Abstract
Over the last 5 years, the digital media sector has undergone a radical change in its business model. An industry once focused on broadcasting to a fixed published schedule must now support an on-demand usage model across a wide range of fixed and network devices using a variety of content formats. This media revolution has brought significant changes to user viewing patterns and demanded significant changes in the broadcaster’s business model. In turn, this has resulted in significant changes to the content creation workflow and radical changes in the infrastructure that is used to support digital media creation, distribution, delivery and archive. For the last 7 years, the Belfast e-Science Centre (BeSC) has worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) to research emerging network-centric technology and their applications within the broadcasting sector. This work pioneered the use of grid technology within the broadcasting sector and evolved, over the last 4 years (the PeRvasive Infrastructure of Services for Media (PRISM) project), into piloting a cloud-based media infrastructure that supports traditional and network-centric access to BBC content. The PRISM media cloud has services and test users across the United Kingdom and brings together owned and on-demand resources to support its user content access services. The service cloud is deployed on demand using owned and on-demand resources, and operates as a dynamic market selecting services based on need and usage criteria. In this chapter, we describe the PRISM cloud and the market ideas that underpin its operation.
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Notes
- 1.
Partners in the later work included Qinetiq plc and BT plc.
- 2.
The diagrams here depict the services as clouds are from the initial technical discussions with the BBC in the summer of 2003.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the support of the UK Technology Strategy Board under grant TP/3/PIT/6/l/15656, the EPSRC under Platform Award EP/F066139/1 and our co-researchers in QinetiQ plc and BT plc.
Many people have worked on this project and the authors wish to highlight the role of Christina Cunningham, Stephen Craig, Chris Chambers, David Butler, Tanya Beech, Gerry Robinson and the development teams at Belfast e-Science, BBC Research and Innovation, QinetiQ ISTAR, and BT (Ireland).
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Harmer, T., Perrott, R., Lewis, R. (2010). The PRISM On-demand Digital Media Cloud. In: Antonopoulos, N., Gillam, L. (eds) Cloud Computing. Computer Communications and Networks. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-241-4_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84996-241-4_19
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