- Director and editing suites from the Open Telekom Cloud: Sony Media Backbone Hive
- Video processing and transmission from Harmonic
- Broadcast industry benefits from highly scalable resources from Deutsche Telekom's cloud data centers
Open Telekom Cloud: T-Systems, Sony and Harmonic are revolutionizing news production
T-Systems, Sony and Harmonic are revolutionizing the way media companies create and transmit news, live events and video content: in future, Sony will offer its Media Backbone Hive news production system from the Open Telekom Cloud with Harmonic providing a cloud-based video processing solution, the three companies announced at the IBC exhibition in Amsterdam.
With this step, Deutsche Telekom’ business customer unit, Sony and Harmonic are giving the broadcasting industry a technology that frees the fast-moving news business from expensive hardware and allows it to capture the cost advantages of a cloud-based operating model.
Sony's Media Backbone Hive is a high-performance, omni-media solution from the Open Telekom Cloud for journalists, editors and directors for production, post-production and live reporting. The advantage: instead of having to use expensive, complex equipment like broadcast vans, image mixers, editing stations and playout servers, journalists can create their content online, directly in the Open Telekom Cloud – for TV, mobile devices and social media. Users can even integrate camera signals easily, over the mobile communications network. As a result, complete live events can be produced using Sony's virtual, cloud-based directing studio.
For the distribution of content to the various channels Harmonic, a market-leading specialist for cloud video delivery, could provide the solution of choice as Harmonic VOS Cloud has also been successfully deployed on the Open Telekom Cloud. It is a comprehensive software solution that has been optimized for this new environment, providing an orchestrated set of cloud-native functions, including transcoding and packaging, for OTT delivery.
"The news business keeps getting faster and more agile. Broadcasters and producers face the challenge of keeping up with this pace, while cutting costs at the same time," says Ralf Hülsmann, Head of Cloud Partner Ecosystem at T-Systems, Deutsche Telekom's corporate customers arm. "Since film production demands large computing capacities, the high-performance, flexible, scalable resources from the Open Telekom Cloud are the perfect answer to these challenges."
Stuart Almond, Head of Marketing, Sony Professional Solutions Europe, says, "When you produce content online in the cloud, you're already where the young target audiences get their news. With the Open Telekom Cloud, we are providing a universal tool that is redefining production – incuding the economic aspects."
Bart Spriester, Senior Vice President, Video Products at Harmonic says, “Leveraging Harmonic VOS Cloud, Sony’s Media Backbone Hive on the Open Telekom Cloud provides an efficient cloud-based method for complex workflows.”
The Open Telekom Cloud, based on OpenStack architecture, is Deutsche Telekom's public cloud offering. The company runs the cloud in its German data centers. All the data that is stored and processed there is subject to Germany's strict privacy and data protection regulations. Early this year, DEKRA certified the high data privacy and data protection level of the Open Telekom Cloud (ISO 27017 for data security and ISO 27018 for data privacy). Users can book resources in different flavors, which are predefined combinations of computing and storage capacity. Virtual machines can be scaled nearly infinitely as needed, ordered and then deactivated again – all billed exactly to the minute.