Original Article in Digital Media World
Streaming has become synonymous with media ingest across the board in our IP-driven world.
The COVID pandemic has exacerbated this streaming lifestyle for all walks of life, ages and backgrounds around the world, with individuals forced (or generally wanting) to be indoors. This could be in the mornings with daily news viewings, mid-day breaks for a favorite episode, late afternoon or evening broadcast of a favorite live sporting event, or TV show, and everything in between.
Direct access to our computers, 24/7 and in the confines of our own work environments has made the consumption of content from all sources more accessible and diverse given the increased scope of individuals watching. The more individuals watch, the more content they go through and more new content they look for. With increased consumption comes expanded preferences to add variety and diversity, leading to more and more exploration of new and accessible video – whatever is at our fingertips. Everyone who has enjoyed streaming over IP can relate to this.
At Zixi, we are developers of specialty live video distribution over IP and our patented Software-Defined Video Platform, comprised of our ZEN Master monitoring and management video platform, our industry-leading zixi protocol, Intelligent Data Platform which leverages machine learning to secure and optimize workflows, and expansive Video Solutions Stack.
It is our belief that streaming, especially live streaming, will continue to proliferate in the coming years. And for this reason, every organization in the M&E industry has to be ready for this upswing in streaming if they are not already. More importantly, though, they need to be preparing themselves with the most advanced technology and strategies on the market to address a growing audience and with it an exponentially increasing demand. John Wastcoat, Zixi SVP Alliances and Marketing, identifies inherent agility, universal interoperability and data-driven capabilities that streaming infrastructures need in order to support successful, agile media workflows.
Some of the strategies elaborated on in this article by John and DMW include:
- Agile, Cloud-Based Solutions: “Software-defined and virtualized workflows supply a degree of responsiveness that is impossible to replicate in any other manner. For that reason, we are seeing a growing number of large-scale media enterprises pivot towards end-to-end, cloud-based workflows.”
- Universal interoperability: “The most effective new streaming workflows will be IP-based and portable. It is also being enabled by the increased reliability, adoption and democratization of managed and unmanaged IP networks over and above legacy transport methods.”
- 5G: “5G will drive $1.3 trillion of revenues in the media and entertainment space by 2028 and reshape the media landscape… if companies fail to support it, they risk failure or even extinction.” Extending the existing cloud to 5G / 4G LTE and creating multi-access edge computing (MEC) is critical to successful 5G deployment, as are the other four elements of streaming: content, carrier, cellular and consumer; this is the starting point for broadcasting content at the highest quality of experience (QoE).
- Root Cause Analysis (RCA): Automatically identifying the root causes of process problems – through data – helps lead to optimization based on facts instead of speculation.
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