The investment in a compliance solution is mandatory. But what if your compliance solution can do much more: allow also to re-purpose your content in a cost-effective way, do TS analysis, analyze your rating, as a few examples.

The consumer content consumption is constantly changing. The viewers choose what to watch, when to watch, and from what platform. The new TV landscape is forcing networks, and traditional media companies, to keep up with changing viewer habits by embracing OTT and social media content delivery. Content owners are facing the challenge of publishing the content to the new media platforms as fast as possible, cost effectively, without overloading their existing workflow, from any location and when possible, automatically. This is essential in order to retain the viewers engagement. 

Compliance solution and much more

Content

1. Broadcast compliance solution and quality of service
2. Your compliance solution to be used for content re-purposing
3. Virtual Machine, Physical server or Cloud

 

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Broadcast compliance solution and quality of service

The broadcast content is no longer aired only on TV but also on additional new media platforms.

In parallel, the regulatory content requirements are increasing. All must be under the umbrella of quality service to the viewers. For this purpose, Actus View was designed. It records any number of audio and video streams, and from the HTML5 based application allows to monitor the live or archived content. It provides all the functions to comply with the regulatory such as loudness, closed caption, teletext, DVB subtitles, multiple audio tracks SCTE. It integrates with EPG or As run log, and allows to search on it.

All the input types (TS/IP, SDI, ASI, DVB, ATSC, etc) and formats are supported. A real time alerts option on audio and video issues is a part of the compliance solution, to guarantee good quality of service for the viewer. By giving a real time alert on audio and video issues, the broadcaster has the chance to fix the problem in the incoming feed in real time. A TS analyzer can also be a part of the compliance solution, eliminating the need to purchase another product that will not be integrated to the recording platform.

The Actus View can be installed on premise, on Virtual machines or on the Cloud.

Your compliance solution to be used for content re-purposing

The same “box” that is mandatory for compliance reasons, can also be used for content re-purposing. You invest in the hardware one time and use it for multiple purposes with the benefits of an integrated solutions. Actus Clip Factory can be installed on the same machine.

Clip Factory is an “all-in-one” workflow for content production and publishing: it provides tools to record, create and edit clips, add effects and metadata, transcoding to any format and finally distribute the content to web portals, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or OTT. The workflow is simple to use, fast, does not require professional editing skills and can be operated from any client’s machine. It is replacing overloaded, old legacy and high cost solutions for content re-purposing to the new media platforms.

Clip Factory incorporates video recording, editing, transcoding and delivery into a single streamlined solution.

Virtual Machine, Physical server or Cloud

Broadcasters use more and more VM over physical servers. Although the Actus media platform supports VM, in some cases VMs, in such applications, do not benefit from its advantages.

Physical servers are what we have been using for broadcast monitoring and compliance since years. These are like over-sized PCs, designed for heavy-duty operation, with a large number of hard disks, power supplies, CPUs and RAM. They also operate under a “Server” O/S which is more robust than the consumer grade system.

Virtual machines exist when a pool of computer resources are divided among a number of systems (operating systems, or specialized software) that “act” as if each of them was a complete computer server. Each acting system is a VM, and one may also use the term “Hypervisor”. This means that any software running on that VM “thinks” that it is running on a full server, when in fact the resources are coming from various computer assets that are put together.

Advantages of Virtual Machine

This brings us to the first real advantage of VM. One physical server can in theory host dozens of hypervisors/VM, and each of these VMs will run a different application, thus replacing the need for dozens of separate, dedicated, and underutilized PCs. Such a system will work perfectly on the condition that not all users/applications require the full resources at the same time.

Another obvious advantage of VM is the easier management. In case of failure or even re-configuration, rebuilding a physical (hardware) server is a difficult task. Re-configuring a VM is a simple software configuration.

Finally, the scalability of VM is a breeze. In our context, adding one additional TV channels encoder and a recorder, can practically be done without any physical intervention (no need to add disk, memory, CPU..) and all by configuration.

To summarize, the 3 main advantages of VM are:

	Virtual Machine	Physical Server
CAPEX Investment	Low. One server can serve dozens of users	High. Each user requires a physical machine.
System Management	Easy. One dashboard manages everything.	Medium. Each physical server is managed.
Scalability and Flexibility	High. Can add and modify services at ease.	Medium. Each physical server must be configured.

With all these advantages, there is bound to be some disadvantages too.

Disadvantages of Virtual Machine

A VM would always be less powerful than a comparable physical machine. If we install a VM on a server that has say 10 cores and 48GB RAM, and use it in full capacity (mining for Bitcoins for example…) then we notice that it would deliver around 10% less (and sometimes up to 20%) CPU power than the number of cores physically available. The difference is explained by the layer of overhead that is constantly allocating virtual resources to the applications.

Another cost is the price of the VM system itself. VM software licenses are sold at high prices, several thousands US$ per server license. The high price is perhaps justified when the VM is used by dozens of users and saving much hardware, but it is a net burden when the VM and the Physical machine are both used at full capacity.

So the VM disadvantages are:

	Virtual Machine	Physical Server
CPU Power	low. We noticed 10% to 20% loss compared to physical.	Good. We can run at CPU almost full capacity for months.
O/S cost	More expensive. Can reach US$ 5,000 and more.	Medium. A Windows Server O/S costs around US$ 1,000 per server.

VM and physical servers have different advantages and disadvantages.

Based on these, we can recommend VMs for applications that are:

• Running a large number of services, or users
• Each service is variable in terms of CPU requirements (sometimes high, often low)
• There are many changes, new applications are added, sizing is often modified.
• For example, Web servers, serving thousands of users, are very appropriate for VMs.

It is probable that in the near future, for the majority of all server applications, the VM will be a better choice.

On the other hand, physical servers give benefits when:

• The number of services is constant
• Each of the services requires constant resources.
• It is possible to size a server to use close to 100% of its capacity, constantly.
• Very few changes over time.

In the context of Media encoding servers, where we have customers encoding video from a number of specific TV channels, the amount of CPU used is constant, as are the number of channels, as well as the retention period and the video quality. This means that it is possible to size the servers at almost full capacity. In this context, a physical server is a better choice.

 A physical server will deliver 10% to 20% more than VM and will cost 10% to 20% less.