AWS for M&E Blog
AWS introduces Virtual Live Remote Production Partner Acceleration Initiative for Media
Introduction
The media and entertainment (M&E) industry has witnessed an accelerated move to the cloud to deliver end-to-end live remote production workloads. This move is driven by new norms for remote work, the need to reduce production costs, and to desire to unlock new revenue streams. To help expedite our customers’ and partners’ journey to achieve live production in the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Virtual Live Remote Production (vLRP) Partner Acceleration Initiative.
The initiative is a targeted framework that aims to close technology gaps and expand the broadcast solution portfolio, resulting in timely workload outcomes for both current and future partners and the M&E community. AWS Partners participating in the vLRP initiative develop solutions on AWS based on the Well-Architected Framework (WAF), ensuring consistency in adopting AWS best practices. This allows them to scale best practices across different offerings, resulting in the scaled acceleration of solutions available to customers.
Participating partners share their sentiments about the initiative:
“The best way to reduce pain and friction for our customers who want to produce live content in the cloud is for vendors to come together to innovate, educate, and collaborate. The virtual Remote Live Production (vRLP) initiative provides a fantastic opportunity for us to build the future of cloud production with other leaders in the field.” – Ulrich Voigt – Global Head of Product Management, VIZRT GROUP.
“Diversified believes that the vLRP program is building unprecedented cloud interoperability, system flexibility, speed, and scale of deployment. We are honored to be selected as the Global Systems Integrator by Amazon to simplify and enable next-generation best-of-breed cloud engagements.” – Tom Carlisle – Media Cloud Solutions Leader, Emerging Technology & Solutions, Diversified.
“Telos Alliance has been developing cloud intercom and cloud mixing solutions for the past couple of years and we are thrilled to be part of a community of other vendors working side-by-side with AWS to see real-time production fully realized with the vLRP initiative.” – John Schur – president, solutions group, Telos Alliance.
“Matrox Video is thrilled to collaborate with AWS on this new cloud-based initiative as it marks a significant step in enabling broadcasters to deliver tier-one productions in the cloud. Throughout our history, we have provided underlying technology to solution providers to offer best-of-breed on-premises broadcast workflows. As the industry looks to the cloud, we find ourselves poised to bring our experience and know-how to harness the asynchronous nature of the cloud with a disruptive media development framework—with zero compromises.” – Francesco Scartozzi, Vice President, Sales & Business Development, Matrox Video.
“We’re thrilled to be joining the AWS virtual live production accelerator (vLRP) initiative. We believe that with its advanced graphics and live production capabilities, the Chyron PRIME and LIVE platforms will be adding a lot of value to the vLRP ecosystem. This ecosystem encapsulates the most advanced platforms from the leading vendors in their respective fields – all running on AWS – so that content creators around the world can form best-of-breed production environments, on demand, to address today’s and tomorrow’s most demanding live production needs.” – Mathieu Yerle -Senior Vice President of Strategy & Product.
“We are proud to partner with AWS and other industry leaders through this vLRP initiative.” said Masakazu Murata, Sr. General Manager of Media Solutions Business, Sony Corporation. “Sony’s purpose is to fill the world with emotion, through the power of creativity and technology. Our solutions empower our customers to produce high-quality content from virtually anywhere and at practically any scale, using the optimum combination of resources – whether on-premises or in the cloud. We are confident that with AWS’s leadership and our collective expertise, we can unleash new levels of creativity and productivity for the benefit of our customers”.
The vLRP initiative introduced a sub-stream called “The Global Control API Interoperability” to accelerate multi-partner integration and solution optimization. This aims to encourage solutions to communicate in a lightweight and agnostic manner and reduce integration barriers, accelerating product and solution build, test, integration, and go-to-market. It also seeks to harness multi-vendor integrations’ collective and cumulative capabilities within a well-defined control protocol, using the NMOS IS-12 specification developed by the Advanced Media Workflow Association (AMWA).
Participating AWS Partners receive targeted support through business and technical expertise to guide them through AWS best practices, as well as funding towards their innovation costs. Additionally, the initiative introduces a “Feature-Up” facet that extends partner support beyond the minimum viable product MVP milestone, enabling partners to accelerate integration of new AWS services and features with their offerings. Overall, the vLRP initiative provides a comprehensive framework for partners to develop and scale their solutions, enabling them to meet the needs of their customers and the industry as a whole.
Benefits
The vLRP initiative offers a range of benefits to both AWS customers and technology vendors. For customers, these benefits include increased workflow agility and innovation through multi-vendor solutions, access to a variety of solution offerings from industry technology vendors, and ease of deployment, integration and monitoring/observability.
For AWS Partners, the initiative provides a focused approach where AWS collaborates with the partner to transform identified workloads using AWS’s best practices. As part of this collaboration, relevant AWS initiatives are consolidated into a single-pane view, reducing the effort required for partners to understand individual motions and processes. Additionally, partners are equipped with repeatable processes to accelerate their cloud journey across various offerings, resulting in an accelerated transformation and improved efficiency.
The following diagram illustrates the initiative stages:
Figure 1: Initiative stages
Initiative inputs include identifying business and technical requirements depending on the partner’s stage in the Amazon Partner Network (APN) journey, and a collaboration workshop addressing the partner’s technical and business visions through targeted deep dives.
Initiative outputs include building a collaboration plan with clear milestones and shared responsibility definitions, as well as mechanisms to monitor progress and fine-tune steps towards defined milestones. Example milestones may include a path to modernizing an application, migrating a solution to AWS, improving on an existing offering using the Well-Architected Framework best practices, and more.
Initiative outcomes include achieving an MVP and go-to-market motions set as agreed-upon goals with the partner, such as listing their offering on AWS Marketplace, building a SaaS solution, and so on.
Partner enablement: Training, certification, and custom enablements are provided throughout the partner’s journey through the initiative.
Focus areas
The first iteration of the vLRP initiative targets the followings focus areas in live remote production workloads: Vision mixing, audio mixing, intercom, multiviewers, camera control, routing, news room control systems, production graphics, and replay, as well as system integrations to enable streamlined multi-vendor integration.
Participants
Eight AWS Partners currently participate in the vLRP Partner Accelerator Initiative, with plans to onboard additional partners:
The AWS booth at NAB 2023 will highlight an array of vendor offerings and demonstrations. Find AWS in booth W1701 April 16—19 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Interested to know more about AWS Partner solutions for M&E? Visit Vizrt (W2821), TAG VS (W1542), Associated Press (AP) (C4008), Telos Alliance (W3673), Chyron (N2647), Matrox (N2121), Diversified (W2575), and Sony (C8101) at NAB 2023.