Broadcasters’ move to virtualized production workflows may have been well underway before March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated that shift.
Moving functions from specialized hardware to “virtual machines” — software running on generic computers — had already given networks and station groups increased flexibility. But the adoption of cloud-based tools to support remote workflows over the past two years has permanently changed the production landscape, said top technology executives who gathered last week for the TVNewsCheck webinar Virtualizing TV Production in 2022.
Many staffers have returned to their broadcast centers and local studios. But many are still working from home on a regular basis, handling key functions like editing and graphics by taking advantage of virtual desktop software and new cloud-based tools.
Ray Thompson, senior director of partner and industry marketing for Avid, said that news customers that built out new technology infrastructure to enable a distributed production environment aren’t rewinding those steps, regardless of how many of their people are back in the office. Instead, they are continuing to invest in technology that allow staffers to do more and more out in the field.
“They’ve sort of added this whole new layer of capability which allows them a tremendous amount of flexibility,” Thompson said.
That emphasis on remote workflows is “driving Avid’s roadmap these days,” he added. Avid had already released a cloud-based editing solution, Edit On Demand, in fall 2019 which then gained traction during the pandemic for entertainment post-production. To help support remote collaboration, the company has developed new IP contribution and output capabilities for editors using the low-latency SRT and RTMP protocols. It has also added a collaboration tool to its MediaCentral content management system aimed at facilitating news story development among geographically dispersed teams.
ABS-CBN’s Lessons From The Philippines
Besides COVID-19, international broadcaster ABS-CBN had another crisis to contend with that pushed it towards cloud-based workflows. In May 2020 the Philippines government revoked ABS-CBN’s broadcast franchise, significantly impacting its business. That led it to shut down data centers in the U.S. and elsewhere and move many functions to the public cloud, using Amagi as its key software vendor.
At the same time, production staff back at its headquarters in Manila were forced to work remotely due to the pandemic. Many are still doing so today, including metadata enhancement, subtitling and closed-captioning personnel as well as many news production staffers, said Rab Mukraj, CTO of ABS-CBN International.
That results in a much better work/life balance for ABS-CBN employees compared to pre-pandemic. Transportation is particularly challenging in Manila, Mukraj said, and many staffers had a daily commute of up to two hours each way. Others rented nearby hotel-like lodging so they could stay in Manila for the workweek, which then became untenable during COVID-19.
“As we come out of COVID and things are sort of returning to normal, news is still maintaining a lot of remote production for talent, who are continuing to work from home or from a remote location,” Mukraj said. “I think that’s going to be a permanent fixture. But across the board, from broadcast technology to digital to enterprise tech or corporate IT, it’s changed radically. All the processes, [and] tech platforms we’ve put in, are really to allow people to work from home seamlessly. I think that’s going to stay that way for a long time.”
An Agile Work Environment For ABC News
The increased emphasis on distributed workflows is informing the long-term technology plans for networks and stations, particularly when it comes to new facilities like the broadcast center ABC is building downtown at 4 Hudson Square to replace its current home on West 66th Street.
While ABC’s current plant tends to have a “box for every function,” said Ryan McCormick, executive director of engineering & studio operations for ABC News, the goal for the new IP-based facility is to virtualize as many functions as possible to create an “agile work environment” that allows staffers to perform functions from anywhere.
The plan will help ABC cut down its real estate costs by getting as much utilization from its on-premise hardware as possible, such as having a single control room serve multiple studios. It will also put some computing power offsite in private data centers or public cloud, while keeping certain live production systems on-premise.
“Certainly, making it smaller, getting it outside of the building is key,” McCormick said. “That’s where with virtualization we’re able to achieve a lot more and shrink the overall footprint that we have, and that we depend on daily.”
One big lesson of the pandemic for ABC is that communications with remote staffers like anchors working at home, such as intercom and confidence monitoring, is still a challenge. That is partly due to the latencies inherent in internet-based workflows and partly to the limitations of its current legacy plant.
McCormick said that Haivision encoding technology proved to be a big help in solving some of those problems by allowing ABC to push low-latency multiviewer feeds out to remote talent. But more work still needs to be done, particularly with orchestrating audio communications like intercom.
“And that is still very much a big focus of ours going into 4 Hudson, is how do you extend comms outside of the building?” he said. “Video, playback, editing, graphics creation, that’s easy. That is stuff that can be done through a cloud provider. But how do you communicate to the people within the building? That’s where the real challenge lies.”
NBCUniversal Local’s Transition
For several years, NBCUniversal has been aggressively pushing virtualization across the NBC and Telemundo stations it owns as well as its regional sports networks and associated digital properties. That includes both setting up a data center in Dallas that provides remote processing for a Telemundo station in Las Vegas and taking another station’s production to public cloud.
Much of the near-term development has been driven by acquisitions, said Brian Kincheloe, director of production technology for NBCUniversal Local.
“If we need to refresh or have a new facility in a market, spinning up cloud-based production is the way to do it as far as timetable, outside of an 18-to-24-month window to construct a facility,” he said.
NBCUniversal’s long-term strategy is to first test virtualization and cloud-based production in smaller markets, then offer it as a disaster-recovery option to large-market stations and then eventually duplicate stations’ existing toolsets such as automated production control (APC) in the public cloud. That would allow NBCUniversal to actually use a virtual production control room (VPCR) in the public cloud for a “Tier One” station or RSN.
Kincheloe agreed with McCormick that communications like intercom can be challenging and said that managing latency is a key factor in making virtualized production workflows feasible. Of particular importance is the time that passes between an operator pushing a button to trigger an action on a remote computer and when they see the outcome of that action on a monitor.
In its first private-cloud implementation, NBCUniversal managed to get the “entire roundtrip” down to between 150 and 200 milliseconds, Kincheloe said. Once the latency got past 250 milliseconds, it became problematic.
When considering latency, broadcasters have to weigh several factors including image quality, redundancy and the transport protocols they’re using, Kincheloe said. Keeping an open mind when considering new virtualized and cloud-based workflows is also important.
“There is an option and tradeoff in every scenario,” Kincheloe said. “No one should feel like latency is the ultimate blocker.”
In fact, Thompson said that some of Avid’s Edit On Demand users were pleasantly surprised by the latency of cloud-based editing compared to remote desktop software they had previously used to access their on-premise hardware.
“Because the VMs that we deployed Media Composer on were often more powerful than the workstations they had under their desk,” Thompson explained. “Despite the fact that you might have somewhat questionable bandwidth, all you really need these days is 20 to 25 megabits [per second] down to have a good experience.”
16 May 2024
23 May 2024
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