Hello, and welcome to "This is My Architecture."
My name is Amir. I'm here with Matt from WarnerMedia/HBO.
Matt, why don't you tell us what HBO does?
So HBO is a content provider. We're now part of WarnerMedia.
And we have a number of brands that we are currently supporting.
We're here today to talk about your cloud linear playout
you guys are running currently through New York and Atlanta.
So why don't you tell us a little about what business problem that was trying to solve.
Sure. The business problem is actually twofold.
Initially, it was a BCP solution, so business continuity.
That morphed over time with the business
to support 30 channels out of our
AWS us-east-1 Region.
And I see we have it drawn up here on the board.
So why don't you walk us through how files get
moved up into the cloud, processed,
and then sent back out for playout.
Sure. So today, Linear Ops QC's the files,
the master files, in Atlanta.
Those get taken via Aspera up to S3,
where they're stored with all of the brands.
We store all of our master files there.
Once they are registered in Evertz Mediator,
they then get transferred to the local EC2,
which is running Evertz's ORT software within each AZ.
In us-east-1, we have 10 channels running.
Each channel has a primary and backup.
The primary and backup
and the EC2 instances are supported also with autoscaling groups.
Those files are played out using Evertz Playtime.
That playout goes via Direct Connect
back to prem as a unicast signal.
Then that gets taken and compressed
and brought to the uplink
before distribution to affiliates.
So this path here which I just drew,
is what we call the X-chain.
I'll just put an X there.
That is a tertiary path to air.
We use an auto changeover switch onsite to switch between
a Techwood playout,
a CNN Center playout, and a cloud playout.
For the BCP solution,
we go Direct Connect to Hudson Yards.
And that is eight channels.
And that also gets fed to an uplink.
Now, I've noticed you've got CloudFormation here.
What was that used to deploy the solution here?
Good question. So we took the CloudFormation templates.
We actually scrubbed them all.
Our internal cloud team worked with AWS and Evertz to
essentially edit those YAML files and create
what is a repeatable process so we can now
expand the deployment if we like.
We went through about 40 YAMLs to deploy the system.
And I see that, since they're in different AZs,
if one goes down, the other AZs are still up
and the solution is still running, right?
Absolutely. Redundancy was a key part of this.
We want to try to reach the 5.9's availability
that you would expect from an on-prem system.
And to handle any sort of latency or any problems with the connection,
what kind of protocol are you using to run from
the EC2s to your on-prem?
Good question. Today we're using Evertz's Cloudbridge
to take us from the EC2, the ORT,
back to site.
And we basically bookend that connection.
There's Cloudbridge in New York.
There's Cloudbridges in Atlanta,
and there's Cloudbridges in AWS.
What's your future plans for this solution going forward?
So there are a couple of things on the plate right now we're looking at Live;
how can we take a venue signal
and essentially switch between a live
input on the ORT
and switch between live and pre-recorded content.
We're also looking at taking these signals
from the ORTs out
and Muxing them together, creating a multiplex
that we can then hand off direct to an MVPD,
so essentially doing the compression that you would do today at Atlanta
and do that in the cloud.
Thanks, Matt. It was great learning
how you're able to use the cloud to speed up your deployment
for your cloud linear playout to your affiliates.
Thanks. My pleasure.
And thanks for watching "This is My Architecture."