Remote Video Production Holds the Key to Meeting Video Demand
By Adam Noyes
Cloud-based service delivery could enable a remote video production service capable of efficiently producing high-volume, high-quality live and on-demand video content with fast turnarounds, says Epiphan Video CEO Mike Sandler.
Expectations of live and on-demand video content are ever-growing, and not just for AV and video production industry insiders. With advanced video equipment becoming more affordable than ever, customers in enterprise, education and beyond expect well-produced, high-quality video – delivered fast.
At the same time, today’s standalone AV hardware and software are still much too complex for the average user to master quickly. Current solutions require the expertise of highly skilled professionals, along with intricate knowledge of the systems involved. Dependence on such professionals is often costly and inefficient, yet high-quality video productions are often out of reach without them.
Happily, the delivery of this expertise can be streamlined and, in the process, made more accessible and affordable. How? Through building centralised infrastructures and integrating AV-over-IP-based remote production studios into the video production process.
Cloud-based service delivery could enable a remote video production service capable of efficiently producing high-volume, high-quality live and on-demand video content with fast turnarounds. Providing remote video production as a service this way would also decrease capital expenditures.
Skilled professionals
In this model, highly skilled AV professionals remain one of the most (if not the most) important factors in producing high-quality video. The main difference is that because they do not need to be onsite at all times, AV professionals would work remotely. This approach values AV professionals’ time and eliminates many of the day-to-day distractions they face by relocating them from the chaos of the production floor to the comfort of a well-equipped remote studio. Within this remote studio, all state-of-the-art tools are at hand for the delivery of edited VOD assets, low-latency live broadcasts and more.
AV-over-IP technology makes it possible to control even the most complex AV equipment remotely. The high flexibility of this model also allows easy scaling of infrastructure to virtually any size and level of complexity, all while keeping workflows elegant and efficient.
Naturally, developing a unified infrastructure is crucial to deploying a viable remote production solution, but there is also a bigger opportunity at hand. The AV industry as we know it is a disparate ecosystem of products and services. There is considerable complexity and multiple points of failure within this model. We see a future where infrastructure as a service (IaaS) empowers individuals and companies to build their own autonomous video ecosystems under one umbrella.
This IaaS approach would offer key advantages over the status quo. By minimising local hardware and balancing CPU/GPU/TPU processing between edge hardware and cloud, companies could lower the costs of capital expenditures, cloud processing and energy usage. But the main advantage would be a much more convenient, centralised and efficient AV production workflow.
Updating the approach to video production workflows to include IaaS and SaaS is necessary in order to keep up with market demand today. Both services are on a clear path to becoming industry standards when it comes to high-quality video production. With lowered costs and higher efficiency, high-quality live and on-demand video production will become within reach for everyone.
Mike Sandler is CEO at Epiphan Video