Op-Ed: No Longer Pie in the Sky, Cloud-Based Production Finds Its Place Amid Turbulent Change

Cloud tech provides cost-efficiency, flexibility, speed, reliability

The live-sports-viewing experience is in the midst of one of the most disruptive periods in the history of broadcast. The way viewers engage with sports events is rapidly shifting: as consumers have more viewing options, watching the big game on the living-room TV becomes less and less commonplace. With 5 billion YouTube videos watched every day and two-thirds of 18- to 34-year-olds streaming live programming across a range of devices, viewing trends have seen massively acceleration in the COVID-19 crisis and global lockdown. The result is that production and delivery of live content is more complex than ever.

Even prior to the global health crisis, an increasing number of viewers were getting their fix of their favorite team or athlete across different platforms. More than a fifth of sports fans around the world now look for sports content on social media, an increase of 45% over the past three years, according to GlobalWebIndex. Since COVID and lockdown, these trends have only picked up the pace. Esports-streaming giant Twitch, for example, saw a record-breaking 83% year-on-year jump in viewing

Robert Szabo-Rowe

during the second quarter, according to StreamLabs and Stream Hatchet.

Meanwhile, broadcasters, content producers, and other rightsholders are seeking the most cost-effective ways to produce more shoulder programming and coverage of small and niche events than ever. They must do this while maintaining the agility to produce and deliver more-mainstream sports coverage, giving fans access to the specific games and players they want to see. With a long-term need to provide a growing array of sports content across social and over-the-top (OTT) platforms, as well as traditional linear TV, the ability to deliver a high-quality production quickly, efficiently, flexibly, and economically is a top industry priority. The cloud is emerging as a crucial way to achieve these aims.

Meeting the Changing Needs of Live Sports Production

Innovative organizations are looking for fresh new approaches and technologies that enable them to produce and deliver more live event programming than ever, without stretching themselves too far. This is where cloud-based production comes into its own.

Cloud TV-production tools have been enabling workflow processes to be implemented via a hosted platform. Now comprehensive ‘Production-as-a-Service’ offerings deliver an end-to-end workflow through flexible, on-demand models, which can include remote IP video contribution, production, clipping tools, and distribution. This type of approach allows all aspects of the production workflow — from editing and graphics creation to comms and talkback — to be handled inside the cloud. Distribution via OTT services or private fiber networks ensures that live streams can reach viewers globally on their platform of choice.

Among the benefits of cloud-based production, resourcing is often the biggest — though by no means the only — factor to consider. The primary goal for many organizations is cost-reduction, and a cloud approach has clear advantages in this area. However, it adds value in other ways, too.

Perhaps the most powerful benefit of cloud-based production beyond cost-effectiveness is flexibility. With a cloud methodology in place, content producers can adapt quickly to manage any circumstance, regardless of the location of the event, staff, distribution method, and target content.

In a world where IP-based networks dominate distribution of new content, cloud-based technology, with its software-defined architecture, makes it easy to adapt an altered workflow without physically having to change hardware. When many leagues resumed play amid COVID-19 social-distancing concerns, remote-production teams using cloud-based tools were able to work from home with just a browser. Across a range of use cases, where each production needs to do things slightly differently, having video, IP networks, and cloud-based production tools accessible via the same platform provides a powerful combination.

Efficiency and speed are other key elements of cloud-based production that hold huge appeal for many sports-content producers. By being more flexible, a cloud platform can help optimize efficiency often just by simplifying the logistics, travel, and resourcing around the production of sports and other events. Live-event producers would otherwise find themselves juggling these elements when the production components are more fixed.

Fans increasingly view sports events on platforms other than linear TV.

Speed is also crucial to capitalizing on the immediacy of a sports event and represents a huge difference in value for subscribers and advertisers alike, especially when it comes to social platforms. The cloud-based method is well-suited for social media because of the sheer speed of delivery. With every few seconds of delay, rightsholders risk losing viewership to rivals and pirated content sources. The time between many live sports-coverage feeds coming into the cloud and a highlights package being made available on video-enabled social platforms is usually measured in minutes; the cloud radically affects the speed to market.

Reliability underpins everything in the telecast, and live-streaming content and a typical cloud production environment can run transparently, securely, and independently of the main broadcast feed from a major event. Even in a scenario where the cloud workflow is the primary production and distribution method, the design is based on a highly virtualized and microservices-based architecture to avoid a single point of failure.

As a further backstop, cloud production can be architected to offer a pass-through “clean feed” that can go straight through from contribution to encoding, then to CDN distribution – almost like an override switch – to ensure that there is never a “black screen” situation. As we move into a more content-rich future, cloud-based TV production gives broadcasters, rightsholders, and other live-content producers more assured and dependable options than ever.

Tapping the Full Potential of Cloud-Based Production

Cloud-based production has emerged as a technology and service combination that is right for the market conditions we currently face and the trends driving the sports-viewing market. And its role will only expand. It addresses a pressing need for live-TV and social-content creation with an approach that makes financial sense, ensures efficiency, offers unparalleled agility, and provides speed to market — while enabling broadcasters, streaming services, and social platforms to meet consumers’ demand for the content they want when they want it.

Top-tier sports broadcasters, production companies, teams, and associations are already testing the waters and realizing the benefits of cloud-based production. For potential users with limited resources looking to grow their content quickly and efficiently, such as esports and lower-level sports leagues, the cost-benefit analysis makes a compelling case. It points to cloud-based production as a fundamental tool for much of what they do.

Further down the line, as major sports leagues and organizations worldwide look to broaden the content they offer their fanbases and as rightsholders aim to make the most of their investment, cloud production offers a way to bring more games to more people across more platforms, without the content producers’ overextending themselves.

Moreover, looking to a future in which social-media–based content delivery starts to offer sports potential revenue on par with that of traditional TV and pay-TV business models, what began as a sideline is likely to evolve swiftly into a profit center. Cloud-centric models are likely to offer additional technologies — ad insertion, viewer interactivity, AI-based automation — as optional layers.

Ultimately, like many internet-inspired innovations, cloud production is easy to deploy and provides a technical architecture that works alongside existing broadcast workflows without adding any inherent risk or compromise to well-established processes. As remote production emerges as the de facto approach for many sports and events, cloud-based services provide a professional-quality TV-production offering that is set to play an integral role in the industry’s transition.