CBS Sports Goes All-In on Cloud Playout for Launch of Golazo Network By Jason Dachman, Chief Editor Tuesday, April 11, 2023 - 2:03 pm
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The launch of the CBS Sports Golazo Network today marks not only one of the biggest swings in the history of soccer programming but also one of the biggest cloud deployments in the history of broadcasting. All switching, routing, recording, clipping, and distribution is being done entirely in an AWS cloud environment for the 24-hour direct-to-consumer streaming network, which is dedicated entirely to domestic and international soccer coverage.
Everything is actually built in the cloud in terms of the network playout, says Corey Smith, senior director, advanced production technologies, CBS Sports. The only thing we're [producing] live from outside the cloud are our desk shows coming from Ft. Lauderdale or Stamford or CBS Broadcast Center - or it could be anywhere else in the world. Our cloud-based infrastructure can pull in all the external feeds coming in and route them logically - just like you would in a fixed facility but removing the dependency on a physical facility - to package all of the broadcasts. It's quite the machine we've built.
System Overview: GV AMPP, AWS Play Key Roles Golazo Network's cloud-based ecosystem is based on Grass Valley's GV AMPP (Agile Media Processing Platform) and has been built out across multiple AWS instances. GV AMPP handles all playout, recording, routing, and switching from its broadcast facilities (the system also features GV Replay and Live Touch Integration), and Net Insight NIMBRA manages all routing of SRT feeds within the cloud. Other key vendors are OpenDrives for cloud-based storage, EEG's Lexi encoders for automated captioning, and a mix of Ross Video Xpression, Chyron, and Singular.Live for graphics. The ticker is supplied by a set of servers in Dublin routing over NDI into playout and keyed in cloud.
CBS Sports Golazo Network's Morning Footy debuted this morning, featuring (from left) Susannah Collins, Charlie Davies, Nico Cantor, and Alexis Guerreros.
We're truly embarking on a new mission where we're not allowing physical constraints to dictate what feeds we get and who we get them from, says Smith. The biggest challenge is how to globally scale this. How do we bring up environments in a blue/red network design just like you would for a traditional high-profile television network? You need to make sure you have zero points of failure, everything's redundant, and things are all backed up.
The primary AWS data center for the Golazo Network operation is in Virginia, which is close to CBS Sports Digital's studios in Stamford, CT, and Ft. Lauderdale, FL, as well as the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. In total, the ecosystem comprises five AWS regions: Virginia, Dublin, Frankfurt, Oregon, and Sao Paulo.
Inside each environment, several layers of technology are deployed. The primary regions for AMPP are Oregon, Virginia, Dublin, and Sao Paulo - the last also serving as a hub for Paramount Global's Latin American operations in Argentina and Brazil. All recording infrastructure is run out of Virginia, Oregon, and Dublin; the playout systems come out of Virginia and Oregon. Asset-management nodes are in Virginia, Dublin, Oregon, and Sao Paulo. Net Insight NIMBRA infrastructure is deployed in all five regions.
It's a fairly crazy undertaking to put this much switching, routing, and recording capability in cloud, says Smith. I don't know that that I've seen anybody else doing this - at least not at this scale.
Since all infrastructure is in the cloud, all operators for the Golazo Network are able to work remotely. Currently, master-control operators are located in Tennessee, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Texas, Mississippi, Colorado, and other places.
Recording, Storage, MAM: OpenDrives and GV AMPP Elastic Recorder One of the biggest challenges CBS Sports faced was figuring out how to deploy enough storage in the environment to record all the feeds - including all live matches and studio shows - for re-airing later. CBS Sports opted to deploy a model in which three regions have OpenDrives storage built in the cloud. Each environment has roughly 500 TB of storage, totaling 1 PB of cloud storage across the three regions.
Those regions are equipped with a GV AMPP Elastic Recorder, providing 40 channels of live-recording capacity. The asset-management layer indexes the content based on storage location and makes it available to all playout nodes and the operators in master control to clip the content for playout.
Box to Box, with Poppy Miller (left) and Aaron West, launched today.
It's a very complex mesh of storage locations, says Smith. Every box can reach every storage region, and every storage region is accessible to every box that it needs access to. When we're doing a primary and a backup record, we may be recording into Virginia as primary and into Dublin as secondary. We always have a backup file copy somewhere on the network. If we lose Virginia, for example, we can still bring those files back to our playout nodes in Oregon. We're actively redundant on multiple layers.
OpenDrives helped solve a key issue for CBS Sports when constructing the ecosystem: AWS doesn't have the functionality to do live read/write on S3 until the file is closed. 0
We needed to be able to take the assets coming into the system and subclip them so we can roll it to playout, says Smith. As we are clipping content internally, we can basically drag those clip assets directly from asset management into the playlist as we're building our 24-hour program schedule throughout the course of the day.
Contribution, Routing, Switching, Captioning: GV AMPP, Net Insight NIMBRA, and EEG Le
