On 3/29/12, Dave Rocamora, VP of DevOps at Control Group, Charlie Miller, Associate Partner, Media & Entertainment at Control Group, and Mark Ramberg, AWS Business Development Manager discussed the media production roadmap for the Studio of the Future. This webinar provided architecture guidance and highlight vendors and AWS products that will help studio managers, production managers, and IT leaders understand how AWS can be used to power the Media Production Studio of the Future.

1. TITLE
TITLE
CG CONTROL GROUP
beautifully engineered
+
STUDIO OF THE FUTURE
March 29, 2012
1
1
MTA

2. BIOS
DAVID CHARLIE MARK
ROCAMORA MILLER RAMBERG
VP of DevOps Associate Partner Business Development
Cloud Expert M&E & Strategy for Media
Control Group Control Group Amazon Web Services
2 CONTROL GROUP

3. CONTROL GROUP
• Technology & design company in NYC
• Founded in 2001, currently ~85 developers,
engineers, UX designers, and strategists
• Expertise from infrastructure to interface
3 CONTROL GROUP

4. CONTROL GROUP
RAA
Ralph Applebaum
Associates Incorporated
4 CONTROL GROUP

5. CONTROL GROUP
Traditional M&E Cloud systems
solutions for broadcast architecture and
and post environments integration expertise
5 CONTROL GROUP

6. STUDIOS TODAY
CHALLENGES
• Inflexible and fixed • Number of formats required
• Requires large upfront expense • Users and teams are
distributed
• Pay for peak capacity at all
times • Deadlines are shrinking
• Sheer volume of content • Rapidly evolving technology
6
CONTROL GROUP

7. STUDIOS TODAY
Encode/Transcode Archive
Render Broadcast
Distribution
OVP
Storage
iTunes/
Netflix Customers/
Viewers
Content Creators
7
CONTROL GROUP

8. HOW AMAZON GOT INTO
CLOUD COMPUTING
?
8
CONTROL GROUP

9. GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE
FOR GLOBAL ENTERPRISES
GovCloud US West US West US East South EU Asia Asia
(US ITAR (Northern (Oregon) (Northern America (Ireland) Pacific Pacific
Region) California) Virginia) (Sao Paulo) (Singapore) (Tokyo)
AWS Regions
AWS Edge Locations
9
CONTROL GROUP

10. AWS PLATFORM
Your Applications
Management & Administration
Building Block Services
Identity & Access Deployment &
Web Interface AWS IAM Automation Monitoring
Management Console Identity Federation AWS Elastic Beanstalk Amazon CloudWatch
Consolidated Billing AWS CloudFormation
Application Platform Services
Content Messaging Parallel Libraries & SDKs
Amazon SNS
Distribution Amazon SQS Processing Java, PHP, Python,
Amazon CloudFront Elastic MapReduce Ruby, .NET
Amazon SES
Foundation Services
Storage Database Networking
Compute Amazon S3 Amazon RDS
Amazon VPC
Amazon EC2 Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon EBS Amazon DynamoDB
Auto Scale Amazon Route 53
AWS Storage Gateway Amazon Elasticache
AWS Direct Connect
Availability Zones
AWS Global Infrastructure Edge Locations
Regions
10
CONTROL GROUP

11. MEDIA APPLICATIONS
ON AWS
Uses AWS to Samsung runs its
Runs its online
process media files Smart Hub
business almost
and deliver them application on
entirely on AWS
to customers AWS
“We moved to the clouds looking for availability. We have also found a
tremendous agility by eliminating complexity, process, and control.”
Kevin McEntee, VP of Content Engineering, Netflix
11
CONTROL GROUP

12. THE ROADMAP FOR THE
STUDIO OF THE FUTURE
1. STORAGE
2. ENCODING/RENDERING
3. DISTRIBUTION
12
CONTROL GROUP

13. STORAGE
TODAY’S CHALLENGES:
• Inflexible
• Expensive
• Fixed
13 CONTROL GROUP

14. STORAGE
Example: Video library for cable TV show that airs 4x a week
Challenges:
• Production must record news channels in HD to reference and
play back in the show each day
• Everything must be archived, searchable and retrievable quickly
• Assets must be shared with sister show
Present State:
• They use a SAN that needs more and more space every year
• Increases power and cooling capacity and costs
• Running fiber between studio and sister show’s studio
14 CONTROL GROUP

15. STORAGE
Studio of the Future
Store data on infinitely scalable AWS systems:
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• Elastic Block Store (EBS)
Studio 1
Small local bucket
of storage
Connect to AWS
via VPC
or DirectConnect
Studio 2
Small local bucket
15 of storage
CONTROL GROUP

16. KEY TECHNOLOGY
Benefits of AWS Solution:
• Flexible, available
• Infinitely scalable
• Distributed & protected
• Pay per GB of storage and transfer
AWS Direct Amazon Virtual S3 Server Side
Connect Private Cloud (VPC) Encryption
Encryption of data
while at rest in S3
Internet
Dedicated connection Private VPN connection Encrypt data on upload,
between your datacenter to your AWS resources automatic decryption on
and AWS retrieval
16 CONTROL GROUP

17. ENCODING & RENDERING
TODAY’S CHALLENGES:
• Requires investment in expensive, special
purpose hardware
• Uses lots of energy and physical space
• You don’t need it all the time, but when you do,
it’s never enough!
17 CONTROL GROUP

18. ENCODING & RENDERING
Example: Media production studio that needs on-demand rendering
Challenges:
• Little need for rendering at beginning of projects but lots of
capacity needed near end of projects
• Renderfarm hardware is expensive and takes time to troubleshoot
• Hardware must be reconfigured for different types of projects
Present State:
• Renderfarm is a rack of computers that sits idle at the beginning of
projects and is overtaxed by the end
• Increasing capacity takes days or weeks
18 CONTROL GROUP

19. ENCODING & RENDERING
Studio of the Future
• Create render nodes on-demand with EC2
• Pay for only what you use
Connect to AWS
via VPC
or DirectConnect
19 CONTROL GROUP

20. KEY TECHNOLOGY
Benefits of AWS Solution: EC2
Virtual Server
• Flexible
• Scalable
• Pay for the exact capacity you need,
when you need it
• Have the ability to track and bill
infrastructure costs back to clients
Provision and boot new
servers
20 CONTROL GROUP

21. DISTRIBUTION
TODAY’S CHALLENGES:
• Teams are distributed
• Consumers are distributed
• Expensive to build your own global
distribution network
21 CONTROL GROUP

22. DISTRIBUTION
Example: Digital media company distributes video to multiple
platforms
Challenges:
• Finished video must be transcoded and uploaded to numerous
systems quickly
Present State:
• Manual and inflexible content distribution processes are used (FTP)
• Labor intensive
• Distribution platform is not integrated with production or encoding
workflows
22 CONTROL GROUP

23. DISTRIBUTION
Studio of the Future
• Files are processed by EC2
• Files distributed using S3
• All controlled by SWF
SWF
Connect to AWS
via VPC
or DirectConnect
23 CONTROL GROUP

24. DISTRIBUTION
Files are distributed using S3 and CloudFront
Broadcast
OVP
iTunes/
Customers/
Netflix
Viewers
24 CONTROL GROUP

25. KEY TECHNOLOGY
Simple Workflow
CloudFront CloudFront
Service (SWF)
Benefits of AWS Solution:
• Simple
• Scalable
• Distributed 26 edge servers 26 edge servers
Global content
Workflow Global content
delivery network
Automation delivery network
25 CONTROL GROUP

26. THE STUDIO OF THE FUTURE
Studio 1
Small local bucket SWF
of storage
Studio 2
Small local bucket
of storage
26 CONTROL GROUP

27. APPROACHING THE FUTURE
• Each system architecture & implementation depends on
business and workflow
• Technologies and platforms are changing continuously and
will offer new functionality and optimization opportunities
• Take a rolling approach (one system at a time, hybrid
models)
• Use a partner that understands all of the components:
production workflow and the intricacies of AWS
technologies
27 CONTROL GROUP

28. Q&A
Got more questions?
For more information on moving media production
infrastructure to AWS:
charlie.miller@controlgroup.com
212-343-2525 x189
www.controlgroup.com
28 CONTROL GROUP

29. CG THANK YOU!
David Rocamora, david.rocamora@controlgroup.com
Charlie Miller, charlie.miller@controlgroup.com
Mark Ramberg, mramberg@amazon.com