MediaHub Australia transitions seamlessly to remote Broadcast Operations
Announcement posted by MediaHub Australia 22 Jun 2020
For an organisation with the sheer size, scope and number of channels under control that MediaHub Australia (MediaHub) has, the prospect of moving the majority of their operations offsite is no mean feat. That said, not only did MediaHub achieve this incredible feat during these recent and most challenging of times, but they did so without any interruption of service to their many clients.
Head of broadcast operations, Scott Jolly explained, “As part of the mitigation of COVID-19 impacting MediaHub operations, the MediaHub Senior Management Team made the decision early to move to remote working wherever possible. The consequence of a COVID-19 outbreak within the facility would have been very serious for all concerned. MediaHub, as an essential service business, is responsible for providing critical news programming from the prime minister, federal and state government officials as well as the chief medical officer across both metro and regional television and radio services both nationally and internationally for our clients, so we simply could not allow this to happen.”
MediaHub’s requirements for a Work From Home (WFH) solution were to quickly and effectively move to remote operations, in the first instance for all administration staff, quickly followed by operational divisions.
Jolly continued, “It was essential for frontline operations staff to have a remote working solution as closely aligned to being at MediaHub. This meant investing in additional devices including laptops, Chromecasts®, tablets and monitors for each of the team, allowing each operator to recreate their workspace at home in a familiar set up.”
MediaHub’s smart investment and the fact many of their platforms are cloud based enabled them to move ingest, playout, network operations centre (NOC), IT and engineering support teams to remote operations quickly and seamlessly.
MediaHub head of technology, Simon Scott added, “We collaborated with a number of vendor partners such as Magna Systems, Grass Valley, Akamai and RTS to set up our users with a fully-functioning WFH solution. This included GV for remote control platform software, Akamai for CDN and security services and RTS VLink Virtual Comms to extend our talkback system over the internet. This integrated solution meant that not only had we achieved a level of sophistication that enabled our staff to completely operate the system from home, but there were significant savings in terms of operations space and equipment as we didn’t need to build a remote Disaster Recovery suite.”
This smart solution also meant MediaHub could operate under any possible broadcast scenario quite easily, without restrictions, quickly and efficiently without any negative impact in Service Level Agreements (SLA) for any of MediaHub’s clients.
The smarts didn’t stop there as MediaHub also provided low latency live streams of their monitoring multi-viewer outputs delivered using Akamai CDN and via standard streaming players to their users in their homes. This meant the MediaHub team could now see their monitoring screens on their standard home TV – a major part of the WFH solution.
One of the early challenges MediaHub did face however, was how to deliver a full featured ‘at home’ experience for their operations team when clearly they had no control over their team members’ ISP at home and no choice in their users’ connectivity which varied between 4G, 5G, FTTN, FTTP and HFC. All of which in turn affected the home user’s ISP network congestion during their most active periods.
Scott added, “Operators on shift changeover, or in certain scenarios for live sports or news programming have overlapping access to live video feeds and systems, meaning more than one operator may require access to the same multi-viewer generated screen. So we made a call early into the process to adopt a live OTT approach to the WFH solution. We partnered with Akamai to deliver this consistent delivery to our users across their CDN platform regardless of their ISP access. This allowed ease of access to the streams by any of the devices our staff were using and flexibility to scale out the number of people monitoring the streams.”
Security was a key issue within the MediaHub WFH solution and one they solved by again partnering with Akamai to provide distributed and encrypted remote access service to their systems. This allowed staff to access MediaHub’s platforms’ remote control surfaces via any internet connected device with the Akamai service also providing additional levels of security and monitoring far beyond a traditional VPN solution.
According to MediaHub CEO Alan Sweeney, the key to the amazing success of their unique WFH solution was the total buy-in from the entire MediaHub team – something he is very proud of.
Sweeney said, “The acceptance and approach from all of the staff was exemplary and they were incredibly supportive in testing the solutions remotely and then embracing the challenges of working from home. Our gratitude also extends to the families of our team particularly over the past few challenging months. As a result of our teams’ efforts and the WFH solution we have implemented, I’m delighted to say that our client base were not only very impressed we got on the front foot early and planned accordingly to protect their outputs, but also that their services have not been disrupted in any way and it has been 100% business as usual from their point of view.”
About MediaHub
MediaHub Australia is a constantly expanding, 'new technology'-driven company at the forefront of the Broadcast Services industry. MediaHub currently provides over 400 broadcast and live streaming services for both television and radio to audiences locally, nationally and internationally.
Among the current service offerings are Media Asset Management, Managed Archive Storage, VOD & Transcoding Services, Audio Description & Closed Caption Insertion, Connectivity, Pass-Through Channel capabilities, 24/7 Master Control & NOC facilities, live Television and Radio Streaming, in-house coding solutions and more.
Through our suite of 'Hub' products, MediaHub provides Terrestrial Broadcast, Live Streaming, Archive Storage, Connectivity, Media Asset Management and Content delivery for our growing roster of clients.