Media.Monks

Over the past 8 years, the only constants in VR broadcast have been change and evolution. VR has been a central part of my work since 2015, with a particular focus on livestreaming immersive video since 2017. When creating live, highquality video content for HMDs, we face a core challenge: the increasing computational demand of a constantly evolving medium. Solving for this has required creative solutions that forced us to break through the traditional broadcast architecture with a cloud-based broadcast model. Cloud broadcasting has many advantages, including lower and more flexible costs, immense compute elasticity and power, and a sustainable revolution.

Creative Flexibility & Elasticity

Working with constantly changing formats comes with the need to frequently upgrade your hardware. I started my VR career broadcasting in UHD stereo with a Nokia Ozo attached to a car battery, and now we’re talking about 8K stereo. We are working with an evolving medium, and our partner creators constantly demand us to be able to adapt to what they need. With traditional hardware, this would be so expensive as to be literally impossible - short of buying a 10 million dollar supertruck, with no guarantees of usefulness down the line.

The cloud solves many long standing issues in traditional broadcasting. We employ a scalable, modular infrastructure that efficiently moves and stores data, runs live graphics systems at every resolution, and handles video stitching and audio needs on a case-by-case basis. This enables an elasticity of media across formats that would otherwise be a massive headache (and a logistical nightmare). In the morning we’ll do a show at 16:9 at 1920x1080, and at night we’ll do a show at 8K on the same software. We just [effectively] hit a few buttons on the computer and we’re good to go. That said, we keep a close eye on hardware innovation as it catches up to software.

Cost and Stability

The cloud only loses cost-effectiveness if you keep it on when you don’t need it. Our truck is a remote data center with every tool we need on demand, and we pay as we go. Unlocking virtual hardware means we don’t need to rent or buy trucks, and we save on travel costs, making the cloud a preferable and less costly alternative to traditional, physical production.

Remote production also unlocks scalability. When we run a show in the cloud, we use far fewer onsite engineers (usually 3 for a 6 camera show), the rest of the engineers have a 3-footcommute to the next show, and the team can run a shoot from LA in the morning and do England in the evening.

 As the old broadcast model becomes increasingly expensive when compared with what a teenager can do with their phone, and digital content operates on tighter and tighter budgets, the shift to the cloud looks more and more inviting in VR, but also everywhere else. 

Broadcasting is all about redundancy and stability. We live and die by our signal, and have whole codes of superstition around it. By drastically reducing our onsite footprint, we run into fewer failures. We’ve run into snow plows cutting cables during several physical shows, and while we have used snowcones for our cloud shows, we generally find the cloud much more reliable. It’s also worth pointing out, while our shows are very important to us and to our clients, if AWS goes down, we’re going to have much bigger problems societally.

Talent & Sustainability

The Cloud allows us to take a talent-focused approach to hiring. Our team is a motley crew of the best-of-the-best broadcast creative technologists from around the world; not formed based on who can show up to a monitor in LA, but based on who’s best for the job. As we face new challenges only an 18-year-old Twitch streamer or OBS-modder in Europe has ever faced before, our talent flexibility keeps us nimble, and removing the geographical hiring barrier has been crucial to our performance so far.

Not having to travel also cuts the majority of your carbon footprint. 1 hour of broadcast television generates about 9 metric tons of carbon. Today, you can run seven 4k VR shows with high graphics and only produce 0.1. Comparatively, doing a single show with a truck is equivalent to running two refrigerators for over a year. Vendors like AWS power their data centers with sustainable energy, and provide carbon trackers you can use to measure and offset what’s left.

Conclusion

Remote, cloud-based production workflows virtualize all the hardware of the production process. Vendors who offer virtualized solutions have them all running on a virtual computer rather than a physical server rack that’s recording media to a flash drive. But the incredible benefits in costs, data, compute, talent, and sustainability come with the cost of a dramatic shift in mindset. As the old broadcast model becomes increasingly expensive when compared with what a teenager can do with their phone, and digital content operates on tighter and tighter budgets, the shift to the cloud looks more and more inviting in VR, but also everywhere else.