Cloud playout is quickly gaining favor among broadcasters and content providers, making it easier to enhance the viewer experience by accelerating the launch of new channels and enabling more cost-efficient content delivery.
However, going all in on the cloud is more challenging for media providers with legacy SDI infrastructure. To answer this demand, Coralbay.tv develops next-generation full and hybrid cloud playout solutions. Its team serves clients across the UK, Europe, Asia, and Brazil, including SES, Red Bee, and others.
Leveraging the elasticity and redundancy of the cloud, its solutions are designed with microservices, containerized via the Docker platform, and deployed using Kubernetes. When a coralbay.tv client recently expressed interest in a playout system with NDI and SDI inputs and outputs, the team combined its cloud-enabled playout solution coralPlay with AJA’s BRIDGE NDI 3G IP gateway device to deliver a solution.
Coralbay.tv CEO, Peter Hajittofi, said: ‘The customer’s video router was already in use by a legacy system, so we had to be extra careful during the implementation phase. The company was considering a transition to NDI for some workflows within their facility in the future, so that was a factor in our decision to utilize the AJA BRIDGE NDI 3G. This, paired with coralPlay, allowed us to provide both SDI and NDI inputs and outputs simultaneously for added flexibility’.
CoralPlay is a new generation of playout software that provides an automation control interface and video pipelines capable of playing video and audio in various formats, including XDCAM, AVC Intra, IMX, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. It also supports several wrappers such as MXF, MOV, and GXF, as well as SD, HD, and UltraHD resolutions, and boasts an internal graphics generator, keyer, master control switcher, DVE, up/down scaler, SCTE inserter/detector, subtitler, and loudness normalization.
Output of DVB MPEG-2 transport streams or H264 with Dolby D, MPEG1, or AAC audio is also supported with the system, and NewTek NDI I/O and HLS can be used for preview. Optionally, using an AJA video card, SDI video can be output via coralPlay, and inputs can be NDI, H264, or MPEG-2 transport streams. The solution can scale from one to hundreds of channels, and channels can be launched within seconds and/or decommissioned easily after use, all in the software and without complex re-wiring.
Commenting on the decision to use BRIDGE NDI 3G and his experience, Hajittofi concluded: ‘We were particularly drawn to BRIDGE NDI 3G’s live I/O preview and simultaneous source/ destination capabilities. Both features provide great insight and visibility into the current status of NDI streams and make configuration/control of the BRIDGE NDI 3G simple. Overall, we’ve been very happy with the BRIDGE NDI 3G and the support we’ve received from AJA’.
coralPlay customers can leverage the technology to manage the playout of their channels. They can import playlists manually, or the system can load them automatically. The technology is compatible with dynamic traffic interfaces and allows for last-minute changes to on-air playlists. When playlists are loaded, the system will automatically look for media that corresponds with the media IDs in the playlists. Media can be stored locally, held in deeper storage (either in the cloud via a solution like Amazon S3 or in an archive within a facility), or kept on nearline storage on a NAS or SAN. The system will automatically retrieve media, both primary and secondary, that is needed for playout from any deep storage location.
