SVG Tech Insight: A Digital Ecosystem Approach to Support a New Era of Broadcasting

This fall, SVG will be presenting a series of White Papers covering the latest advancements and trends in sports-production technology. The full series of SVG’s Tech Insight White Papers can be found in the SVG Fall SportsTech Journal HERE.

Introduction

The media and entertainment (M&E) industry is undergoing fundamental transformation. Change is occurring across key M&E segments including movie production, gaming, streaming media, and broadcasting. This evolution encompasses the emergence and growth of new digital services, consumer behaviors, and monetization models. As legacy models move to obsolescence, M&E ecosystem participants must embrace change and prepare for the future.

Part of embracing change is carefully evaluating how M&E transformation drives the need for digital infrastructure to support the new demands on the industry. In addition, a prerequisite to participating in this transformed industry is having access to platforms and connectivity that enable applications to streamline the delivery of new digital services everywhere content consumers are located. This platform and connectivity access is a fundamental resource in delivering new customer/consumer experiences.

A New Era of Broadcasting

For the purposes of this paper, broadcasting is broadly defined to include TV, movie, and other video content distributed over the air (OTA), via traditional pay TV services (pay TV), and on the internet (OTT). Within the context of M&E transformation, broadcasting has moved into a new era. This era is characterized by rapid service evolution in which legacy models give way to new forms of distribution and monetization. Key facets of this evolution include:

• Erosion of legacy distribution. Cord-cutting, in which consumers cancel pay TV in favor of OTT options, is real and accelerating. In the United States, cord-cutting has already reduced the pay TV subscriber base by nearly a third over the past seven years. The disruptions caused by cord-cutting are vast as media companies require new content distribution strategies and pay TV providers transform service and bundle offerings. Rapidly changing consumer expectations and emerging digital services require the media and entertainment industry to embrace new digital strategies to survive.
• Live TV moves to OTT. One driver of cord-cutting is the growth of live TV distribution over OTT platforms. Some services seek to replicate the offerings of traditional pay TV and give consumers increased choice and improved user experiences. These services, often dubbed vMVPDs, or virtual multichannel video programming distributors, demand scalable and reliable digital infrastructure that support both live and on-demand streaming.
• Direct to consumer (DTC) emerges as a critical strategic priority. As legacy distribution declines, media companies are becoming dependent on and increasingly investing in DTC services. DTC requires that media companies take responsibility for content distribution technology decisions rather than rely on legacy pay TV or OTA strategies.
• Global expansion. The distribution of content to a global audience is not a new requirement or business priority. However, with the growth of DTC, global distribution is less about inking deals with pay TV providers around the world and more about making sure technology partners and DTC digital infrastructure have global reach.
• Hybrid business models. The diversification of business models used to be tied to distinct distribution platforms. Today, that diversification must exist within services that increasingly offer paid, ad-supported, and free content tiers. Paid models include subscription and transactional video on demand.
• New content aggregation models and creator ecosystems. The erosion of video aggregation through traditional pay TV providers creates opportunities for new aggregation models that combine OTT services within a common user interface and subscription management platform, distribute content from third-party creators, and offer bundles of individual services

User Experiences

These facets of market evolution dovetail with the transformation of user experiences. Any serious contender for market share across the competitive video services ecosystem must deliver a minimum quality of service, which requires the support of technology partners that possess digital infrastructure. Other elements of user experiences, however, are forward looking and blend optimized experiences today with pathways to future differentiation, service enhancement, and monetization opportunities. Following are examples of how the market evolution and new user experiences increase demands on digital infrastructure:

• Scalability and reliability. Quality of service remains critical. As M&E strategic priorities shift and new services emerge, best-effort video delivery is insufficient to meet consumer and competitive demands. The elements of scalability and reliability are of increasing importance as subscriber bases and audiences grow, consumers demand higher-quality video, and real-time advanced services evolve.
• Device reach. OTT service evolution is inherently multiplatform as consumption takes places on mobile and nonmobile devices. Reaching each viewing environment requires support for a diverse ecosystem of consumption devices. For services to be successful, supporting technology solutions must enable seamless consumption across all the major platforms and devices in and out of the home.
• Video quality. In today’s competitive environment for video services, high-definition content is already giving way to 4K Ultra HD. Over time, higher-quality video such as 8K will be the norm. Standard functions such as adaptive bit rate encoding, which ensure a graceful degradation of quality to prevent a stream from being interrupted, will now blend with increasingly higher bit rate files to drive increased demands on digital infrastructure.
• Data-driven personalization. User experiences have long focused on content discovery, user profiles, and personalization. Data-driven optimizations of these experiences, along with personalized marketing and advertising, will leverage solutions powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) while being dependent on network performance.
• Advanced experiences. As services evolve to be inclusive of augmented and virtual reality, elements of gamification, and betting, new demands will be placed on networks that need to support real-time and bandwidth-intensive experiences. Similar demands will be placed on digital infrastructure as content creation workflows move to cloud and virtual environments

Importance of Access to (and Participation In) a Digital Platform

Creating and delivering content on a broad range of devices, in any format, anywhere in the world puts exponentially greater demands on the compute, storage, and connectivity infrastructure supporting this activity. Media and broadcast industry providers are facing competitive pressure to deliver innovative and seamless customer experiences. Creating these next-level experiences requires access to modernized digital infrastructure and a digital platform that enables rapid, cost-effective connection to content consumers. A global platform will be a requirement for many organizations as they seek to deliver new digital media experiences everywhere. The innovations underway are escalating the need for edge compute resources to gather, analyze, and store data across myriad of edge compute locations.

Need for Edge Resources

Modernized edge resources underpin the rapidly increasing data volumes required to support multichannel, on-demand content access. Two years after the emergence of the global pandemic, the M&E industry is still building on the vast growth of video traffic seen in 2020. During that period, the total volume of video delivered in the United States increased more than 60%.

The demands on the digital infrastructure will continue to expand. Digital infrastructure is often required in close physical proximity to where data is being generated and consumed, making edge resources necessary. In addition to aggregating and protecting data and content, modernized digital infrastructure, often in edge locations, is required to support the new ways customers interact with and access content. These edge resources often need a high degree of programmability and the ability to support advanced workloads and process data in remote locations. AI technologies will increasingly be adopted to improve content quality and identify potential connectivity anomalies that could result in service interruption. These capabilities often require highly scalable and open resources that can leverage data that resides in cloud service provider environments.

Critical Roles of the Digital Platform and Ecosystem

Supporting the new demands of the broadcast industry is a heavy lift for organizations that plan to build their own resources to create and deliver new customer experiences. Beyond the increase in compute horsepower, the connectivity resources needed to rapidly extend the delivery of content in a cost-effective manner is a challenge for all. The broadcast industry is rapidly adopting a new approach to tackle the demands for personalization. These demands require access to a network that can support these highly personalized experiences. However, content and digital media creators are not operating with unlimited budgets.

Content and digital media creators need access to infrastructure and a platform to store, secure, and transport digital media. As the data volumes expand to support an extensive array of delivery formats, the industry needs a fast, cost-effective means to connect content with consumers. Programmable, opensource, software-defined resources are emerging as a viable way to enable content and digital media creators to meet the demands of the M&E industry transformation.

Critical qualities of the infrastructure and platforms needed to support M&E transformation include the following:

• Support for hybrid, multicloud architectures
• Low-latency transmission of data
• Cost-efficient means of transmitting data
• Cloud-adjacent innovation
• Ability to access ecosystems and extend anywhere people are and data resides

The most frequently cited challenges as organizations seek to innovate and shift to a digital-first strategy are integrating legacy infrastructure with new infrastructure and provisioning secure and resilient resources everywhere data and workloads reside. As organizations explore their options, providers that help bridge the gap between legacy and modernized environments will positively impact transformation outcomes.