Sony and Swisscom present the industry's first fully virtual workflow

The conceptual proof of a production workflow carried out at the Lorcano Festival represents the first application of Sony's HIVE virtual mixer and Media Backbone.

Sony and Swiss operator Swisscom presented the first truly cloud-native live production and post-production platform for multi-channel delivery at the Locarno International Film Festival. They combined Sony's HIVE Media Backbone, live streaming technology and Sony's innovative virtual switcher with secure data centers, the cloud and Swisscom's world-class 4G mobile network to deliver live and video-on-demand content in a first-of-its-kind virtualized production workflow. This cloud-native setup enables efficient content creation for producers and broadcasters of any scale.

Sony and Swisscom have successfully implemented a fully virtual workflow at the Locarno Film Festival. Thanks to this step forward in innovation, Locarno Film Festival teams were able to capture content wirelessly connected to Sony XDCAM camcorders and even smartphones. The obtained material was then transmitted to the Swisscom cloud via its 4G mobile network. Editors could access proxy content arriving in the cloud while the camera crew was still on location and begin editing using the Media Backbone Hive web editor for lightning-fast publishing. Unlike previous years, this comprehensive cloud-native production platform gave festival teams the opportunity to produce video-on-demand content in addition to live content for audiences delivered via the Internet. The team was also able to use Adobe Premiere, seamlessly integrated into the platform, for a more sophisticated effect.

The three main fixed locations of the festival, where the traditional production is located, were equipped with CBK-WA100, compact wireless modules from Sony and LTE/4G adapters from Swisscom, which transmitted live to the virtual mixer. In this way, the team in charge of social networks could take any content they wanted for their daily live program on Facebook, Good Morning, Locarno, without having to send more people to the place in question.

Proof of demanding environments

The platform was used throughout the ten-day festival through an on-demand service that provided a level of flexibility not previously possible. Urs Lehner, Head of Enterprise Clients at Swisscom, comments: "Delivering the first truly cloud-native workflow of its kind at the Locarno Film Festival has been a fantastic achievement. We understand the time pressures that everyone, be they broadcasters, production companies and content creators, face in the digital age of immediacy. This is the first step in making cloud technology more accessible to small broadcast teams and at the same time time, costs are reduced.”

Richard Scott, Head of Media Solutions at Sony Professional Solutions Europe, said: "We are delighted to have strengthened our collaboration with Swisscom by building another transformative cloud production workflow within the framework of the Locarno Film Festival. Together, we have enabled the festival to produce more content on more platforms at a lower cost, while increasing collaboration between teams."

“This project demonstrates Sony and Swisscom's shared goal of delivering dynamic business models to our customers, increasing the number of opex opportunities, making this innovative technology available to chains of any size,” he adds.

The extensible production workflow is ideal for those who want to avoid excessive investment in live production infrastructure and instead want easy access to the production toolsets orchestrated by e2e and required for a limited period of time.

This fully virtualized workflow builds on previous successes from Sony and Swisscom. Already in 2015, they used the QoS (Quality of Service) direct streaming of the XDCAM camcorder and Swisscom's 4G mobile network for the first time to deliver cost-effective live coverage. Sony and Swisscom are optimizing traditional linear workflow to achieve cost savings of at least 30%. In 2016, this strategic partnership saw the integration of live streams into a cloud-based virtual mixer hosted in Swisscom's data center. This reduced the entire production to just a few wirelessly activated camcorders and a PC. Now, in 2017, they have established a virtual platform for post-production in the cloud.