Free your technical team’s time – and empower your media operators with Profile Composer
By Callum Elsdon, Product Marketing Manager, M2A Media
It may have started life as a single unmonitored IP stream in a machine room, but live streaming operations for OTT and the internet are now at the heart of broadcast operations sitting side by side with traditional delivery. Today, playout operations for live streaming need to work reliably and predictably, along with the flexibility to scale to meet huge leaps in demand.
After giving you a sneak peek in our Roadmap Webinar in November, we’re excited to reveal our latest M2A LIVE feature, Profile Composer. Creating operational streaming profiles is hard and making a suitable adaptive bitrate (ABR) ladder of profiles is almost an art form. Maintaining, managing and making minor alterations to profiles is not something that you want to bother your streaming engineers with – after all, once they’ve made a streaming profile they will, by necessity, have to move onto the next priority. However, having the capability to make alterations to profiles is essential given that streaming operations evolve over time.
Profile Composer is changing the way we look at, compile and analyse streaming profiles. It allows your technical team to develop the parameters for each individual stream, which can then be quickly and easily evolved by an operations team, depending on the changing demands of the project. Prior to Profile Composer, a small alteration which may have proven to be a herculean task that carried great operational risk, is now a simple drag and drop procedure.
Profile Composer takes the original configurations and stores them in a library of profiles. As technical demands change, a single similar fragment can be swapped out and saved as a new complete profile. For example, there may be no one watching your lowest resolution bit-rate profile so you decide to remove that part of the profile and instead swap in a new 4K profile. As the initial work of creating all the profiles and fragments was created by your technical engineers, all your operators need to do is to add the new fragment in and save a new profile. Profile Composer allows media operators to quickly combine different elements, test and deploy them for use in a real environment. This makes your change process far easier than it otherwise would be – leaving your technical team to work elsewhere while giving your operations team greater transparency and control over their work.
Within the Profile Composer, you can control and tailor your config by simply dragging and dropping the different fragments within the UI. Creating streaming configurations couldn’t be easier than this and can be used by a media operator with a basic understanding of streaming or broadcast essentials.
Step 1: Drag in the sources, including video and audio inputs.
Step 2: Add the format types for your renditions into the UI to define what they will encode to.
Step 3: Repeat the above for the different fragments such as audio, subtitles and failover settings.
Step 4: Pull in the output format such as DASH or UDP.
Step 5: Name your Config profile for easy recognition later and then save for future use.
The Profile Composer UI makes the experience more manageable thanks to a visually intuitive method of interpreting the encoding information and creating profile combinations, which can later be implemented as part of your streaming operations. All the encoding profiles a user uploads and all the associated fragments are then saved in a library of reusable profiles – so they can later be easily reconfigured in different setups later. We’ve added validation on the composition process so you won’t be able to join fragments in the wrong order, or of the wrong type, and you will positively want to present your profile in the clearest way possible.
Streaming shouldn’t be a pain, even when you’re delivering Tier 1 sports content to your subscribers. With Profile Composer in M2A LIVE we’re taking you one step further to a streamlined workflow for your Cloud IP delivered video. Development of Profile Composer will continue over the next year including the ability to duplicate and then alter existing encoding profiles to further support implementation across different use cases. Ultimately, we’re simplifying this process to make the difficult, esoteric tasks more manageable and easy to understand for everybody in the industry – and to help your experts get back to doing the complex tasks they do best.
If all this STILL sounds overwhelming, if you aren’t at a stage where you are comfortable building out your MediaLive specification, then we can start you off with some basic compositions to use, or to mix and match, to drive some test streams. We want you to give it a go. The thing is, I left the best until last: Profile Composer isn’t just useful, it isn’t just fun; it might even be addictive. This is all on top of the world-class live streaming and cloud automation that is already in play within M2A LIVE to deliver the best experience to your customers watching at home – and make the end to end process easier to manage.
To find out more, drop us a line at sales@m2amedia.tv.
