Entertainment = Consumption + Interaction:

Internet-enabled TV will bring about some radical changes.  Nielsen’s Three Screen Report indicates that consumption of the moving image is increasing across all three screens: traditional TV, internet, and mobile. The interactivity of this “data” will surely change. Entertainment now equals both watching and interaction: checking out additional content online, playing games, or participating in ads as entertainment. 3D and gesture-based interactions will also redefine this blurring of the line between passive and active viewing over the next few years.

Ditch the “dumb” set-top:

Content models that rely on “captive audience” set-top box capture of viewing habits are outmoded as delivery systems, and deliver poor analytics and reporting compared with the information we can glean from a data-only model. If content owners rely on this information, why does the old model remain unchecked? The set-top box is largely a passive unit that doesn’t include an interface, platform, or APIs for allowing advertisers to interact directly with their target audience in real-time like the Web does. We have seen some recent (and awesome) successes with new methods of delivery: Hulu, Netflix, MLB, and on-demand efforts. However we are in an infancy of thinking about the possibilities of satellite, cable, and their antiquated set-tops, and how broadcast can recapture some of the money that migrated to online advertising.

This is an opportunity for direct access to consumers in their living rooms. The delivery method is there, there is already a large internet-enabled box in many living rooms: tuner, DVR, AppleTV, Slingbox, etc. MSOs already have the access to provide value-add applications to the experience, but what is preventing them from radically changing the intersection of TV, Internet, and advertising? They actually have had a better chance than anyone.

Develop a platform:

Imagine tying content delivery to analytics and advertising – a platform that delivers both choice and guidance to direct viewers to shows they like, and then targets accompanying ads based on more granular information and feedback. Visible World does last-mile ad insertion for parent company, Comcast, who acquired one of the big three: NBC.  A small wrinkle in this still-disputed merger is Sen. Kohl, who is asking for a divestiture of NBC’s holdings in Hulu, arguing that it potentially violates anti-trust.

But this is an amazing opportunity for MSOs to radically change the model for consumers and advertisers by providing a platform for interaction. MSOs have a chance to drive people back to their subscriptions — otherwise we will see a switch to online viewing, where advertisers can get a lot more feedback for their digital dimes, and consumers can have more choice, and augment their experiences.

The TV could supersede the MSO-provided set-top box as a platform:

Internet-enabled TVs or TVs with companion internet-enabled boxes will supersede the current MSO interface and platform. Federated search across Internet/DVR/broadcast is far more useful and less clunky than a remote-driven interface.  In addition, the ability to bring in dynamic web content — ads, additional content, or related information — should quickly reduce the three screens to just two.

When MSOs realize they are missing out on key advertising opportunities, we will see a rush to market with subscription- and licensed-content across the three screens. You would have thought that Hulu would have put the fear in them, but wait until Google TV takes their bite.  Their recent partnerships with TV manufacturer, Sony, ensures that this will be widely distributed to Best Buy, Walmart, etc. beyond the market reach of Roku, Slingboxes, of the world.

Prepare to lose ad revenue:

NBC Universal’s (current) CEO Jeff Zucker and his oft-quoted ‘trading analog dollars for digital pennies’ was revised last year to ‘digital dimes’ from the man himself. That is good news, especially for the multitudes of investors that entered into internet video ventures last year. Out of that gold-rush of investment though, there hasn’t been significant pay-dirt for many. Clearly the answer lies in uniting broadcast to the Internet, bringing the interactivity the web provides, in addition to the type of analytics that are possible. I predict Google TV will make more of an impact than Apple TV did to unite those advertising schemes, although watch out, Apple’s clearly got some plans a brewin‘.

Google TV offers the opportunity to sell ad’s within the interface, and provide targeted advertising, on the TV. Show me what you got MSO’s.

In Conclusion:

It is a rapidly changing world, and people have clearly shown that the TV, cable-tuner, and DVR do not have all the features people want. The cable companies who own the infrastructure and delivery method of video and data are being left out of this equation. Google has side-stepped around cable companies and the licensing issues — wisely I might add — and added a layer with enhancements that will allow them get deep into people’s living rooms, to collect data and provide a smarter ad platform. Things are going to get really interesting….

Everyone, everywhere, was talking about 3D: cameras, displays, production software, trucks, expertise, etc. The race for preparedness is on, and people will spend as pushy studios and producers want to be the first to do this or that with 3D. First sitcom, first sporting event, first documentary, first newscast, etc. The reality is that we are a ways off from wide-scale adoption, and showrooms and special screenings will be the place for 3D for the foreseeable future. We are in a similar catch-22 phase as a few years ago during the early days of HD production – 3D TVs are just coming onto the market and will drop down to reasonable consumer level prices within the next 2-3 yrs. Consumers are asking “do I buy a 3D TV when there is little to no programming?” while content creators are wondering “do I produce in 3D when there is little to no audience?”

Being an industry event though, it’s about more than bragging rights or audience – it’s about technical feasibility, practice, and logistics – all things which will change when 3D comes to our living room. DirecTV has announced that they will carry four 3D channels starting in June, including ESPN 3D and a dedicated 3D pay-per-view channel. And Cablevision dipped its toes into the 3D pool a few weeks ago with an MSG Network broadcast of a Rangers and Islanders hockey game live from Madison Square Garden.

After talking to a few industry experts who participated in the recent Masters in 3D, the challenges with 3D production are less technical than logistical: camera placement for example. While HD favors wide top-down shots for seeing all the action, 3D is most effective with close, ground-level cameras – imagine Phil Mickelson’s birdie putt as viewed from grass-level, just across the green, the ball rolling right toward you as he sinks it…

There were also lots of other things of interest: Falconstor’s HyperFS, CatDV asset management, Avid’s Java app for editing over the web, 3ality cameras, Adobe CS5, among many more. We were particularly excited by the potential of Active Storage’s Innerpool appliance for metadata. This PCI Express card contains on-board redundant solid-state drives, specifically engineered for storing metadata in an Xsan environment. This has the potential of being something of a game changer, allowing us to more efficiently configure the storage in our Xsan integrations, and giving our clients more bang for their buck when deploying new SAN solutions.

We had some great meetings with prospective clients, old and new friends, fellow consultants and vendors, and we’re excited about some emerging strategic opportunities. Our work in online video technology and web delivery combined with our broadcast infrastructure and workflow experience means we are ideally positioned to help organizations streamline and bring these workstreams closer together.

When I started searching for a way to connect an audio feed to a gateway router, I found that there were no great turnkey solutions. What I did find is that there is a way to make use of an available FXO port to bring a live feed into the system with some inexpensive parts. The solution I have deployed requires a surface mount RJ 45, a chassis mount RCA jack, and a stereo 1/8″ mini to RCA adaptor. All of these pieces can be found at a nearby electronics parts store and purchased for under $20. The FXO port and an iPod will set you back some but if you want easy control of your hold music it may be worth it.

Build the Adaptor

To make the adaptor, open up the surface mount box and figure out how you will attach the RCA jack. In one case I used a drill bit to make a hole for it, in another case I found a form factor where the notch for a cat 5 cable fit the connector perfectly. You may also find a general purpose surface mount with modular fittings where an RCA “snap in” would snap right in.

Once you’ve sorted that you will need a pair of wires from either a solid or stranded piece of cat 5. Punch these down to pins 4 and 5 of the RJ45 and solder the other side to the RCA jack.

When you are done it should look like this.

Adaptor wiring detail. Though the jack in this configuration is an RJ 45 you can use a standard RJ11 phone cord to connect between the adaptor and the FXO port.

Configuring the Voice Gateway

Configuring the voice gateway is pretty straightforward:

1. Create a DN for the MOH call out with an unused multicast address

ephone-dn 274
number 1 no-reg primary
moh ip 239.12.13.1 port 2000 out-call 899

2. Configure the available FXO port remain open to the iPod

voice-port 0/3/3
signal loopStart live-feed
input gain 2
description To MoH Live Feed

3. Create a dial peer to connect to the FXO port

dial-peer voice 55 pots
destination-pattern 899
port 0/3/3

4. Configure CME to use the multicast for MOH

telephony-service
multicast moh 239.12.13.1 port 2000

Then Shut/No shut the voice port to invoke the change.

I have been using one of the built in USB ports on our gateway here at Control Group to power the iPod which turns out to be very convenient.

Safety and Other Considerations

There are some very important caveats.

1. The adaptor I describe is potentially dangerous. If you were to connect an iPod to a POTS line or an FXS port feeding a battery signal you could damage the iPod or the device connected to it. You could also receive a serious electrical shock.
2. The use of copyrighted material for Music on Hold can be a violation of the rights of the copyright owner.
3. The adaptor will only work with one channel of audio from the iPod. If you use a mono 1/8″ to RCA cable it will short out the other channel.

These issues need to be minded if you would consider this solution. Also, keep in mind that people’s taste in music varies widely. Implement Music on Hold and you will find out just how much!

Miles Green is a Senior Network Engineer at Control Group and worked as a Musician and Recording Engineer in a previous life.

We have been doing some work with with Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) which allows us to create virtual machines in the cloud in a few seconds. These are great for hosting websites, and what’s cool about them is that if you get Slashdotted or experience a similar unexpected spike in traffic you can create new hosts immediately. Recently Amazon added a new service called Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) which can distribute load across hosts. We’ve been looking at this for some of our recent development and infrastructure projects.

I just read this description of how ELB works by Shlomo Swidler from his Cloud Developer Tips blog. It’s a great reference.

You pay for ELB by usage just like everything else at AWS. From Amazon: “You are charged at $0.025 per hour for each Elastic Load Balancer, plus $0.008 per GB of data transferred through an Elastic Load Balancer.” For reference, on a deployment project in 2008 our Engineering team used a Cisco load balancer which I imagine cost a few thousand bucks.

Cost isn’t the only advantage. These can be created and destroyed quickly and remotely, allowing us to work more efficiently and spend less time visiting data centers in the middle of nowhere. This leads to improved quality of service for our clients as we can spend more time consulting on future technology growth plans and less time troubleshooting servers in cold, loud data centers.

This blog post brought to you by the iced coffee I am enjoying in the comfort and quiet of my office while deploying virtual machines!

This tool is called iozone. iozone is open source and runs on a ton of operating systems (including Windows). It runs several tests which can take some time to complete but provide the best overall view of the capabilities of a piece of storage. For instance, iozone runs a write test with files of different sizes and with different size records (the amount of data written at a time). It does this over and over again with writes, reads, random writes, random reads, and so forth. Since it’s running all these tests you can see what sorts of operations will have good performance and which ones will not perform so well. Check out the iozone documentation here.

One really great thing about iozone is that the output it generates can be easily placed in a spreadsheet program like Excel to generate a great 3d diagram describing your storage. Here’s a diagram I generated from some tests on a Linux server.

Results of a write test with iozone

This particular server performed quite well with large files and a record size around 1 MB (interesting to note, this is the same storage from the lmdd post. Notice that the parameters I tested with there are the same as the best write that this disk can do according to iozone!).

If you’ve been following my posts on storage performance testing I hope you’ve learned about some new tools that you can use to see what’s going on. I use these on every deployment to make sure we’re giving our clients solutions that they can depend for performance and reliability. As always, let me know if you have any questions about these tools. Happy testing!

Tom Mills from Google and Sean Finnegan from Mozy will be giving an in-depth review of their offerings and how they fit into an agile, post-recession office technology strategy.

I’ll be giving a brief overview of how I think we arrived at this point in IT and what it means for creative, innovative firms that are trying to do more with less.

In an effort to get my thoughts together and get some feedback, I’m using this blog post as a draft for the event.

Let me start off by giving a brief overview of our services, and then a little history about the evolution of our offerings:

We provide a number of technical services for our clients in the areas of infrastructure, application development, and industry-focused workflow consulting. As this is New York, we work with a number of creative firms; media, architecture, publishing, and design companies, as well as some key clients in the financial sector. We strive for long-term relationships with our clients, many of whom we’ve worked with for close to a decade. We have installed and managed hundreds of servers, network devices and application suites, but more recently we’ve been focusing on helping our clients select, migrate to, integrate, and manage Cloud-based services.

Since the 1990s and the introduction of pervasive bandwidth, we’ve gone through a number of permutations of the remote server/client model, and much has been written about the benefits and the irony of the shift back to the mainframe/thin client structure of the 1960s. Now everyone is talking about the future of ‘The Cloud‘; a vast array of computing resources, abstracted and presented as a single source to the consumer.

At the turn of the century, we found most small to mid-sized businesses with a pure Local Area Network (LAN), typically comprised of in-house mail – most likely Exchange – and a few other local services: file, print, etc.  A lot of these firms had an internal IT staff or a dedicated consultant to manage their servers, tape backup, networks, and desktops. Only a few were pushing the envelope by leveraging Application Service Providers (ASPs) to deliver back office services.

The risks with this situation were obvious. These systems mostly depended on a single Internet connection, a single building, and a single individual, prone to career changes and untimely vacations.  Remote access to these in-house services was expensive to do right and applications rarely worked as well remotely as they did in the office.

Over the next five years, we saw a gradual shift towards ‘Hosted Applications’. This typically came in the form of a service provider taking a LAN-based solution like Exchange or SharePoint out of the office and putting it in a data center. In conjunction with this change, we saw the IT services industry begin to shift its focus from in-house IT, or consultants, to managed services – companies providing regular systems management remotely.

There were some benefits to this offering: critical applications were not dependent on intermittent Internet connections or over-heated server rooms. Flaky consultants were traded for predictable management services and cost became as regular as the electric bill.

But there were still problems. We had the same old model of doing things, only it was moved out of the business’s office and into the provider’s.  Services that were built for an onsite installation and LAN speeds were shifted to a remote location – not always producing the best results. Access to applications designed for the LAN was sometimes unacceptable because of bandwidth and latency. In a similarly narrow view of the problem, Managed Service companies focused on monitoring systems and patching software, maintaining the status quo, without looking at the big picture, or driving the business forward.

Now the next generation of IT services is coming along and delivering on the promise of on-demand, scalable solutions. These services are web-native, built for the Cloud and multi-tenant environments.

As services like Google Apps and Mozy were built for the web – not re-purposed LAN applications – they deliver exceptional performance and remain very flexible. Control Group has designed our support and project services in a similar way. Our services are built to function efficiently remotely – scaling up when our clients need it, and going away when they don’t – and also to be flexible and innovative, driving business forward rather than maintaining the status quo.

Using the cloud paradigm, we act as a single source of technology for our clients. We help them run more efficient, profitable businesses by weaving an ever growing selection of web-based services, traditional IT, and industry expertise together, to provide an flexible, competitive business platform.

bonnie++ is a series of file system tests that focuses on small files. It was designed to behave like a mail server does, creating and dealing with lots of small files (emails). bonnie++ is easy to run and outputs a CSV file that you can view with something like Excel. With the bon_csv2html command you can quickly generate html pages from the CSVs.

Here’s the output from bonnie++ running on a server:

The HTML output of bonnie++ on a Linux Server

At first glance the output can seem quite cryptic, but if we look close we can see that this provides us a great amount of information about latency and speed on different filesystem operations. I generally run this several times as I make changes to verify that the storage is providing the right performance characteristics. Tweaking a file system to make file system operations happen a few milliseconds faster may seem ridiculous, but in some environments it can make a huge difference.

Next time I’ll post about a tool that’s new to me but can test a disk in so many different ways I’m planning to run it on every system we install from now on.

I do some work on implementing storage systems for our clients, and we’ve found that different applications have different storage requirements. For example a video post production facility — like the facility at WWE — generally needs lots of disk space that is very good at reading and writing large files at high speeds. The storage here needs to provide good streaming throughput, because high quality video files generally have high bit rates, and are being stored or played back from the disk in real-time for ingesting, editing, or playout. If the storage system is not fast enough to read or write the file in real-time, frames will be dropped. This can cause unsatisfactory media files, programs to crash, or audio and video to become out of sync.

10,000 RPM SAS disks. That's some serious storage.

Suboptimal read/write performance can become a huge problem. When we put in a new system this is something we need to test. I usually do the test with a tool called lmdd.

lmdd comes from the lmbench tools which are provided by Bitmover for benchmarking systems. lmdd is great for testing streaming bandwidth. In most of our engagements with video, we install a Stornext or Xsan filesystem so we’ll run our tests against this. lmdd will probably work on any filesystem that you can mount on your Mac or Linux computer (Leave a comment if you need a version for Mac OS X, I have one compiled).  lmdd lets us verify exactly what the maximum number of megabytes per second we can push through the storage and point us to where we need to make changes to the hardware or software configuration. I use lmdd like this :

lmdd of=/path/to/test_file count=1g

lmdd if=/path/to/test_file

The first tests write performance and the second tests read performance. More information about the syntax is available in the manual page for lmdd. The results of the command from a server I was testing looked like this:

2147.4755 MB in 6.8003 secs, 315.7914 MB/sec

lmdd is great because it’s easy to read. This result shows I could write to the filesystem at 315 megabytes per second. That’s really fast! This is from a test with a server with a lot of RAM and a special filesystem that took advantage of that cache. When I run it on my Macbook, I get a result like this:

18342.6171 MB in 376.7685 secs, 48.6841 MB/sec

So the next time you’re interested in how your storage is performing give lmdd a shot and let me know how it goes. If you’re looking for more information about storage performance testing then stay tuned; I’ll be posting about testing storage with tools that benchmark small reads and writes next.

I was recently having a conversation with a friend and we both laughed when we thought back to the first five hundred megabyte hard drives that we had owned. Back then, the half-gigabyte drive was ridiculously expensive and physically huge. We both thought that it would be impossible to fill these drives up.

This of course was not the case. Now you’re lucky if an application can be installed in less than 500 MB, and as hard disk sizes grow, we find new ways to fill them up with applications, documents, and media. Digital files have become the most valued assets for most of our customers, so the organization, storage, and archiving of data is a serious concern.

I find that the best way to evaluate storage technologies solutions for our clients is to step back and take a look at the problems the client is looking to solve and the priorities dictated by their business needs. Usually, our clients’ storage needs require a combination of performance, reliability, disaster recovery, scalability, and manageability. Fortunately technology has stepped up to the challenge to handle the increased need for larger, faster, and more reliable storage.

Storage networking is a general term that encompasses many different technologies that provide excellent solutions to modern storage problems. A storage area network (SAN) is an architecture in which storage devices are connected in a high-speed, dedicated network and are presented to computers that are part of the same network. Using storage networking, we can accommodate our clients’ performance and reliability needs: by abstracting groups of hard drives as logical units (LUNs) we can stripe data across disks to increase speed and add redundancy by storing parity on the disks. This configuration will allow us to rebuild the LUN when a disk fails, without causing downtime or data loss.

Example SAN Configuration for Final Cut Pro Editing

A storage network abstracts the underlying hardware that provides storage services, providing some great advantages for disaster recovery. When we add tape libraries to a SAN we can make backups quickly and efficiently without slowing down the network or computers on it. We can also connect a SAN to another SAN that’s in a different building or even a different state. This allows us to easily replicate data to a secondary location so our clients can be up and running quickly if there is some kind of catastrophe in the data center.

Even the largest SANs will eventually get filled up with data. What happens when it’s time to increase capacity? With traditional storage, the system is shut down, new equipment is installed, and the data is migrated. This typically involves downtime and runs the risk of data loss if something goes wrong. With a SAN expansion is no problem. Since the storage services are abstracted from the storage hardware it’s easy to add capacity or replace older equipment, in many cases involving no downtime.

A SAN also provides centralized management for storage: administrators can look in one place to see the status of all storage in a data center.  This allows businesses to evaluate storage health and utilization, which can prevent problems and help plan for future growth.

As data becomes a more and more important part of business strategy, it becomes critical for businesses to have larger, faster, and more reliable storage services to keep things operating smoothly. Storage networking is a core component of these strategies. I’ll continue posting about our thoughts and experiences with SAN solutions, and try to shed some light on the storage ecosystem as new technologies emerge.

First, a quick discussion of semantics:

When you ingest a media file into Final Cut Server, it creates an asset. This asset is actually a collection of files, including the original media file, or primary representation. If the file being uploaded is a graphics or video file, Final Cut Server creates additional representations: a poster frame and a thumbnail. These are used to represent the asset’s media within Final Cut Server. If the file being uploaded is a video asset, a clip proxy representation is also generated, used for viewing the file within Final Cut Server.  This representation is created by transcoding the primary representation file to a lower-resolution codec.

Asset Representations in Final Cut Server

So a video asset is actually a container that’s made up of a bunch of files. This is pretty cool, and it’s mostly transparent to the end-user in Final Cut Server. However, while these representations are customizable (codecs, quality, etc), they all generated on ingest. Final Cut Server doesn’t currently support a way to create a new representation of an asset on-the-fly and have that representation become part of the asset container.

I’m struggling with this limitation as I explore Final Cut Server/Episode Engine integration. It would be ideal if I could setup Episode integration via a Final Cut Server copy response to an Episode watch folder, and have the resulting transcoded file copied back into Final Cut Server and made a representation of the original asset. Right now there’s no way to do this, so instead we are only able to re-ingest the new transcoded file as a new asset. And there is no relationship between this new asset and the original asset from which it was created.

Frustrating, but we’re thinking about ways around this. More to come as our tests and thinking solidifies. More info on Episode Engine/Final Cut Server integration in this pdf from Telestream’s website.