Amsterdam – 15 September 2017: ​ Sony Professional Solutions Europe and Switzerland's largest ICT provider Swisscom presented an industry first, truly cloud native live and post-production platform for multi-channel delivery at the Locarno International Film Festival. They combined Sony’s Media Backbone HIVE, live streaming technology and Sony’s innovative virtual switcher with Swisscom’s 4G first class mobile network, secure data centres and cloud, to deliver live and video-on-demand content in the first virtualised production workflow of its kind. This cloud native setup enables effective content creation to producers and broadcasters of any size.

Sony and Swisscom successfully operated a fully virtual workflow at Locarno Film Festival. Taking innovations one-step further, this allowed Locarno Film Festival crews to capture content wirelessly, whilst connected to Sony XDCAM Camcorders and even Smartphones. The footage they produced was then streamed to the Swisscom cloud through Swisscom’s 4G mobile network. Editors could access the proxy content arriving in the cloud while the camera crew were still in the field, and start the edit using Media Backbone Hive’s web editor for fast publishing. Unlike previous years, this full cloud-native production platform gave the festival crews the opportunity to produce video-on-demand content, in addition to live content for their online audience. The team could also use Adobe Premiere, which was seamlessly integrated into the platform, for a more sophisticated effect.

The three key fixed locations of the festival – where a traditional production is set up - were also equipped with CBK-WA100, Sony’s compact wireless modules and Swisscom LTE/4G dongles, wirelessly feeding live streams to the virtual switcher. This allowed the social media team to pick up any content they wanted for the daily live show on Facebook, ‘Good Morning Locarno’, without having to send additional people on site.
​Proofed workflow in a demanding environment

The platform was used for the duration of the 10-day festival, through an on-demand service providing a level of flexibility that was not possible before. “Delivering the first truly cloud-native workflow of this kind for Locarno Film Festival is a fantastic achievement,” said Urs Lehner, Head of Enterprise Customers at Swisscom. “We understand the time pressures facing everybody -broadcasters, production companies and content creators alike, in this digital age of ‘everything now’, this is the first step to making cloud technology more accessible to smaller broadcast teams, whilst driving down cost.”

“We’re delighted to have strengthened our partnership with Swisscom through building another transformative cloud production workflow for Locarno Film Festival,” said Richard Scott, Head of Media Solutions at Sony Professional Solutions Europe. “Together, we’ve enabled the festival to produce more content across more platforms at a lower cost, whilst increasing collaboration across teams. This project demonstrates Sony’s and Swisscom’s aim to deliver dynamic business models to our customers, increasing the amount of OpEx opportunities, to make this innovative technology available to broadcasters of any size.” The scalable workflow is ideal for those looking to avoid overinvestment in live production infrastructure, but gain simple access to the required e2e-orchestrated production tool-sets for a limited period of time.

Building on previous achievements
​ The fully virtualised workflow builds on previous achievements of Sony and Swisscom. They first used XDCAM camcorder’s QoS (Quality of Service) live streaming and Swisscom’s 4G mobile network in 2015, to demonstrate a cost-efficient live coverage delivery. Sony and Swisscom are optimising the traditional linear workflow, gaining a minimum of 30% cost saving. In 2016, the strategic partnership provided the integration of these live streams into a cloud-based virtual switcher, hosted in Swisscom’s data centre. This reduced the entire production to only a few wireless-enabled camcorders and a PC. Now in 2017, they have established a fully virtual platform for post production in the cloud.

For more information visit pro.sony.eu.

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