Video Networks, Synamedia
OTT and traditional TV service providers are discovering they can count on the cloud as a far more cost-effective and versatile space for executing streaming strategies than has been the case so far.
Mounting evidence supporting this proposition is being generated by a breakthrough in cloud resource utilization introduced by video technology vendor Synamedia in the wake of its 2022 acquisition of startup Quortex. By incorporating and continuing development of the Quortex technology as an integral component of B2C and B2B streaming and other solutions offered in software-as-a-service (SaaS) mode, Synamedia has made it possible for service providers to limit their spending on cloud resources to highly granular increments of real usage that ebb and flow across live and on-demand channels.
Quortex-based solutions are designed to achieve maximum optimization in the use of cloud resources, explains Quortex co-founder Jérôme Viéron, who is now senior director for R&D streaming engineering at Synamedia. In a blog posted earlier this year, he says, “With our Quortex SaaS solutions, video service providers can build video streams on-the-fly, cutting cloud costs, and efficiently deliver live video streams to partners globally in one click.”
Or, as Synamedia’s executive vice president and general manager of video networks Julien Signes puts it in an interview with UltraMedia Pipeline, “We can guarantee that we’re only going to process what’s watched as opposed to processing everything 24/7 just in case somebody wants to watch it.”
By tapping dispersed cloud compute resources as needed to encode and package content with the ability to switch to other available resources during any streaming session, Synamedia’s Quortex platform allows customers to avoid not only the higher costs associated with cloud resources that need to be dedicated for the entire duration of streaming sessions but also the costs of provisioning backup resources. All the transcoding and packaging is done on the fly across whatever instances of cloud resources are engaged to support any streaming session involving live content or content from core storage.
The OpEx vs. CapEx Conundrum
This new perspective on cloud utilization comes amid growing industry pushback against the notion that cloud virtualization alone, even with the virtualized container and Kubernetes-enhanced approaches to usage versatility, leads to significant cost savings over traditional premises-based approaches to video processing. “Our customers are clear that they are hyper focused on ROI, and every decision they take is through that lens,” Signes says. Typically, when they look at using the cloud they see that taking “whatever you had on prem and putting it in the cloud just drives your costs up,” he adds.
It's a confusing situation, given that, as previously reported, the allure of cloud speed and flexibility, especially in live sports streaming, is drawing ever more entities to the cloud. The appeal has grown with the emergence of a new generation of compelling vendor solutions that rely on cloud technology. But, as Signes notes, there’s also a trend going in the opposite direction where OTT providers who rely on cloud-based streaming platforms have decided “to move back out of the cloud. And the primary reason for that is the cost explosion.”
This stems from the fact that, even with the availability of virtualization, the tendency has been to take a fixed infrastructure approach to allocating data resources whether in the service provider’s private domain or the public cloud. “When you put that infrastructure in the cloud, it’s going to cost you even more,” Signes says.
As revealed in a global study of OTT technology procurement practices conducted by Caretta Research, 76% of streaming service providers are customizing applications in house, often with vendor support in the use of open-source solutions. The study found that cost is the primary driver in this market-wide shift away from turnkey solutions, followed by a desire to avoid vendor lock-in.
But this leads to a conundrum that was highlighted in Streaming Media’s fall 2023 State of Streaming survey report, which found that “CapEx and OpEx continue to dominate the challenges faced by respondents’ organizations.” Notably, the report attributed a rise in CapEx concerns to “the creation of private clouds as a way of offsetting the rising cost of public-cloud delivery solutions.”
In other words, there’s a vicious-circle aspect to incurring higher CapEx to offset OpEx given that doing so reverses the decision to trade CapEx for OpEx that moved companies to the cloud in the first place. Leveraging the cloud to its true potential would appear to be a better way to go, even if the shift to the cloud is incremental, provided a way can be found around the OpEx issue.
The Revamped Synamedia Solutions Portfolio
Recognizing that’s the case, Synamedia has leveraged the Quortex just-in-time engine to profoundly impact evolution of the company’s product suite. This has bent the cost/benefit equation strongly in favor of cloud usage for those who want to make the transition in whole or in part from reliance on premises-based equipment.
“There’s definitely a lot of know-how and patented technology behind the Quortex just-in-time engine that we’ve continued to expand and develop,” says Signes, who joined Synamedia nearly six years ago with its acquisition of Envivio, the pioneering software-based encoding company he founded. “We can actually claim in many aspects that your total cost of ownership of migrating your infrastructure to the cloud is now significantly lower.”
This applies to a broad range of capabilities which, together, allow video streamers to offer new viewing experiences quickly at scale with superior quality at lower bitrates, Signes adds. Via Synamedia’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) portal customers can exploit Quortex-enhanced cloud usage through self-managed execution of D2C streaming, B2B video distribution, multi-CDN operations, and applications like cloud DVR, time-shift TV, and dynamic ad insertions. Or they can do the same things by leveraging Synamedia’s professional services.
One of the major advances stemming from Synamedia acquisition of Quortex has been the development of a virtualized version of the company’s flagship Digital Content Manager (DCM), which has been a mainstay in MVPD headends since the early days of digital TV. By supporting DCM-caliber performance of functions like bulk encryption, transcoding, ad insertion and much else in the cloud, VDCM is inducing ever more of Synamedia’s traditional TV customers to move away from reliance on premises-based hardware, Signes says.
Quortex cloud technology is also intrinsic to Synamedia’s latest advancement in compression technology. The new Quortex Play AI compression framework incorporates AI and machine learning to support a codec-agnostic approach to content-aware encoding that reduces bitrates by up to 30% while affording customers the flexibility to optimize compression to accommodate nuances like the variations in motion complexity that occur with different types of sports.
Automatic tuning of compression to meet quality objectives is enabled by another Synamedia innovation known as predicted Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion. Ideally suited for live content compression scenarios, pVMAF achieves VMAF-like precision while minimizing the computational overhead by performing analysis that leverages pre-analysis statistics and key encoding parameters within the encoding loop.
One of Synamedia’s most dramatic applications of its advanced cloud technology was unveiled at IBC with introduction of the Senza platform as a way to enable access to services from any connected device without the need for specialized device hardware such as set-top boxes, streaming modules, smart TVs or IoT gateways. “You're not locked into an OS ecosystem like you are with the new wave of set-top boxes,” Signes says in reference to Android and Apple TV. “You can actually deploy any application that’s cloud rendered, which gives you both scale and complete independence from maintaining devices.”
Synamedia says the write-once, run-anywhere Senza platform can cut service providers’ costs of onboarding subscribers by as much as 90%. With use of a $6 Senza Cloud Connector, they can turn any TV screen into a high-performance display device, whether in the home, hotel rooms or a sport bar. And by tapping into the common internet framework, Senza can eliminate the need to download apps to reach connected devices with service packages matched to their formats and functionalities, notes Nick Thexton, executive vice president of media cloud services at Synamedia.
In a recent blog, Thexton explains that beyond reliance on Synamedia’s TV service-oriented solutions the company is building a network of partners whose solutions have been or will be integrated into the Senza framework. “The Senza network will support M&E, digital signage, hospitality, IoT, and other vertical markets with the creation of personalized, immersive viewing experiences at a far lower cost than previously possible,” Thexton says, adding that “leading video platforms are also eager to embrace bring-your-own device capabilities with Senza.”
Signes says Synamedia has already brought more than 40 customers on board with its cloud and SaaS solutions, including some that are well outside the realm of traditional customers. One interesting case in point is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which in July let it be known it was using Synamedia’s Quortex Play live D2C SaaS service to stream events lie ministerial meetings, press conferences the annual NATO Youth Summit through its website, YouTube and other channels.
Customers, especially the traditional TV operators, “are actually stunned by the performance” they’re getting with Synamedia in the cloud, Signes says. “They see it’s very reliable, very scalable, and rock solid.”
That said, he adds, it’s still going to take some time for traditional TV providers to make a full transition to the cloud. But the resistance to incremental migration is starting to dissipate. “It’s progressive, not massive,” he says.
Mounting evidence supporting this proposition is being generated by a breakthrough in cloud resource utilization introduced by video technology vendor Synamedia in the wake of its 2022 acquisition of startup Quortex. By incorporating and continuing development of the Quortex technology as an integral component of B2C and B2B streaming and other solutions offered in software-as-a-service (SaaS) mode, Synamedia has made it possible for service providers to limit their spending on cloud resources to highly granular increments of real usage that ebb and flow across live and on-demand channels.
Quortex-based solutions are designed to achieve maximum optimization in the use of cloud resources, explains Quortex co-founder Jérôme Viéron, who is now senior director for R&D streaming engineering at Synamedia. In a blog posted earlier this year, he says, “With our Quortex SaaS solutions, video service providers can build video streams on-the-fly, cutting cloud costs, and efficiently deliver live video streams to partners globally in one click.”
Or, as Synamedia’s executive vice president and general manager of video networks Julien Signes puts it in an interview with UltraMedia Pipeline, “We can guarantee that we’re only going to process what’s watched as opposed to processing everything 24/7 just in case somebody wants to watch it.”
By tapping dispersed cloud compute resources as needed to encode and package content with the ability to switch to other available resources during any streaming session, Synamedia’s Quortex platform allows customers to avoid not only the higher costs associated with cloud resources that need to be dedicated for the entire duration of streaming sessions but also the costs of provisioning backup resources. All the transcoding and packaging is done on the fly across whatever instances of cloud resources are engaged to support any streaming session involving live content or content from core storage.
This new perspective on cloud utilization comes amid growing industry pushback against the notion that cloud virtualization alone, even with the virtualized container and Kubernetes-enhanced approaches to usage versatility, leads to significant cost savings over traditional premises-based approaches to video processing. “Our customers are clear that they are hyper focused on ROI, and every decision they take is through that lens,” Signes says. Typically, when they look at using the cloud they see that taking “whatever you had on prem and putting it in the cloud just drives your costs up,” he adds.
It's a confusing situation, given that, as previously reported, the allure of cloud speed and flexibility, especially in live sports streaming, is drawing ever more entities to the cloud. The appeal has grown with the emergence of a new generation of compelling vendor solutions that rely on cloud technology. But, as Signes notes, there’s also a trend going in the opposite direction where OTT providers who rely on cloud-based streaming platforms have decided “to move back out of the cloud. And the primary reason for that is the cost explosion.”
This stems from the fact that, even with the availability of virtualization, the tendency has been to take a fixed infrastructure approach to allocating data resources whether in the service provider’s private domain or the public cloud. “When you put that infrastructure in the cloud, it’s going to cost you even more,” Signes says.
As revealed in a global study of OTT technology procurement practices conducted by Caretta Research, 76% of streaming service providers are customizing applications in house, often with vendor support in the use of open-source solutions. The study found that cost is the primary driver in this market-wide shift away from turnkey solutions, followed by a desire to avoid vendor lock-in.
But this leads to a conundrum that was highlighted in Streaming Media’s fall 2023 State of Streaming survey report, which found that “CapEx and OpEx continue to dominate the challenges faced by respondents’ organizations.” Notably, the report attributed a rise in CapEx concerns to “the creation of private clouds as a way of offsetting the rising cost of public-cloud delivery solutions.”
In other words, there’s a vicious-circle aspect to incurring higher CapEx to offset OpEx given that doing so reverses the decision to trade CapEx for OpEx that moved companies to the cloud in the first place. Leveraging the cloud to its true potential would appear to be a better way to go, even if the shift to the cloud is incremental, provided a way can be found around the OpEx issue.
Recognizing that’s the case, Synamedia has leveraged the Quortex just-in-time engine to profoundly impact evolution of the company’s product suite. This has bent the cost/benefit equation strongly in favor of cloud usage for those who want to make the transition in whole or in part from reliance on premises-based equipment.
“There’s definitely a lot of know-how and patented technology behind the Quortex just-in-time engine that we’ve continued to expand and develop,” says Signes, who joined Synamedia nearly six years ago with its acquisition of Envivio, the pioneering software-based encoding company he founded. “We can actually claim in many aspects that your total cost of ownership of migrating your infrastructure to the cloud is now significantly lower.”
This applies to a broad range of capabilities which, together, allow video streamers to offer new viewing experiences quickly at scale with superior quality at lower bitrates, Signes adds. Via Synamedia’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) portal customers can exploit Quortex-enhanced cloud usage through self-managed execution of D2C streaming, B2B video distribution, multi-CDN operations, and applications like cloud DVR, time-shift TV, and dynamic ad insertions. Or they can do the same things by leveraging Synamedia’s professional services.
One of the major advances stemming from Synamedia acquisition of Quortex has been the development of a virtualized version of the company’s flagship Digital Content Manager (DCM), which has been a mainstay in MVPD headends since the early days of digital TV. By supporting DCM-caliber performance of functions like bulk encryption, transcoding, ad insertion and much else in the cloud, VDCM is inducing ever more of Synamedia’s traditional TV customers to move away from reliance on premises-based hardware, Signes says.
Quortex cloud technology is also intrinsic to Synamedia’s latest advancement in compression technology. The new Quortex Play AI compression framework incorporates AI and machine learning to support a codec-agnostic approach to content-aware encoding that reduces bitrates by up to 30% while affording customers the flexibility to optimize compression to accommodate nuances like the variations in motion complexity that occur with different types of sports.
Automatic tuning of compression to meet quality objectives is enabled by another Synamedia innovation known as predicted Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion. Ideally suited for live content compression scenarios, pVMAF achieves VMAF-like precision while minimizing the computational overhead by performing analysis that leverages pre-analysis statistics and key encoding parameters within the encoding loop.
One of Synamedia’s most dramatic applications of its advanced cloud technology was unveiled at IBC with introduction of the Senza platform as a way to enable access to services from any connected device without the need for specialized device hardware such as set-top boxes, streaming modules, smart TVs or IoT gateways. “You're not locked into an OS ecosystem like you are with the new wave of set-top boxes,” Signes says in reference to Android and Apple TV. “You can actually deploy any application that’s cloud rendered, which gives you both scale and complete independence from maintaining devices.”
Synamedia says the write-once, run-anywhere Senza platform can cut service providers’ costs of onboarding subscribers by as much as 90%. With use of a $6 Senza Cloud Connector, they can turn any TV screen into a high-performance display device, whether in the home, hotel rooms or a sport bar. And by tapping into the common internet framework, Senza can eliminate the need to download apps to reach connected devices with service packages matched to their formats and functionalities, notes Nick Thexton, executive vice president of media cloud services at Synamedia.
In a recent blog, Thexton explains that beyond reliance on Synamedia’s TV service-oriented solutions the company is building a network of partners whose solutions have been or will be integrated into the Senza framework. “The Senza network will support M&E, digital signage, hospitality, IoT, and other vertical markets with the creation of personalized, immersive viewing experiences at a far lower cost than previously possible,” Thexton says, adding that “leading video platforms are also eager to embrace bring-your-own device capabilities with Senza.”
Signes says Synamedia has already brought more than 40 customers on board with its cloud and SaaS solutions, including some that are well outside the realm of traditional customers. One interesting case in point is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which in July let it be known it was using Synamedia’s Quortex Play live D2C SaaS service to stream events lie ministerial meetings, press conferences the annual NATO Youth Summit through its website, YouTube and other channels.
Customers, especially the traditional TV operators, “are actually stunned by the performance” they’re getting with Synamedia in the cloud, Signes says. “They see it’s very reliable, very scalable, and rock solid.”
That said, he adds, it’s still going to take some time for traditional TV providers to make a full transition to the cloud. But the resistance to incremental migration is starting to dissipate. “It’s progressive, not massive,” he says.