In recent years, advances in cloud technology and computation has made way for the cloud to play an increasingly important role in the media and broadcast industry.
Cloud-based media processing services have proven to be reliable and essential for video delivery. Not only has the value of cloud services come to light in 2020. Video consumption increased exponentially as people around the world suddenly found themselves sheltering in place and spending an unprecedented amount of time at home.
To ensure video delivery at scale, with high reliability and availability, operators and content providers are specifically embracing media processing and delivery services that are cloud-native and more specifically, cloud-neutral. Let’s review the key benefits of the cloud for video delivery services.
Scaling video services to meet growing demand is a critical aspect of every video service provider today. However, with the massive shifts in consumption and demand, scaling quickly and elastically has become a make or break point.
Cloud-native computing is a software development approach that utilizes the cloud to deploy applications such as microservices in a modular, containerized approach. Microsoft expertly sums up the advantages of cloud-native systems, saying that they are designed to embrace rapid change, large scale, and resilience.
Single cloud approach: A solution that is locked-in to single cloud provider does offer the basic advantages of cloud redundancy for a network and geographical redundancy.
Multi-cloud approach: A solution that can leverage multiple cloud platforms provides increased reliability of mission-critical services. Take for example the recent outage that AWS experienced. The customers that run all their services with the same cloud provider were down with no other option than wait for AWS to get things up and running again.
There are two approaches cloud services: cloud-neutral, and single provider. Cloud-native solutions take on even more importance here. If you aim to use a multi-cloud approach, then containerized applications that are cloud-neutral allow you to port the application service from one cloud provider to another, or even from private data centers to the public cloud, and vice-versa.
Cloud neutrality enables running your services over multiple cloud platforms, with different cloud providers, simultaneously. It’s the difference between 99.995% and 99.9995% reliability. Having the flexibility to rely on multiple, different cloud providers for your services helps to keep your business agile, resilient and also enables your business to more easily adapt to unexpected changes.
Another major challenge for service providers today is disaster recovery, which seems to be needed more and more frequently. Backing up an entire video architecture with a second set of hardware is expensive and operationally time consuming. There are also occurrences when service providers only need resources to support short-term events.
With a cloud-native service you’ve got an agile and cost-effective way to request temporary or redundant resources in the cloud. You also benefit from a team of experts managing your video service 24/7, assuring the highest level of availability and maximum up-time.
There are other cost benefits in choosing a cloud-based platform for video streaming. With on-premise hardware, resources are limited, and the infrastructure is not future-proof without a costly hardware refresh. Cloud platforms are constantly updated so providers will have access to the latest and greatest features, formats and capabilities.
Operationally, it’s costly to maintain on-premise hardware. The total cost of ownership needs to be considered, including factors such as maintenance of the building, cooling, power, head count, security and insurance. Eliminate operational complexity using Harmonic's VOS360 cloud-based platform. Operators and content providers can focus or reallocate resources on what they do best, such as creating content, retaining and gaining subscribers and building more broadband services.
When looking for a media processing and delivery service provider, cloud-native and cloud-neutral platforms are a prerequisite.
Harmonic’s VOS®360 platform exemplifies the cloud-native media processing service, enabling you to flexibly scale resources on the fly without sacrificing video quality. It leverages the flexibility of cloud-native infrastructures to meet the most demanding and complex requirements for media processing and delivery. It integrates with the three major cloud providers, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and AWS.
Being cloud-native and cloud-neutral, the platform brings increased agility, scalability and reliability to any video delivery scenario. Looking for more information about how to harness the power of the cloud? Get in touch with us to learn how our cloud-native solutions can work for you.