Sponsored Insight: Agile Media Operations through Hybrid Architectures: A Look at the Revolutionary Smart Streaming Technology
In the cutthroat world of video streaming, adaptability and cost-effectiveness are the keys to success. As viewer expectations grow for live events, personalized content, and immersive ad formats, service providers face immense pressure to optimize every aspect of their operations.
Meanwhile, the fusion of traditional broadcast and streaming workflows is transforming video infrastructure, necessitating unified, flexible solutions. To stay ahead of the competition, service providers need to do more than offer top-notch streaming experiences; they must also minimize complexity and costs.
Traditional all-in-one streaming solutions are no longer equipped to handle the needs of service providers. A hybrid streaming model, which integrates on-premises infrastructure and the cloud, offers service providers a competitive edge, providing the adaptability and resilience needed to meet current demands while ensuring their operations stay future-ready.
The Drawbacks of Monolithic Streaming Solutions
With the surge in video streaming demand, on-premises infrastructures are straining to accommodate the scale, agility, and personalization required for high-quality viewer experiences. To handle peak traffic for live events, operators often resort to overprovisioning infrastructure. Yet, during certain situations, these excess resources fall short. If the infrastructure is underprovisioned, video streaming quality can suffer during spikes in viewer demand, particularly during major sports events.
Cloud-only approaches offer elasticity and scalability, but they can also present challenges. Using the public cloud for all video workflows can be prohibitively expensive.
It's clear that a cloud- or on-premises-only architecture cannot cater to the assorted demands of video streaming. Service providers need hybrid infrastructures that balance cost, performance, and flexibility across cloud and on-premises environments. By merging the cloud with on-premises infrastructure, service providers can flexibly shift workloads in real-time, delivering a wide range of experiences from FAST and pop-up channels to premium live events. In essence, hybrid architectures empower service providers to support evolving viewer expectations without sacrificing operational agility or budget.
Harmonic's VOS360 SaaS Solutions: Pioneering Hybrid Streaming Innovation
Harmonic is a frontrunner in hybrid streaming innovation with its VOS360 Media SaaS and VOS Media Software.
A notable use case for Harmonic's hybrid streaming solution is the management of VOD and network PVR storage. Viewers typically enjoy new and freshly recorded content, while older assets consume valuable storage space in service providers' libraries. Harmonic's hybrid streaming solution tackles this issue by enabling providers to economically store large-scale archival content in the public cloud, while keeping high-demand, fresh content on-premises. This approach not only results in reduced total cost of ownership but also ensures an optimized viewer experience by enabling instant access to the most relevant content, without compromising the accessibility of archival libraries.
An advantage of the hybrid streaming solution is its centralized management system that reduces the complexity of operating across both on-premises and cloud environments. Operators can manage, monitor, and configure the entire workflow from a single user interface. Transferring content from on-premises to the cloud is automated, based on rules such as content freshness. It remains transparent to the content management system (CMS), ensuring smooth operations. This significantly simplifies operations, streamlines resource allocation, and lowers costs for service providers.
Another unique advantage of the hybrid streaming solution is EyeQTM content-aware encoding for live and file-based transcoding. This advanced encoding technology significantly reduces bandwidth requirements and minimizes cloud and CDN storage costs. With EyeQ content-aware encoding, service providers can save around $1,100 each day, assuming 300,000 viewers are watching video content for two hours daily, making it an essential tool for maintaining high video quality while optimizing resource usage in hybrid streaming environments.
Additionally, the hybrid streaming solution enhances VOD asset transcoding, allowing service providers to balance transcoding tasks between on-premises and cloud resources. Service providers can manage routine workloads, like adding 10 to 20 new movies to a streaming platform weekly, on-premises. For peak demands like onboarding a full content library from a major partner (e.g., Disney+), service providers can transcode thousands of assets in the cloud to avoid costly on-premises infrastructure scaling. This hybrid strategy ensures high scalability and cost efficiency.
Furthermore, Harmonic's hybrid streaming solution improves disaster recovery and operational reliability. By leveraging the built-in redundancy, geographic distribution, and failover capabilities of the cloud, service providers can protect their on-premises infrastructure and maintain service uptime during unexpected disruptions.
Future-Proof Streaming Begins with a Hybrid Base
Hybrid streaming empowers service providers to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and scale their video streaming services across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. By partnering with Harmonic, service providers can spearhead the hybrid streaming revolution with innovative SaaS and software-based solutions that simplify operations via a centralized management system, enhance viewer experiences, and provide the flexibility needed to excel in a rapidly evolving media landscape.
About Harmonic
Harmonic, the world leader in video delivery, enables media companies and service providers to deliver next-gen streaming and broadcast services to consumers globally. Powering millions of simultaneous streams, thousands of live channels, and countless VOD requests, Harmonic's innovative cloud and software-based offerings simplify all stages of media processing and delivery for exceptional-quality video experiences. To ensure the highest service availability, Harmonic's worldwide DevOps team provides 24/7 monitoring of the cloud platform. Whether powering live sports, ad-supported TV, TV everywhere, or cloud broadcast delivery, Harmonic enables operators to meet the demand for scalable video services. More information is available at www.harmonicinc.com.
Enrichment Data:- Hybrid streaming models offer benefits including cost optimization, elastic compute and storage, enhanced operational resilience, improved user experience, and multiple revenue streams.- Advantages of cost optimization include reduced storage costs and a more scalable and cost-effective solution compared to maintaining all content on-premises.- Advantages of elastic compute and storage include the ability to handle peak viewership during events like live sports, avoiding expensive on-premises infrastructure scaling.- Enhanced operational resilience benefits include centralized management, seamless orchestration between cloud and on-prem environments, enhanced disaster recovery, agility in service deployment, and built-in cloud redundancy and failover options.- Improved user experience benefits include personalization and performance, AI distribution of workloads, flexibility and accessibility, and enhanced overall user satisfaction.- Multiple revenue streams benefits include the combination of different revenue streams, such as subscription-based, transactional, and ad-supported options, offering users more choices and creating diverse income sources for platform owners.
- Service providers can reap benefits with hybrid streaming workflows, such as cost optimization, elastic compute and storage, enhanced operational resilience, improved user experience, and multiple revenue streams.
- Harmonic's VOS360 Media SaaS and VOS Media Software provide a pioneering hybrid streaming solution, offering advantages like centralized management, seamless orchestration between cloud and on-premises environments, and improved disaster recovery.
- The hybrid streaming solution also enables providers to economically store large-scale archival content in the cloud while keeping high-demand, fresh content on-premises, resulting in reduced total cost of ownership and optimized viewer experience.
- Harmonic's hybrid streaming solution uses EyeQTM content-aware encoding to significantly reduce bandwidth requirements, minimizing cloud and CDN storage costs, saving service providers around $1,100 per day under certain usage assumptions.
- The hybrid streaming solution allows service providers to balance workloads between on-premises and cloud resources, handling routine tasks on-premises while transoding peak demands in the cloud to avoid costly infrastructure scaling.
- By partnering with Harmonic, service providers can stay ahead in a rapidly evolving media landscape, delivering efficient, cost-effective, and high-quality video streaming experiences to consumers.
