The PRISM On-demand Digital Media Cloud

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 oper- ates 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.