Broadcast Media Creation as a Service: Using Infrastructure-As-Code and the Public Cloud to Power On-Air Media Creation Platforms

Traditionally, the infrastructure required for broadcast media creation has consisted of specialized graphics workstations, high-performance storage arrays, complex networking, and video wiring, all of which are capital-intensive and expensive to maintain. Over the past two years, NBCUniversal has developed a cloud infrastructure model to provide on-air media creation as a service to its creative teams. Utilizing GPU-enabled cloud-based virtual machines, dynamically scalable high-performance cloud-native storage, and infrastructure-as-code methodologies, we are now able to provide full end-to-end media production workflows in the public cloud. With an automation-forward approach, we know exactly what is going to be applied, how it will propagate through the infrastructure, and what dependencies are involved. Elastic scalability of compute and storage eliminates over-provisioning (and its related capital investments) and provides the ability to dynamically add/remove resources as necessary. This paper aims to highlight the technical details of our programmatically reproducible solution as well as the challenges and benefits of media creation in the cloud
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