As broadcasters, production companies, news gatherers, major corporates, and educational facilities increasingly turn their attention to new media technologies, the practical and economic benefits of these innovations become more apparent. Software-defined architectures are enabling remote and federated production, opening up transformative possibilities for the industry.
At the heart of this shift lies scalability. Take, for instance, a corporate media operation with facilities in London, New York, Singapore, and beyond. Rather than duplicating every tool and resource in each location, the smarter approach is to work with a core set of tools and bring in additional functionality remotely from another site when needed.
The same principle applies to global news operations. Equipping every bureau with every possible tool is neither practical nor cost-effective. Instead, well-equipped hubs are built, with smaller newsrooms connecting to them as required, using centralised technology only when necessary.
In each case, shared technology infrastructures increase equipment utilisation and make investments more secure. You can justify purchasing the best tools if they’re in constant use, and when certain functionalities aren’t available across the network, software tools can be easily spun up in the cloud as needed.
While this is a compelling theory, the reality is more complex.
Most media operations aren’t starting from scratch. Many have an existing investment in technology, and financial prudence often discourages replacing perfectly good equipment that still delivers the necessary quality and functionality.
This means there’s a real need for seamless integration between legacy hardware, early software applications, and newer networked, federated virtual machines. Without this linking layer, achieving seamless, efficient operations for teams focused on content creation becomes a challenge.
The good news is that leading vendors are developing environments where multi-vendor legacy equipment can be integrated with software tools to create a cohesive workspace. Typically delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), these solutions allow you to build a scalable environment tailored to your needs, paying only for the resources you require and enabling quick scaling when necessary. At CJP, we have extensive experience with the leading platforms and can offer expert advice on the best implementation strategies.
However, there’s another layer of complexity when moving toward federated, elastic production technology – reliance on the public cloud for command and control, as well as for content processing and storage.
The challenge here is that major cloud providers didn’t design their infrastructures (or their pricing models) with media applications in mind. Their focus was on mainstream IT applications, typically involving small files and simple processing. But in the media industry, we deal with sizeable files.
The result is that while the cloud offers tremendous potential, it can also be expensive. To successfully develop a distributed media network, you need a technology partner who understands both the economics and the workflows. This partner must help build the business case for balancing on-premises server networks with cloud elasticity, developing infrastructure that allows basic command and control functions to be affordably cloud-hosted while ensuring most signal processing occurs on owned equipment.
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Each organisation must consider a variety of factors: productivity, media access, security, content protection, disaster recovery, and the priority of urgent needs. Our role is to provide the expertise necessary to design and implement systems that align with your creative, technical, and commercial objectives.
Ready to make the move to distributed production?
CJP Broadcast can here to support you every step of the way, from system design to seamless integration. Get in touch with us to explore how we can help you streamline your workflows, maximise your technology investments, and future-proof your production capabilities.
