NAB Show Perspectives: Software is the solution to the technology problem

More and more outlets are fighting for viewers. More and more creators are producing content, much of it engaging and attractive. But audiences are not growing: Pretty much everyone who can watch video has one pair of eyes and one span of time.

Because creators, broadcasters and distributors are fighting for this very finite resource — audience attention — they have to be clear about where they invest their time and money. In short, their budget needs to go on the screen, and the hardware they need must be agile and affordable. They cannot throw money at any problem: they need their technology stack to be able to deliver what they need, without fuss and without risk.

The old days of dedicated hardware for media have long gone, thank goodness. That really was limiting: you built a system to do what you thought you needed, then you were stuck with it until the capital had been amortized, after maybe seven or 10 years.

Today we assume that our media management and creation technology is largely going to be software-defined. In an ideal world, that software will run on standard hardware: a PC or a Mac.

Some see the cloud as a solution: shifting the problem of processing and storage to a specialist. There are applications where this is appropriate, particularly where the need is “peaky”: where some of the time not a lot happens; at others you need a lot of processing power. That is a classic cloud application.

But the problem with the cloud — at least as provided by the well-known names — is that its business model does not align with the media industry. When your typical customer is dealing with files measured in kilobytes, like a bank or an airline, then egress charges are a reasonable way to cover costs and make money. When the files are in gigabytes or even terabytes, those egress charges are suddenly huge.

Alongside that, many media folk still cling to the belief that their workflows and their content are best protected under their noses. They feel comfort in keeping everything in house, and that is a reasonable argument. Even where content may have been virtualized offsite, many media operations are hybrid or have explored going back on prem. Trust is good but control is better.

So we have the situation that sees small and medium businesses building systems out of COTS hardware, and even large media enterprises constructing on-premises data centers for their operations. If we need to scale, the theory goes, we buy some more computers.

Advertisement

We face a new reality. Hardware — the right sort of hardware — is expensive and can be hard to source. GPUs are in very short supply. Long delivery cycles and rapidly rising costs make simple upgrades a challenge and could completely block large-scale transformations. Unpredicated cost increases are a risk to the supply chain, and makes it hard to plan. Organizations may not be able to afford or want to pay for something that ultimately will be obsolete in a couple of years.

Oh, and people want to talk about AI, which if nothing else is very, very processor heavy.

If we cannot get bigger through buying more hardware, how do we respond to challenges? The answer is to ensure that the software we run on the hardware we have is as efficient, powerful and flexible as we need it to be.

The Cinegy approach is towards software-defined workflows that run efficiently on the hardware you have. Use better software to achieve the gains, rather than pitching for capital investment and waiting for hardware availability.

For more than 20 years, Cinegy has been developing media software that is designed to be inherently flexible. You simply assemble the modules you need to achieve the needed results. The software architecture means it automatically balances its requirements: workloads are distributed across all available resources, so you can scale performance without replacing hardware.

Processing is optimized to make the most of both CPU and GPU resources, reducing reliance on high-end and scarce components. The virtualized software is also ready for the cloud, allowing you to use it to best advantage when peaks demand it.

The software is also cloud-like in the way it deals with servers. Video servers and archives have always been a part of the Cinegy environment, and they use object-based storage — the same architecture as big cloud infrastructure like AWS S3. That delivers performance benefits in-house and allows you to use cloud storage and archiving as best serves your business, without compromise.

This approach, of course, depends upon a software developer that is dedicated to continuous improvement in media applications. One that continues to evolve the software for maximum performance, even while adding the functionality that new use cases demand.

At the same time, by being completely modular, it never gets bogged down in functionality you do not need at the moment. Of course Cinegy supports 4k — and even 8k — and HDR, but if you want to make or distribute HD video, then the resolutions you don’t need are not adding unnecessary load to your systems.

This is not to say you will never buy hardware again. Of course there will be times when you need more capacity to support your successful business. But you will do so knowing that you are getting the best out of your current hardware, and with the understanding that the next investment, when it comes, will deliver the benefits you expect.

For reasons completely outside of our industry, just at the moment, hardware is a constraint. It is simple good sense to make software your strategy.

Advertisement

Daniella Weigner, CinegyDaniella Weigner is co-founder and managing director of Cinegy.