Future of sports broadcasting: Behind the live production software of manifold Cloud

Is cloud the future of sports broadcasting? According to manifold, an independent spin off from Arkona, its manifold Cloud production infrastructure means it can be. manifold Cloud is a broadcast live production infrastructure software product that runs on COTS FPGA programmable acceleration cards (PAC) from various manufacturers. At its core, manifold Cloud is service oriented software that utilises an on-demand configurable pool of shared COTS resources (PACs) allocated within a private cloud environment. Hardware resources are pooled together in clusters which can be thought of as virtual private clouds, or put differently, a broadcast production. Here, we chat to Erling Hedkvist, sales and business development manager at Arkona, to find out what it’s all about.

Tell me about the development of manifold Cloud – how did it come about as a concept initially?

The background behind manifold Cloud was that we were clearly seeing how the benefits of virtualisation and cloud computing would be beneficial for our customers, but they did not want to compromise on the performance and quality of their existing solutions. manifold Cloud was developed to provide these benefits, such as a user-friendly single sign-on easy webUI, a 100% software based service architecture which can easily scale on-demand, built-in automated resiliency and the ability to run on COTS hardware from a multitude of manufacturers.

What is the aim and vision behind its creation?

• The aim and vision can be summarised in a few bullets:
• To provide the benefits of cloud computing and virtualisation such as self-healing, service-based architecture and on-demand capabilities while retaining the performance our customers expect for Tier 1 live broadcast productions
• To take advantage of the fast development cycles of COTS chip and server manufacturers while at the same time lowering the capex and power costs
• To provide a 100% software service-based solution based around a modern API with a single sign on web-based user interface accessible from anywhere

How have you created it? How long did it take and what has been invested in it?

manifold Cloud is developed on a modern software-based technology stack. It’s centered around a PostgreSQL database that is federated across multiple servers with each server containing one or more FPGA accelerators that provide the “heavy lifting” and implement the broadcast specific services that the operator requests from the single-sign-on UI or through the REST API. Services are dynamically placed on the accelerators without user intervention.
It was developed by the manifold R&D team that has several decades of experience of building high end live production technology.

What’s the cool thing about manifold?

There’s a lot of cool things with manifold Cloud! Here are a few bullets:

• 100% software-based service architecture
• Simple configuration through single-sign-on UI. Users can focus on the what not the how. Easily save complete productions as code (infrastructure as code). As a 100% software-based solution it allows it to constantly be improved and upgraded as more powerful compute becomes available
• Resiliency and automatic provisioning through virtualisation
  manifold Cloud is inherently self-healing and will automatically recover from processing failure
• In addition, it scales linearly, the more compute resources that are added to a cluster the more it can process
• Current generation COTS FPGA offer at least 10 x more density than competing platforms
• Power consumption is 1/10th (10%) of equivalent CPU-based systems

What does manifold’s technology and roadmap ultimately mean for the future of arkona?

arkona and manifold work together in partnership with arkona providing the AT300 as a programmable acceleration card (PAC) for manifold Cloud. In addition, arkona has a well established product line with Blade//runner. Our belief is that many customers will decide on a solution that includes both Blade//runner and manifold Cloud for a long time.

Why is cloud the future for sports broadcasting?

We believe that the benefits of virtualisation and software solutions are apparent and obvious to all industries, as can be seen by the huge success of the public cloud providers today. What we are doing is simply providing these benefits in conjunction with a private cloud environment which is able to provide the performance our customers are asking for. Ultimately, we create software and it doesn’t matter if it resides in public or private cloud, as long as it meets our customers’ needs.