Innovating Live Productions: Building Software-Centric Facilities on an Asynchronous Media Framework 

Modern media consumption habits require live production to be more adaptable, agile, and scalable. Hardware-centric bespoke infrastructure cannot offer broadcasters and professional media producers the flexibility needed. The technological innovations in generic IT and cloud computing, on the other hand, look compelling as a means of addressing this through software only facilities running on prem or in the cloud. However, the transition from traditional hardware-centric approaches to IT-based architectures presents challenges. Unlike broadcast, which relies heavily on clock-driven signal synchronization, IT equipment and cloud systems operate in an event-driven, asynchronous manner. This necessitates a fundamental re-evaluation of how live video is managed and presents opportunities to build low latency, frame accurate and resilient systems that match or exceed the performance of hardware using synchronous interconnects such as SDI or SMPTE ST 2110.

This paper delves into the intricacies of building agile software facilities in a complete IT environment using event driven asynchronous processing for live media production, covering:
Foundational concepts of synchronous vs asynchronous operations
System architecture, including framework design, media microservices deployment, remote provisioning mechanisms, and application control
Empirical measurements highlighting considerable time savings by processing streams asynchronously compared to realtime
Benefits and implications for live production, such as scalability, reliability, agility, and composability

Marwan Al-Habbal | Matrox Video | Montreal, Quebec, Canada