same content. For example, operators can enhance core live linear streaming services with catch-up TV functionality and multiscreen delivery. Key monetization capabilities, such as just-in-time (JIT) packaging, ad insertion/replacement and expanded CDN capabilities are seamlessly integrated within the ecosystem – all in software – enabling operators to generate additional revenues.
Support for new services and video formats is seamlessly provided through software upgrades– only without the hardware innovation lag. What is used to process MPEG-2 video today can migrate seamless to H.264 or HEVC in the future. What is used to trial 8-bit 4K processing might evolve to 10 or 12-bit processing at real deployment. The possibilities are only constrained by the lines of code in the software — and not by chip designs within traditional hardware systems.
Finally, since a software-defined video platform is designed to run on standard computing hardware, it is ideally suited for virtual private cloud (virtualized infrastructure) and public cloud-based environments. Increased virtualization enabled by end-to-end software architectures also has the potential to reduce the need for storage capacity and bandwidth. This is vital when launching value-add functions, such as catch-up TV and start-over TV, for extending the life and value of live streamed content.
Infrastructure Everywhere for Pay TV Operators
Pay TV providers who deploy the Elemental Cloud can leverage a unified workflow to execute live linear video processing, packaging and delivery functions across ground and cloud-based resources. And because Elemental Cloud is seamlessly integrated with on-premises video operations, video providers can elastically scale capacity in response to rapidly changing consumer behavior patterns and digital media market shifts with complete feature parity and transparent redundancy across all resources. This is especially important for pay TV operators with large-scale video processing applications.
By committing to flexible, scalable software-defined architecture as the basis for their next generation video processing infrastructure, Pay TV operators can more confidently pursue live linear streaming offers, enhance them with innovative new functionality such as catch-up TV and start-over TV, and explore new delivery models such as HbbTV (hybrid broadcast-broadband TV). And, they can accomplish it all while lowering financial cost of entry into new projects, markets, and applications.
