As forecast by many, that catch-all phrase ‘the cloud’ was one of the dominant themes of this year’s NAB.
According to IABM end-user research unveiled at the Las Vegas show, 85% of media businesses are likely to use the cloud in the next two or three years, with 28% already using it. To answer that apparently growing demand, vendors are stepping up their efforts to provide end-users with the cloud-based tools they need.
Avid set the tone at NAB during its press conference and customer briefing when it announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to take its suite of applications to the cloud. Imagine Communications also announced a partnership with Microsoft for the launch of its end-to-end workflow.
Ross Video took the opportunity to launch its first cloud service, while Ericsson revealed that it had moved its subtitling toolkit Subito to the cloud (see box below).
The Foundry: cloud-based VFX
One of the most interesting unveils was from UK VFX software developer The Foundry, which provided a glimpse of Elara, a cloud-based VFX “studio in a box”.
Foundry Chief Technology Officer Jon Wadelton explained that the project began three years ago as a government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).government funded initiative in association with the London arm of VFX and animation studio Industrial Light and Magic (ILM).
“We were trying to answer a few issues related to the cloud,” said Wadelton.
“Number one, can we think about flexibility and a world where you don’t have to invest in upfront hardware and worry about capacity planning? And we thought about collaboration; could we have many freelancers all around the world all sharing and working together?
“And what would the idea of unlimited compute power bring to workflows in VFX and are there new workflows enabled by the cloud that were previously thought not possible?”
Tools available through the platform include Foundry and third-party creative applications Nuke Studio, Katana, Houdini and V-Ray, along with integrated cloud rendering, scalable storage and compute.
The Foundry co-founder and Chief Scientist Simon Robinson explained to IBC365 that typical users of Elara might be small teams and individuals.
He said: “One of the inspirations is that if you and some friends thought ‘we can do this, we can set up a new studio’, there are a lot of challenges on top of running a business such as the kit and software you might need. And if those involved in a studio were geographically distributed, where would you to put [equipment and software]?
“The idea of being a few clicks of a mouse away from spinning up a studio in the cloud without the need for hardware but with the ability to pay on demand is really compelling.”
Elara also provides an analytics engine that will allow users to inspect CPU cycles. Chief Product and Customer Officer Jody Madden added: “The opportunity for efficiency improvements when you are looking at the metrics across workflows and the opportunity to feedback to customers the amount of data usage on all levels is really powerful.”
A beta version of Elara is expected to be available this summer.
Up in the cloud
Ericsson: Subito Vault
At NAB, Ericsson announced Subito Vault which it described as “a single, globally accessible, integrated caption production toolkit that enables cloud-based captioning workflow management, secure management of caption and proxy media files, and a complete caption file archive delivered with a client-facing API”.
At the unveiling, Ericsson Head of Broadcast and Media Services Thorsten Sauer said: “We are one of the largest providers to media industry, and one of our challenges is that we have many customers and we would like to serve them globally.
“Scale is probably the key differentiator for us and that goes across out portfolio.r us and that goes across out portr us and that goes across out portfolio.
”We serve hundreds of TV channels every day and millions of hours of content per year, so scale is a key element. And within that, it is extremely important ”We serve hundreds of TV channels every day and millions of hours of content per year, so scale is a key element. And within that, it is extremely important for us to adopt the cloud.
“We are the largest provider of captioning services in the world…we believe that captions are becoming more relevant as we consume media on the move and in acoustically challenging environments.
“This year, we are lifting Subito into the cloud. Why? Because our customers have their content stored in the cloud, and the cloud makes it easy for us to integrate on a global basis with our customers’ content.
”It also allows us to introduce business rules that make it very secure, because we can administer the access to the content both person-to-person and time-bound; that is why we call it Vault.”
Imagine Communications: End-to-end offering
Microsoft was also the chosen partner for Imagine Communications, which was keen to emphasise how its “early embrace” of a cloud-native strategy had enabled it to offer an end-to-end cloud-based workflow.
Imagine is working in “tight collaboration” with Microsoft to make sure that its end-to-end solutions, from ingest to delivery, are available as services from the Azure Cloud.
Cloud-native capabilities demonstrated by Imagine in Las Vegas included an end-to-end system for OTT services, including VOD, live/linear and cloud DVR, that supports subscription, targeted advertising and hybrid monetisation.
The solution, which combines Siemens Convergence Creators’ Smart Video Engine video platform and Imagine’s multiscreen media and ad delivery solutions, will be available “soon” as a service on Microsoft Azure.Imagine’s multiscreen media and ad delivery solutions, will be available “soon” as a service on Microsoft Azure.
Ross Video: Inception Cloud
NAB was the setting for the launch of Ross Video’s first cloud service: Inception Cloud.
All the Inception product variants, including Inception Social for curating and playing out social media messages, Inception Live for live event production and Inception News for newsrooms are available with the same full feature set found in the traditional software versions.
Pricing is a monthly rate based on the level of service and number of users.
IBM: Watson Cloud
IBM has used NAB 2017 to launch a cloud service that aims to help companies extract new insights from video.
The service is part of IBM’s continued focus on combining artificial intelligence with the IBM Cloud to help media and entertainment companies try to make sense of unstructured data and make more informed decisions about the content they create, acquire and deliver to viewers.
Avid: MediaCentral
Announced at NAB, Microsoft Azure is Avid’s preferred cloud hosting platform for the development and launch of a range of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings.
Avid’s MediaCentral Platform, including video and audio editing software Media Composer and Pro Tools, will be available as on premises, private data centre or public cloud offerings.on premises, private data centre or public cloud offerings.
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