CIOReview | | 19 JULY 2024By Lewis Smithingham, EVP of Strategic Industries, Media, Entertainment, Games, and Sports, Media.MonksOver the past eight years, the only constants in VR broadcast have been change and evolution. VR has been a central part of my work since 2015, with a particular focus on live-streaming immersive video since 2017. When creating live, high-quality video content for HMDs, we face a core challenge: the increasing computational demand of a constantly evolving medium. Solving this has required creative solutions that forced us to break through the traditional broadcast architecture with a cloud-based broadcast model. Cloud broadcasting has many advantages, including lower and more flexible costs, immense compute elasticity and power, and a sustainable revolution.Creative Flexibility & ElasticityWorking with constantly changing formats comes with the need to frequently upgrade your hardware. I started my VR career broadcasting in UHD stereo with a Nokia Ozo attached to a car battery, and now we're talking about 8K stereo. We are working with an evolving medium, and our partner creators constantly demand us to be able to adapt to what they need. With traditional hardware, this would be so expensive as to be literally impossible - short of buying a 10 million dollar super truck, with no guarantees of usefulness down the line.The cloud solves many long-standing issues in traditional broadcasting. We employ a scalable, modular infrastructure that efficiently moves and stores data, runs live graphics systems at every resolution, and handles video stitching and audio needs on a case-by-case basis. This enables an elasticity of media across formats that would otherwise be a massive headache (and a logistical nightmare). In the morning, we'll do a show at 16:9 at 1920x1080, and at night we'll do a show at 8K on the same software. We just [effectively] hit a few buttons on the computer, and we're good to go. That said, we keep a close eye on hardware innovation as it catches up to software.Cost and StabilityThe cloud only loses cost-effectiveness if you keep it on when you don't need it. Our truck is a remote data center with every tool we need on demand, and we pay as we go. Unlocking virtual hardware means we don't need to rent or buy trucks, and we save on travel costs, making the cloud a preferable and less costly alternative to traditional, physical broadcast production.Remote production also unlocks scalability. When we run a show in the cloud, we use far fewer onsite engineers (usually 3 for a 6-camera show), the rest of the engineers have a 3-foot commute to the next show, and the team can run a shoot from LA in the morning and do England in the evening.Broadcasting is all about redundancy and stability. We live and die by our signal and have whole codes of superstition around it. By drastically reducing our onsite footprint, we run into fewer failures. We've run into snow plows cutting cables during several physical shows, and while we have used snow cones for our cloud shows, we generally find the cloud much more reliable. It's also worth pointing out that while our shows are very important to us and to our clients if AWS goes down, we're going to have much bigger problems societally.THE CLOUD OBLIGATION IN SCALED BROADCAST VRCXO INSIGHTSLewis Smithingham
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