New Alliance Aims to Facilitate Broadcast-Caliber Orchestration with Best-of-Breed Options
By Fred Dawson
Whit Jackson, VP, M&E, Wasabi
Baskar Subramanian, co-founder, Amagi
Bea Alonso, director, global product marketing, Ooyala
“We’re a group of like-minded companies offering best-of-breed solutions without holding anybody hostage to a cloud compute silo,” says Whit Jackson, vice president for M&E at Wasabi, a provider of advanced storage solutions and driving force behind MICA. Services offered by the alliance span the media lifecycle from content transfer and ingest, to editing and transformation, to playback and delivery, through archiving and library management, Jackson explains.
Critically, a key advantage touted by MICA is the ability to move among chosen cloud options without incurring significant or, in some cases, any transfer fees, he adds. “Since our founding, Wasabi has been pushing the notion of Cloud 2.0, where workloads can move across multiple clouds without friction or added expense in order to deliver the best finished product at the lowest possible price,” he says.
Storage Flexibility
Indeed, storage management and costs have become a major challenge for content producers and distributors to the point that, going forward, it would appear operating within status quo parameters may not be sustainable. According to a recent forecast from researchers at Coughlin Associates, the volume of M&E content utilizing cloud-based storage over the six-year period dating from 2017 will grow 13.3x from 5.1 to 68.2 exabytes.
As described by Wasabi officials, the company’s value proposition rests on the fact that media companies need to store raw footage, rough cuts and finished product in a highly secure and reliable environment without breaking the bank or compromising on access speeds essential to collaboration and superior user experience. The strategy is paying off, says Wasabi CMO Michael Welts.
“We’ve been growing exponentially fast since we launched in 2015,” Welts says. With over 10,000 customers, Wasabi’s lead verticals include M&E, education, scientific research, healthcare and surveillance, he adds.
Utilizing object-based storage technology that leverages the API used with the AWS S3 storage platform, Wasabi relies on speed and low costs as its keys to success, Jackson notes. “Anyone who can write to Amazon can use Wasabi,” he says. “The real game changer is our business model.”
“We take advantage of the latest drive technology using our own file system with code that directly controls the heads and platters in disc drives, which determines how we lay out the bits,” Jackson explains. “This allows us to push more data on discs than others, which adds up to significant performance and cost advantages.”
With a single-tier pricing structure, Wasabi charges 80 percent less on average than competitors for basic storage capacity, he notes. And it doesn’t assess transfer fees for egress or charge for API calls to manage files. “You can access your files at will without paying a penalty,” he says.
Wasabi’s cloud facilities are based in datacenters operated by Digital Reality in Ashburn, VA, Equinix in Amsterdam and Flexential in Hillsboro, OR. Jackson notes Wasabi’s facilities in Oregon are directly connected to the One Wilshire datacenter in Los Angeles, which is a major carrier hotel serving the western U.S., including studios, broadcasters and other M&E entities in the Los Angeles area, as well as Asia-Pacific markets.
The Multi-Cloud Infrastructure
Jackson notes that extremely low-latency connectivity is fundamental to enabling integration of Wasabi cloud storage into time-sensitive workflows tied to other applications, including legacy storage, in private or public cloud locations. High-speed options include private interconnections between Wasabi cloud facilities and customer locations in their own datacenters or AWS facilities and public Internet connectivity to Wasabi that can be expedited via Wasabi direct links to POPs run by network-as-a-service provider Megaport, Internet exchange operator Equinix and CDN operator Limelight.
Such connections ensure Wasabi cloud-stored content is available “as if it’s on customer premises,” he says. And they help form the connectivity backbone that makes the dispersed “cloud 2.0” model touted by MICA a viable option for the premium video market.
In that regard a key player in the alliance is Acembly, a company providing multi-cloud management-as-a-service solutions built on a microservices architecture. As one of many public cloud storage services supported by Acembly, Wasabi stands out as “the most cost-effective storage product in the market,” says Acembly co-founder Patrick Kennedy. “We’ve put a lot of energy into our partnership with Wasabi and for good reason.”
Many other MICA members are facilitators of the multi-cloud concept as well. For example, FileCatalyst supports file-acceleration technology, Integrated Media Technologies enables systems integration, Marquis deals with disaster recovery and backup and Packet supplies bare-metal compute facilities in over 18 locations worldwide. Other members provide application-specific cloud solutions that can be tied into the multi-cloud workflows, such as Primestream (production and workflow automation), Levels Beyond (media production orchestration), Cinnafilm (transcoding and image processing) and several that support various aspects of archive management, including Archiware, Cloudfirst.io, Masstech, Versity and XenData.
MICA serves to broaden the utility of several partnerships like the one with Acembly that Wasabi already had in place. One of these involves Primestream, which is well positioned to exploit the MICA agenda insofar as its asset management solutions are designed to be scalable and configurable across multiple markets, platforms and infrastructures.
The tie-in with Wasabi is a perfect example of how the synergies work, notes Primestream co-founder and head of North American sales Namdev Lisman. “At Primestream, our integrated solution lets customers focus on how to tell a great story rather that battling with the complexity of deploying cloud-based storage systems,” Lisman says. “Wasabi makes object storage simple to implement, configure and budget. Together, our solutions make managing media easier for the customer.”
Expanding M&E Support
But as compelling as the low-cost/low-latency multi-cloud paradigm might be with all the capabilities amassed under the MICA banner, there’s no denying the alliance has an uphill climb, given the aggressive efforts of the major unitary compute platforms to bring ever more applications into their domains. For example, one of the latest moves by Microsoft Azure is focused on enabling cloud-based premium video production at global scales with the immediacy of operations in a single location.
Through a partnership with Avid, Microsoft has brought that company’s production tools onto the Azure platform in conjunction with enabling fast connectivity among far-flung locations through integration of Azure’s backbone infrastructure with the Secure Reliable Transport connection technology (SRTHub) supplied by Haivision, another Microsoft partner. “The cloud opens up content creation to whole new sets of human beings that today aren’t able to participate in M&E,” says Tad Brockway, Microsoft corporate vice president, Azure storage, media and edge.
“In the future, in order to keep up with all the stories that need to be told, especially with the personalization of content that is happening through the Internet, the story tellers need to scale with that as well,” Brockway adds. “We need for the effect artists and even directors and producers and perhaps even actors over time to be able to work together anywhere on the globe and to collaborate with other artists in other parts of the globe.”
Azure’s big competitors haven’t gone so far as to support production workflows on their platforms, other than some post-production editing apps in the case of AWS. But they’re making big strides in the direction of shoring up support for the M&E sector.
In Amazon’s case, the portfolio of M&E vendors launching application-specific cloud solutions on AWS is growing by leaps and bounds. ScreenPlays, for example, recently reported on the cloud strategies tied to use of AWS by Verimatrix and MediaMorph.
In some cases, vendors are integrating with more than one cloud compute platform to ensure their solutions can be readily accessed whichever environment a particular customer is accustomed to working in. For example, Amagi, a pioneer in cloud-based broadcast playout and dynamic advertising solutions, is integrated with both Azure and AWS and, like many other vendors, offers its solutions in a variety of permutations, including in SaaS mode and for independent deployments in private clouds.
In a demonstration of the broadcast-caliber functionalities now doable in the public cloud space, Amagi last month announced its playout platform for sports and other live events, CLOUDPORT-LIVE. As explained by Amagi co-founder Baskar Subramanian, the orchestration platform, sitting directly before playout in the broadcast workflow, ingests multiple streams from multiple sources anywhere in the world for remote management by human operators through a Web browser interface.
“CLOUDPORT – LIVE is a distinctly different product from our on-demand playout platform,” Subramanian says. “It runs on separate software designed to support real-time management, including orchestration of ad breaks and execution of features specific to targeted distribution points.”
Along with integrating myriad vendor platforms into their compute infrastructures, Azure and AWS have mounted media service packages designed to accommodate the storage, transcoding, streaming and other needs of broadcasters and distributors. Significantly lagging the multi-year Azure Media Services timeline, AWS Media Services says it has managed to draw over 2,000 media companies to its solution set, which includes support for file-to-file transfers, live encoding, just-in-time packaging, storage, server-side ad insertion, and most recently a live video transport service, MediaConnect, which transfers video into, around and out of the cloud.
Google Cloud has a long way to go in the M&E space compared to AWS and Azure. But its recent hiring of former Discovery CTO John Honeycutt as head of telecommunications, media and entertainment signals its intentions to drive this side of the business.
Another big advantage enjoyed by the big 3 is the degree to which vendors of standalone cloud platforms suited for use in private or public infrastructures are integrating with specific applications developed by these giants. Often, in order to play in a best-of-breed modular scenario, vendors that include a solution in their portfolio that is also supported by one of the compute platform providers integrate with the alternative option. For example, vendors that include transcoding support in their solutions frequently integrate with AWS Elemental.
Sometimes an application hosted by a cloud compute platform is tapped as an intrinsic contribution to a set of solutions offered by a vendor working independently of that platform. For example, Ooyala last month announced it had integrated its Flex Media video management platform with Google Cloud Video Intelligence, a suite of AI and machine-learning products designed to support video analysis and metadata enrichment.
“This allows our customers to use AI in an automated way so that a distributor acquiring content from a supplier using Flex Media can set rules for singling out highlights or delivering other special features, connecting with social media or applying analytics for a wide range of scenarios,” says Bea Alonso, director of global product marketing at Ooyala.
Indeed, while Ooyala is not a member of MICA, its platform is designed to facilitate the multi-cloud operations environment envisioned by the alliance. “Our customers are saying that one cloud provider is good at a particular thing like load balancing, transcoding or whatever,” Alonso notes. “We have a microservice architecture that allows us to set up the workflow across multiple instances wherever they’re positioned.”
If David Friend, CEO and co-founder of Wasabi is right, the dominance of the big 3 is part of a Cloud 1.0 scenario that will eventually give way to Cloud 2.0, much as the dominance of IBM in the early days of computing gave way to a multi-supplier ecosystem. “There is a movement afoot, almost a rebellion of sorts, to redefine what a cloud should look like, on the customer’s terms instead of the vendor’s terms,” Friend says.
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