COTS (Commercial-off-the-Shelf) Platform for Media Production Everywhere

Abstract

A hybrid multicloud approach is needed to address the goals of broadcasters to commission and evolve scalable software-based broadcast systems composed of elements from diverse vendors, on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, avoiding lock-in at the facility and in the cloud. These software elements need to support common control, integration with enterprise management systems, and a sufficient level of automation. To this end, broadcast vendors’ software needs to run everywhere; use standards and open specifications for control and transport interoperability; support fine-grained resource allocation; and leverage information technology (IT) best practice, for example, for monitoring, security, and orchestration. An open-source container orchestration platform, virtualized infrastructure layers, and common software application programming interfaces (APIs) for control interoperability allow the vendor to focus where their value and revenue is—the application and user experience (UX). As a case study, a scalable edge platform was constructed for transcoding, artificial intelligence (AI) inference, and other video and audio processing. Multi-architecture, containerized, applications were deployed and managed with Kubernetes. This provides fine-grained allocation of hardware resources, including graphic- processing units (GPUs) and ST 2110-capable network interface controllers (NICs). Service discovery and connection management are achieved using the Networked Media Open Specifications (NMOS).