A creation chain with multiple stakeholders
The media industry is structured around two major units: upstream, the businesses that create the content (recording, directing, producing, etc.), and downstream, the businesses that broadcast it (TV, radio, streaming, VOD platforms, etc.). In these two universes, the methods and tools differ, with each using their own business applications and different networks (satellite, fiber, 5G). This means that IT services monitoring is also fragmented. In the event of an incident, the IT department must identify the root cause among multiple digital and analog systems and streams. No mean feat.
Cross-functional visibility offers multiple benefits. For example, correlating recording equipment logs and reports with broadcast media logs and reports makes the recording experience measurable.
Media's transition to all-digital
To unify upstream and downstream workflows, there is one solution: switching to all-IP. The media industry is turning towards “full SaaS” IP-media chains, where data streams pass through business tools hosted in the cloud. This transformation opens a wide range of opportunities, for example: a TV star can film a television show from home and broadcast it live, or a radio host can use his own computer in the studio.
Remote production is among the future opportunities in the pipeline. Here, content is captured live at a remote location while production is performed at a main studio. Remote production involves the use of several cloud services to communicate with each other. Having an end-to-end overview of the performance of the entire production and broadcasting chain is essential.
Global visibility of all your IT services to improve performance
To meet the demand for ever-greater quality and innovation, media industry professionals are looking for solutions to improve IT performance. As such, a new generation of supervision solutions is taking shape, such as Service Manage - Watch. Compatible with all existing monitoring tools, Service Manage - Watch offers cross-functional supervision for all your IT services. The artificial intelligence layer integrated into the solution helps the IT department to establish correlations between different data sources and learn from each alert in order to resolve the following ones more quickly. This enhanced visibility secures the performance of networks and applications, which gives the IT department a better understanding of the status of its equipment in order to manage the transition to IP in the best conditions.
The rapid progress made by digital technology continues to transform the media industry. In the future, SD-WAN networks will support all-IP cloud usage, and edge computing will improve content distribution by bringing CDNs closer to users, while 5G promises to develop wireless recording and multicast ABR. While content is multicast for IPTV, OTT works on a unicast basis: content should be distributed as many times as the number of people wanting to watch it, multiplying the number of transported streams accordingly. Multicast ABR allows the benefits of multicast to be used in the OTT world via equipment positioned as close to the customer as possible.
These revolutions cannot succeed in the long term without end-to-end supervision for the benefit of all businesses.
A Sales Engineer at Orange Business, I work on the digital transformation of major public and private media networks, both in France and abroad.