With increased competition and evolving audience preferences, broadcasters are under a great deal of pressure to rethink their trusted hardware-based architectures. Failure to act risks being left behind, and this really isn’t an option in an industry that’s evolving at a rate not seen since it started. There’s a real need to be able to scale, adapt and innovate, while also reducing operational complexity. This is incentivising broadcasters to modernise their legacy systems and adopt cloud technology and new ways of working.
Although it’s true that many, if not most broadcasters have now moved some workflows to the cloud and so are operating a hybrid cloud/on-prem approach, far fewer have completed a full end-to-end migration from fully on-prem infrastructure to a full-cloud architecture.
With that in mind, what does it take to make that leap? What kind of engineering, operational, and strategic considerations do broadcasters need to factor in?
Before beginning any kind of migration to the cloud, whether just for a single workflow or for full migration, there’s a need first to assess existing hardware-based architectures to determine dependencies and cloud ready components. Well established broadcasters are often operating interconnected systems that have been constructed over time, and while these systems are understood well internally, their operational nuances are not always well documented nor easy to translate into a cloud environment.
Another challenge comes because migrating to the cloud isn’t just a case of lifting and shifting workflows to this new environment. It’s widely accepted that replicating legacy setups in a cloud environment will not deliver the benefits that the cloud can offer. Instead, there’s a need to redesign and optimise workflows for the cloud. Some elements will map cleanly to cloud-based equivalents, while others need to be rethought entirely. Cloud-native equivalents for workflows such as playout, ingest, processing, QC, and delivery need to be designed and every component in the cloud environment needs to support the broadcaster’s requirements in terms of reliability, redundancy and latency performance.
Migrating fully to the cloud is a complex undertaking that requires a significant level of operational change. Given that a typical broadcaster is operating well established workflows built around on-prem hardware that have been refined over time, it’s easy to see why there remains a reluctance to fully embrace the cloud. On-prem hardware systems are well understood in terms of performance, cost, reliability and risks, whereas for most broadcasters, there’s still a lot of unknowns when it comes to the practicalities of operating cloud-based infrastructure.
When adopting cloud technology, operational focus moves from managing physical equipment to orchestration, observability and automation, and it is this shift that enables operations to scale more easily. Alongside this change, capacity, resilience, redundancy, cost management and security must also be handled differently than they are in traditional on-prem set up.
Aside from the day-to-day operational changes that running operations in the cloud inevitably brings about, there’s also likely to be some resistance to change within the organisation. It’s critical therefore to have the entire organisation’s buy-in, including operational teams. Building confidence in cloud-based infrastructure can take time and broadcasters need to manage operational and cultural change carefully.
Determining which workflows or assets to move to the cloud first, and when to move them will depend on a range of factors including the nature of the operation, its size and complexity. Smaller, less complex operations will obviously be easier to move to the cloud than larger, multi-channel operations. The age and efficacy of existing hardware is another consideration; given the high costs and lengthy lifecycles of broadcast hardware, it may not make sense to move from physical equipment to cloud based solutions until hardware is reaching the end of its life.
Growth is another consideration to factor in when considering when and how to migrate to the cloud. On-prem infrastructure can be a major barrier to growth because it does not allow broadcasters to easily scale to new regions or platforms to expand reach. Cost is of course another consideration, though it is not always straightforward. While cloud reduces the need for physical infrastructure and maintenance, it introduces a different cost structure that depends on usage, scaling, and architectural choices. Without careful planning, inefficiencies can appear in unexpected places. With the right approach, there is an opportunity to align cost more closely with actual demand.
As a cloud native company, Veset works with broadcasters at all stages of their migration to the cloud, whether migrating a playout workflow in isolation or a full migration. One such example is Telekom Malaysia (TM), one of the largest telecommunications providers in Malaysia, which operates a complex multichannel operation. TM partnered with Veset as part of its organisation wide migration to fully cloud-native operations, which resulted in the successful migration of ten of its regional TV channels to the cloud with Veset Nimbus.
It’s useful to examine case studies such as this to see what we can learn from broadcasters who have completed a full migration to the cloud. Veset will be doing exactly this at NAB where it will use TM as an illustrative use case to examine the engineering, operational, and strategic considerations behind a complete cloud migration across playout, contribution, distribution, and monitoring workflows.
TM’s journey demonstrates how a national operator can modernise legacy systems, reduce operational complexity, and open the door to new service models, while maintaining broadcast-grade resilience and regulatory compliance.
Veset will be presenting the discussion: Engineering the Shift: How Broadcasters Can Move from 100% Hardware to 100% Cloud, as part of the Broadcasting Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference on Sunday 19th April at 11:40am, location N256.
