IBC2023 Accelerator Overview: Virtual software deployment for all productions

One of the eight unprecedented projects to be showcased on the Innovation Stage at IBC2023 explores solutions to the myriad of complexities of covering live events from small to large scales. The Connect and Produce Everywhere project aims to move live production media processing stages between cloud and edge computing at an event.

As part of the IBC2023 Accelerator Media Innovation Programme, which aims to solve complex media and entertainment business and technology challenges, Connect & Produce Everywhere will present a challenge that allows us to virtually deploy resources anywhere that best fit any given production. The project goal is to support the deployment of software to the best location making the most efficient use of resources in a bandwidth constrained location.

The project Champions include DAZN, Sky Sports, BT Media & Broadcast, Vodafone Group, BBC, and TV2; and Participants: LAMA, VizRT, Open Broadcast Systems, Zixi, InSync, Limitless, Singular.live, Google, Techex, Microsoft, AMD, Grass Valley, and Verizon Business.

Dynamic Moves
The team uphold that we are now approaching a future where a click of the mouse will virtually move a vision mixer to the cloud or edge compute at an event, instead of driving big metal hardware up a motorway.

They will demonstrate detaching software from hardware and deploying a distributed computing architecture between ground and cloud, exploring the benefits and challenges of this approach, such as dynamically moving live production media processing stages between cloud and edge computing at an event.

Mark Smith, IBC’s Innovation Co-Lead commented: “This team has been experimenting with and building toward all-IP workflows for live remote production over several phases within the Accelerator programme. These have covered early end-to-end cloud production experiments and various forms of mobile and satellite connectivity. This year Edge Compute has come to the fore in terms of valuable learnings from a multi-vendor, cloud agnostic approach to live event production. The team has essentially taken this from an Accelerator to an incubator with a test lab created for conducting next level software defined trials with collaborative infrastructure.”

Objectives
The collaborative team of experts will use their time on the Innovation Stage to illustrate the project’s objectives:

• To build a distributed edge and cloud computing system to produce a live sports event.
• Create the ability to geographically move media processing without the user knowing.
• To push interoperability between software providers (licencing, common approaches, OS).

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