Why media infrastructure is shifting to COTS
Broadcasters are urged to rethink strategies for a more competitive future
The media industry is undergoing a significant transformation in how infrastructure is bought and used, probably the biggest that will happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this. For years, broadcasters and other organisations producing TV shows relied on proprietary hardware for their studio, control room and OB van infrastructure. This hardware was often dedicated to a single use case—multiviewer, converter, colour corrector—with embedded software and a perpetual licence. However, a new approach is gaining traction: dynamic media operations built on commoditised off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware onto which software is deployed as it is needed.
The move to software on COTS is driven by the desire for agility, scalability and efficiency in media operations. Our latest research, Media infrastructure utilisation matters, explores this shift and examines the factors driving and inhibiting the transition.
What is COTS and why does it matter?
COTS stands for “commoditised off-the-shelf” hardware. This is standard, interchangeable computer hardware which is readily available (as opposed to proprietary hardware which is only available from a particular vendor). This flexibility enables the same piece of hardware to run different types of software and may be reconfigured rapidly if requirements change. Imagine changing a production studio used for a morning talk show to a live sports studio just hours later. With dedicated hardware you might need to move a load of boxes around and mess around with wires and cooling. With COTS hardware, turn off the configuration you needed for the morning show and deploy whatever software you need for live sports. You’ll probably need highlights, replay and commentary and you probably won’t need the modules responsible for the weather report in the morning show.
The industry is supporting this transition by collaborating on initiatives like Media eXchange Layer (“MXL”) and Dynamic Media Facility (“DMF”), facilitated by the EBU. MXL is developing open source software to enable real-time exchange of video, audio and metadata in software-driven production environments. This layer is meant to deliver interoperability, so broadcasters can mix and match software from different vendors. The DMF is a reference architecture providing a vision of how a software-based production facility is structured. To their credit, these initiatives are supported not just by broadcasters and trade associations, but also by many of the leading vendors of production infrastructure such as Lawo, Grass Valley and Matrox.
Key benefits of dynamic media operations
Caretta Research spoke to several broadcasters across Europe and North America to understand why they’re embracing an increasingly software-based approach:
- Effortless maintenance and updates: software is much easier to maintain than dedicated hardware, including critical security patches as well as new functionalities. This reduces the burden on customers’ technology teams and ensures that a customer’s infrastructure gets the latest innovations as quickly as possible.
- Agility: rapidly reconfigure resources to address multiple production use cases and increase resource utilisation. This helps facilities morph their infrastructure to address different use cases and to rapidly scale media operations up or down.
- Maximising utilisation: realise significant efficiencies compared to how things were done in the past, when broadcasters weren’t under huge pressure to cut costs and tactics like deliberately over-speccing infrastructure, compute and hardware resources was a viable approach. Many TV studios are used to actually make programmes for only a small percentage of time available. This wastes resources such as studio space, hardware, software, electricity, ducting, cooling etc. sitting around doing nothing productive for large swathes of time. Dynamic operations enable higher levels of utilisation by enabling broadcasters to change studio use cases rapidly, using live production infrastructure for non-live workflows during downtimes and speccing to the mean rather than the peaks.
- Sustainability: reducing resource waste contributes to sustainability targets. We’re aware of sustainability becoming an increasingly prevalent aspect of procurements. Vendors must be able to measure and justify how their proposed approaches align with their customers’ sustainability obligations.
Overcoming the hurdles
While the benefits are clear, transitioning is currently not straightforward. Media technology buyers are risk averse, exhibiting a slight preference for the predictability of the traditional CAPEX charging models they’ve always used. Forecasting TCO for software on COTS can be challenging, particularly regarding overage and cost ceilings.
Many organisations also lack the tools, expertise and workflows to effectively manage floating licences, credit and token-based software deployment models. Buyers also consider historic spending levels as the benchmark for the future: they don’t want to pay more, in TCO terms, than they have in the past. Many buyers told us that vendors are charging too much for their pay-as-you-go software licences. Vendors argue that buyers are not comparing like with like, given the benefits of dynamic software on COTS over dedicated hardware.
Caretta Research says that if a buyer “problem” is inhibiting them from spending with vendors, it’s actually a vendor problem, and that there is a competitive advantage sat in the open waiting for a vendor to pick it up and use it against its competitors.
Vendors can play a crucial role in this transition
Vendors have an important role to play in accelerating this transition, if they wish. They need to simplify pricing, reduce TCO and make the move to dynamic media operations a no-brainer for buyers. Vendors who enable their customers’ transitions will enjoy the potential to gain significant market share and pricing leverage over the coming decades.
For buyers considering the transition to software and COTS, our suggestions are:
- Identify vendors with easy to understand pricing and an explicit commitment to enabling your transition: how easy do they make it to work with them?
- If you need the predictability of CAPEX but the flexibility of OPEX, consider purchasing software credits which you can capitalise (usually five-year credits which don’t burn down)
- Choose vendors that can provide your required permutation of managed services, support, maintenance and feature upgrade cadence (look at their historic roadmap as well as the forward-looking one the sales team shows you).
- Spec to the mean and ask the vendor about their backstops for peak bursts and/or have a plan for using the cloud computing platforms for this.
- Develop the workflows required for allocating flexible and floating software licences across your infrastructure and accelerate your orchestration and configuration capabilities.
- Build granular infrastructure monitoring to measure savings and efficiency gains from increased utilisation.
Broadcasters need to consider where they are in the transition process and where they want to get to. Dynamic media operations offer a host of benefits and we expect most organisations operating production facilities to transition at some point. The pace of transition is contingent on multiple factors but what is beyond doubt is that the vendor community can make it a lot easier and hence faster.
Discover more about the future of media infrastructure. Download our full research on the subject through our landing page: https://www.carettaresearch.com/downloads/media-infrastructure-research
This research is supported by Lawo.