An Internet of Things Architecture for Cloud-fit Professional Media Workflow

Flexibility, agility and scale are key benefits of moving media production infrastructure to the cloud and/or commodity data centre platforms, enabling content providers to respond to changing consumer habits. This includes new formats and new propositions, such as personalised immersive social television. Can a “lift and shift” approach - deploying existing production tools designed for enterprise computing environments into the cloud - deliver these benefits? — This paper presents an alternative architecture that is designed to be cloud-fit, using a software-only approach for deploying dynamic software infrastructure. The paper starts by outlining both the benefits and constraints of cloud-based systems, including issues related to virtualised systems being inherently non-real-time. An architecture that overcomes these limitations is then presented, along with an approach for dealing with security and scaling. This consists of a combination of mainly IT tool sets (e.g. monitoring tools, orchestration engines, cloud APIs, automated software deployment) with media-specialist software components. — A key aspect of the architecture is to use media transport mechanisms that can take advantage of the modern data centre platform in a secure and scalable way. The media and entertainment industry is now just one of many industry sectors that streams data through clusters of commodity computers. The paper outlines a big-data approach to stream-based processing designed to make use of today's multi-core architectures, something that the family of SMPTE ST 2110 standards is not well placed to do. — An instance of this architecture has been created using an open source IoT wiring tool. This is being trialed as part of BBC Northern Ireland's IP proof-of-concept activity, working jointly with Streampunk Media and Cinegy through AMWA Labs. The lab environment has enabled the testing and measurement of aspects of this approach, including gesture-based control (e.g. via smartphone/tablet), HTTPS media transport, fast networking with consumer devices and virtual infrastructure replacing traditional hardware solutions - including a virtual video mixer. Results from the lab will be presented, along with a description and pointer to the open source tools used to produce the results, further analysis and next steps.