George Boath,
Director, Channel Management for Enterprise and Lightspeed Products , Telestream
By now, you’ve seen the term “software defined” every-where in our industry. There’s software defined networking, software defined TV, software defined broadcasting, and even software defined storage. It has been associated with just about any technology, sometimes with true significance and sometimes, frankly, it has been hype. It’s a phrase that some say was hastily adopted by industry analysts as a way to talk about something new in tech, but it’s a lot simpler than that. A Software-Defined “anything” should be one in which the function and configuration of the system is not defined or limited by a hardware platform, but instead can be dynamically changed by the nature of the software which is installed on the common IT-class servers. The term is commonly used to define networking systems, storage systems and video processing systems. Perhaps we should now take a broader view and consider that an entire architecture could be “software-defined” and consider what that means for broadcasters and media companies.
In some respects there have been Software Defined products available for several years, but for our industry at least, general computing and networking technology has been (until recently) unable to process live HD video signals (and far less so for UHD) in real-time. So, the concept of a software-defined architecture was limited to non real-time file based workflows.
Telestream Vantage – market leading media transformation capabilities
Telestream’s Vantage media processing platform has, since 2010, enabled standard IT servers to be used for transcoding, file moving, audio processing, standards conversion, quality control… and much more – with the server functions changing dynamically according to user needs. In a conventional architecture there could be a rack full of dedicated single function devices, all essential in their own way, but perhaps needed for only a few hours per day and therefore sitting idly but consuming electricity for most of day. With a software-defined architecture, these functions are performed by software services, which are simply processes called in software running on standard servers. As many of the services are used only sporadically, the number of servers required is usually much fewer than the number of dedicated devices. The rack space and power consumption for a software defined architecture is usually considerably less than for a system of dedicated appliances.
Now, with increased processing power and network bandwidth, we are able to process and distribute live video, including HD and UHD formats, over IP networks in “real time”- by which we mean in the same duration and the same cadence (frame rate) as the live video. Entire systems can now be built using software defined principles, replacing many specialist live hardware appliances with multi-function servers running video processing services.
Any typical broadcast or
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