Net Insight Nimbra Edge Takes to Cloud; Helps Meet Growing Sports Demand for Open Systems
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Net Insight’s Nimbra Edge has been a trusted product family in the industry for video delivery and now its next-generation version is available, a cloud-based open platform solution that supports all major industry standards, has an API for third-party support, and also does not require existing customers to discard current products.
“The move to the cloud is broadening the market for us as tier one, tier two, and tier three sports find it more cost-effective to use the cloud for sports production,” says Crister Fritzson, Net Insight, CEO. “A couple of weeks ago there was a production of orienteering here in Sweden that would not have been possible a year or two ago because cloud services and software were too expensive.”
The company says Nimbra Edge platform drives maximum benefit from the cloud because it is built on open standards. It supports all major industry re-transmission (ARQ) standards (RIST, SRT, Zixi), enabling service providers to deploy any mix of private, hybrid or public cloud network while also avoiding being locked into any particular vendor. Support for open standards also means that streams can be handled in any format, simplifying operations and making it easy to work with existing equipment investments.
“The user can ingest cameras and streams from anywhere and the Stream Manager has thumbnails for media asset management and things like putting rights and authentication of content,” adds Per Lindgren, Net Insight, CTO Media Networks. “It offers self provisioning anywhere in the world and gives customers flexibility to have hybrid solutions.”
The pandemic is accelerating the transition to cloud-based services with Lindgren mentioning a Swedish play-by-play announcer who was living in Spain and calling Italian football matches.
Adds Fritzson: “The latest version of Nimbra Edge and the integration with our existing platforms mean that our customers can get high-quality results with any blend of public, private or hybrid networks.”
By integrating the high-end Nimbra and Aperi platforms directly with Nimbra Edge, Net Insight offers a complete range of agile and secure media delivery solutions for cloud, IP and virtualized networks. This makes it easy for broadcasters, service providers, production companies and enterprises to create frictionless, high-quality, low-latency live video workflows using the perfect networks for their needs.
“We are starting to see sports events starting to have a second or parallel production for social media and highlights and those productions are moving into the cloud,” says Lindgren. “And tier two and three events want to have higher quality with two or three cameras instead of one. It is the same trend we are seeing in the enterprise market.”
Lindgren says the platform pricing is based on pay-per-stream. Additionally, there is no extra charge for handling higher resolution streams. This means users have complete flexibility to offer any combination of 4K, HD and standard definition content without incurring additional costs.
“It’s not a pay per Gigabyte and the cloud is perfect for occasional use like a two-hour event,” he adds. “And organizations can spin up a private cloud on their own servers.”
Nimbra Edge includes an open API for creating seamless communication with any external service. This gives maximum flexibility to integrate with existing management systems for automatic network control. In addition, built-in authentication makes it easy for rights holders, content owners and service providers to directly publish and monetize live content in the cloud.
It also has enhanced monitoring for performance excellence, according to the company, and transparency lies at the heart of robust and reliable networks; service providers need access to precise information about the services running on their network at all times.
“Cloud production companies can integrate directly into it, like Grass Valley, Simply Live, or Grabyo,” adds Lindgren.
Key to working with those type of cloud-based tools is automatic time-stamping and stream alignment of live inputs from multiple cameras in any location. This makes it simple to keep video perfectly in sync across all destinations, removing any video skipping, lip sync errors and misaligned camera angles without the cost and complexity of using GPS antennas.