The world of media and entertainment (M&E) is changing faster than many other industries. This is largely due to the streaming revolution. From production methods to encoding, rendering, and delivery, the demand for newer, faster technologies is at its highest.
However, when it comes to creating engaging and enjoyable M&E experiences for consumers, there are many factors that content creators and video distributors face when it comes to the technical architecture for production and distribution.
Production
Whether producing a sitcom, feature film or the latest blockbuster, the production environment must be captured at the highest possible quality in order to deliver crisp content to our screens. Netflix, for example, requires all content to be output in 4K for master files. Also, for a Netflix-approved workflow, you need to shoot at a resolution above 4K. Going from 4K to 8K means 4 times more data per frame, plus formats like HDR and dynamic color depth, the end result is a much bigger file size.
Just as shooting on film where you are limited by how many frames per second your camera can feed through that camera's shutter, RAW digital shooting shouldn't result in frames being affected by the write speed to the hard disk. For example, a camera with an 8192 x 4608 sensor (16:9 aspect ratio) produces approximately 136 gigapixels per minute of shooting at 60 fps. If each sample is 16 bits, then the uncompressed data that needs to be stored is 272 GB/min or 4.5 GB/s.
But beyond shooting, scenes had to be sent quickly to the editors and producers who would review the “daily videos” and determine if any scenes needed to be reshot. The longer it takes to transfer data from a connected camera or storage device to another, the less efficient the production will be. Hours of time can be wasted when the crew and cast are not doing anything while the data is being transferred. To avoid that, cuts of film must be downloaded quickly to the editing room, preview equipment, and given to other parts, all of which is done almost simultaneously.
This in turn requires high-capacity drives and very fast throughput so that there are no obstacles when transferring data from the camera to the editor. An even more efficient solution is a server with shared resources so that different departments can collaboratively edit footage.
For years, production houses have relied on inexpensive HDDs (hard disk drives), but with the large amount of data generated by modern cameras and the requirements of distribution workflows, production houses are now turning to NVMe U.2 and M.2 drives to take advantage of high transfer speed and computational enhancement.
Distribution
If someone in California wants to watch a video stored in a data center in Virginia, then the video must be downloaded over a remote network. But if 100 or even 1000 people around the world want to watch the same video, then the result is network congestion and a slow viewing experience.
To overcome network latency and bottlenecks, more and more streaming services are using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to distribute their content around the world. This concept is based on the old principle of allowing websites to load static content such as photos, text, and ads more quickly, but in recent years this has changed to include streaming video, audio, and dynamic multimedia content.
CDNs have the unique challenge of not only delivering content, but also doing it in a way that doesn't consume bandwidth. To do that, most CDNs optimize the Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) streaming principle, which provides multiple resolutions and adjusts the playback resolution of movies based on the consumer's device's current network conditions. If you want to watch 4K video but experience network congestion, then your video player may temporarily request a lower resolution video stream, so you don't have to wait due to content loading delays, or "buffering" processes.
ABR is great for movie playback, but puts pressure on CDN storage as each render output quadruples the amount of data for subsequent versions (from 480p to 720p), and even more for dynamic color ranges like HDR. To combat this, many CDNs are building their data centers with high-capacity NVMe SSDs that also have very low latency for read access and use a caching scheme sophisticated way to send all ABR renderings at the same time.
Furthermore, to address playback latency and buffering, CDNs are investing in more edge computing to deploy content to servers that are physically closer to consumers. That requires content to be duplicated worldwide, with virtual RAID and backup storage to ensure redundancy. Most of these edge compute nodes will also follow the same caching strategy for ABR delivery, but can also keep applications running in memory for fast file access and faster first frame spawn times. It requires maximizing RAM and configuring NVMe caches across data centers.
The popularity of streaming media and entertainment services has increased tremendously, so it's no wonder the industry is embracing the latest technology to meet consumer demands. From high-capacity NVMe SSDs to generous RAM allocations, M&E is driving much of the development of low-latency technologies that can capture, render, and deliver the highest quality video and applications around the world.
