Five steps to Connect: Acquisition
By Callum Elsdon, Product Marketing Manager, M2A Media
All too often you will hear about the complexities of the Cloud to acquire content for broadcast TV. We’ve been developing our cloud orchestration product, M2A CONNECT, for the acquisition and distribution of TV channels and events in the AWS Cloud since 2019. Bringing this to market has meant we take on the heavy lifting of developing the streamlined functionality so you don’t have to – but what does it actually take to Connect?
Step 1. Define your requirements
This may seem silly, but too often projects will start with the solution before you’ve asked what the question is. What is the actual problem you are trying to solve? Maybe your existing infrastructure doesn’t scale or it’s too expensive to operate. Perhaps you want to move more of your workflow into the Cloud so you can enable transformations later on. Whatever you want to do, it’s always best to clarify before you get going.
M2A CONNECT can support your teams in easily orchestrating the AWS Media Services for the acquisition of feeds from rights owners and broadcasters – as well as enabling further transformations, such as cloud-based Frame Rate Conversion or live video capture. This is all done through our fully-featured M2A Console or go one step further by integrating M2A CONNECT with your existing systems using our API.
Step 2. Talk to the team and get onboarded
We’re a friendly bunch of people here at M2A Media. We’ll help you get up and running with the correct service, access rights and guidance on how to use our products. Providing we’re all clear on your requirements, we can get you sorted within hours or days – not weeks as with traditional infrastructure. We can either deploy directly onto your AWS accounts or within M2A Media. Need extra operations support? Our optional 24/7 M2A Operations team is here as your extended team to provide hypercare support during important events at reasonable rates.
Step 3. Easy pay with AWS Marketplace
Using AWS Marketplace allows you to licence M2A CONNECT directly through your company’s AWS account without needing to set up a new agreement with M2A Media directly. This can speed up procurement of M2A’s services and allows you to set up payment schedules directly through AWS Marketplace. Even better, you can utilise your existing AWS spend commitment to pay for M2A Media products when purchasing via Marketplace. If you’re looking to turn around a project quickly, this is perfect to jumpstart your M2A CONNECT journey without getting bogged down in procurement complexities.
Step 4. Get scheduling
M2A CONNECT has been designed to optimise event scheduling. Using the Schedule function you can set up the times when you want your events to run and be ingested to form part of your acquisition workflow. This automates the manual process of setting up configuration within AWS, and helps you to spin up and down AWS resources as needed. This saves your operations team precious time, as well as money, since you will not be using the resources for a minute longer than the time you have scheduled. Other core features within the M2A Console include:
- Routing: Switch your feeds between outputs with ease through a graphical and intuitive view of where your feeds are transiting to and from.
- Proxy View: Have reassurance in your feed’s stability and output by utilising the Proxy View to see and monitor it in real time.
- Media Sources: An easy birds-eye view of the channel feeds flowing through your M2A CONNECT instance as well as a method to view ingress/egress regions, stop/start and M2A CAPTURE status.
Step 5. Get more from CONNECT: Turn on Capture, enable Frame Rate Conversion
Looking to output your live feeds onto your VOD platform or save them for future regulatory reference? With its recent integration with M2A CAPTURE, we can now directly capture live feeds via M2A CONNECT making it easier to take advantage of this feature within your acquisition workflow – and saving you from having to buy extra hardware or services to do the same job. The captured feed is then sent to AWS S3 storage where it’s easy to access and to reuse at a later date.
Take M2A CONNECT’s capabilities even further through use of its award-winning Cloud Frame Rate Converter. We get that frame rate conversion is not something you need day in, day out, which is why this feature can be accessed as an add-on to your M2A CONNECT workflow. Motion-compensated, it is perfect for a sports use case and can be deployed on an event-basis, again negating the need to invest in expensive hardware.
M2A Media brings together the best of AWS Media Services making them more accessible and easier to maintain. Acquisition with M2A CONNECT unlocks more than just the ability to move feeds across the globe and is the start of you being able to create a wider cloud broadcast workflow – connecting you with the full spectrum of end-to-end cloud-based capabilities.
Don’t get left behind. Learn more by downloading our Acquisition product sheet here or M2A CONNECT product brochure here.
If you’re visiting NAB 2022 in Las Vegas, be sure to pop by our stand number W8903 – and if you’re looking to set up a meeting to find out more about M2A Connect, head across to this link to schedule time with the team. If you can’t be in Las Vegas, don’t miss out on our webinar on 13th April for our NAB preview – you can register over here.
