SVG Sit-Down: AWS’s Evan Statton on the Cloud-Based Future of Live Sports Production

More than 40 AWS partners demonstrated remote technology at the show

As the M&E industry shifts toward a cloud-based future, AWS is the axis on which many next-gen workflows spin. So it wasn’t surprising that the AWS booth at IBC 2022 in Amsterdam last month was packed wall-to-wall with visitors throughout the show.

To showcase the end-to-end capabilities of its cloud ecosystem for M&E, AWS split its IBC booth footprint into five pods: Content Production, Broadcast, Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming, Media Supply Chain & Archive, and Data Analytics. Each pod featured technology demos in conjunction with AWS’s 40+ technology partners on hand at the show.

SVG sat down with Evan Statton, principal architect, M&E, AWS, during the show to discuss the company’s presence at IBC, how the cloud enables remote-production models, the potential for live 4K UHD production in the cloud, how the pandemic accelerated the shift to cloud and microservices, and how he sees the cloud impacting live sports production specifically.

AWS’s Evan Statton: “Technology we haven’t even thought of [will] enable people to work wherever they want, when they want, and how they want.”

In terms of sports, I think our live production demonstration is a highlight because we have just control surfaces here talking to instances in the cloud — no physical [infrastructure] equipment. We are showing demos with both the Viz Vectar [cloud-based switching platform] and the Grass Valley AMPP [Agile Media Processing Platform]. In both cases, we have a switcher panel here at the booth, but the actual switcher itself doing the processing is [offsite]. We’re just pulling back the multiviewer and the user interface, which is coming back via our own NICE DCV (remote-desktop] protocol. The latency is single-digit milliseconds, so, for the technical director, it feels just like you’re in the truck.

We also have an audio-mixing control panel here running on MIDI, and we have partnered with Evertz and SimplyLive for replay here at the show. We have all the primary pieces you would need for a live sports production.

Are your M&E customers transitioning to remote-production models, and what role is the cloud playing in this transition?
There are two main ways that customers are interested in doing remote production. One is essentially having a control room that doesn’t have racks behind it, and it’s just operating via the cloud. The other way is people working from home. Basically, you just take that same concept and break it apart even further. Customers could want either option for different reasons or a combination of both. Some key people might need to sit next to each other, while the graphics [operator] could be at home.

Many people still see limitations for live UHD production workflows in the cloud. How are you seeing these capabilities improve?
The bitrates of uncompressed 12-Gpbs, 4K video are huge; there’s no question about that. Early on, people would say to us that they thought it was impossible, but nobody is saying that anymore because we are doing it.

AWS’s booth at IBC 2022 focused on software for production rather than physical gear.

There are various ways to do it. NDI is one way that people transport video in the cloud in a compressed [format], but the quality is still good. AWS CDI [cloud digital interface] is another way that people are working on it in an uncompressed [format]. And then you have your established SRT streams. We have come a long way in a very short period of time, and I think that will only continue.

How did the pandemic accelerate this move toward the cloud and the SaaS/microservices model?
Before COVID, I don’t think that people would’ve said that Zoom is a good way to make a TV production. But suddenly, out of necessity, people had to get something on the air so they started using Zoom. Zoom is an AWS customer, and they were able to scale up to 300+ million users because everybody needed to join Zoom all of a sudden. They were able to do that only because they were in the cloud. That was a great example of how the cloud can scale to a global audience.

Zoom quickly made its way into news coverage and other live broadcasts largely because it was an easy tool for people to use. I think that’s the key: tools have to be easy to use. We all learned a lot in those early days, and now we’re trying to make the [more advanced] professional tools just as easy to use in the cloud.

In what ways do cloud-based workflows and infrastructure cater specifically to live sports production?
What our customers are asking for is a way to get what they need when they need it but then turn it off when they don’t. That’s especially true for [live sports production]. Live production has always been something that needs to scale up and scale down because an event is for only that fixed period of time. So live production is a very good fit for the cloud model.

We have more than 400 M&E partners in the space, and, as those vendors make their technology more accessible, they’re going to see more adoption. If you need to pick up the phone to call your sales rep every time you need something, that’s a slow and burdensome process. And that’s not a scenario that works in a live-production environment.

People have realized that there is the real possibility to scale up on demand when you need to do it. For example, we’re working with our partners to deploy [their products] in AWS Marketplace to make that technology easily available — not just to the big customers that they’ve always had but also to new customers coming onto the scene. Once that technology is in AWS Marketplace, anybody can buy it, so it’s a new revenue model that the partners are excited about.

We also recently announced that a customer’s spend commitment [with a vendor] can be counted against its Marketplace spend. If one of our partners is in Marketplace, a customer can count their use of that technology in Marketplace toward their spend with that [vendor].

How have you seen the major technology providers in the M&E space embrace the cloud in recent years, and how do you see its affecting their business?
For one thing, the reliance on standards is changing a lot. In the old days, it was important to have a standard for the wireline protocol because you were going have two separate companies build hardware and, if you get there and plug the wire in and it doesn’t work right, you’ve invested in silicon that’s very expensive and difficult to change. So standards were very important.

But now, with software, the customers and vendors and partners in this space are able to innovate even faster than standards bodies can keep up with. You can write code that works just for specific situations. We have customers investing heavily in DevOps groups that can quickly iterate for individual situations.

We are absolutely seeing some of the major [vendors] in this space lean even more into software and the cloud. You can innovate, fix bugs, and add new features much more quickly because it’s not hardware, it’s software. Most important, that is good for customers because the latency between a customer requesting a fix and a [vendor] delivering that fix is getting much shorter.

Where are we in terms of the roadmap to fully virtualized live productions?
Honestly, I think we’re still on the first turn of the first lap. We have a long way to go, but I think that the technology is closer than people thought a couple years ago. We’re doing these PoCs with major organizations like PGA TOUR and ATP Tour right now. When people see these workflows, the reaction that everybody says, “Oh, this is real. I thought we were further away, but this real now.” That has been eye-opening for the industry.

On top of the cost savings this all offers, it also impacts sustainability. If you think about the impact on the environment of driving trucks and flying crew all over the place, something like this helps people reach their sustainability goals. Yeah.

The ability to produce more content is another big reason [people are looking at cloud], [along with] events that wouldn’t have been produced otherwise. There are only so many trucks, so they have to choose a lot of the times which ones they’re going to do.

Also, [there are] new entrants into the space. If you had rights to tier-three and tier-four games, you couldn’t get a Grass Valley switcher to do something like that because those were in trucks and the cost was prohibitive. But, with the cloud, you can spin up that switcher for three hours and then spin it down and still have the quality of a top-tier [broadcast]. That’s going to create new talent in the field as well.

Like I said, it’s still so early, but what I’m most excited about for the future is how the cloud is going to enable people to tell their stories in new ways. Technology that we haven’t even thought of [will] enable people to work wherever they want, when they want, and how they want. We’re certainly at the infancy, but there’s plenty to be excited about.