Cloud computing podcast audio transcripts
Moderator:
Welcome to the Hostworks’ Cloud Computing podcast featuring Matt Costain, Technical Director of Online at SBS; Shane Baker, [previous] General Manager, Sales and Marketing at Hostworks and Adrian Britton, Head of Products at Hostworks [now General Manager of Technology, Strategy and Innovation].
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
As a starting point, it would be good to provide a short overview to you detailing who Hostworks is, what it does and where it plays in the current marketplace just in case not everyone here is aware. It would also be good to talk about the sort of technologies it offers in the market. So, Shane, this is probably one for you also.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
I will deliver the extended elevator pitch. Please be sure to ask any questions if there is something that I miss or that is unclear.
I have been with company for five years now, so I have seen a lot of the evolution and change. Hostworks started 11 years ago, with its head office based in Adelaide, South Australia. It was set up largely for one purpose, which at that time was to provide services for high-end online and digital media customers. Ninemsn was the first customer of Hostworks and remains so today.
Starting with such a high profile customer worked to build a culture within Hostworks that is able to deal with very high-end online environments. Hostworks understands this means building a strong robust infrastructure and services but more importantly if a red light goes off and there is a service issue, it’s about how you respond to it, how quickly you address it and how long it takes for you to get that website back up and running. The general public is on that site, therefore if that site goes down, there is a real impact to our customers as their customers can simply switch to a competitor website in the flick of a button. So, there is a great deal of expectation on Hostworks to ensure that the way that we respond to any service issue is to first, get the job done, fix it and resolve those issues quickly. Then obviously we go back and take a detailed look at the issue to ensure it never happens again.
The evolution [of Hostworks] has been, I feel, about our ability to build up more and more of these customers – this has therefore been the primary focus for Hostworks. We did enter in to (approximately six years ago now) the enterprise space as well and started taking on the management of typical enterprise applications – SAP, Oracle Financials, the Microsoft Suite and a range of others. But there still remains our core focus which is meeting the needs of the online and digital media space. If you are aware of our customer base, well known examples being ninemsn, Network 10, SBS, ABC, realestate.com.au, carsales, and ticketek, these all very much fall in to that space. I think where we find ourselves today now is under a new ownership which is through Broadcast Australia ultimately owned by the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB). Broadcast Australia which was previously owned by Macquarie Communications Infrastructure Group has brought back the real focus on our core business which is certainly digital media, so therefore providing an extension of the services that Broadcast Australia provide in the media space.
What we have seen certainly over the last two to three years is a lot more demand online from our customers. So, as a ticketek, a carsales and a Seek for example evolve, and as businesses grow quite rapidly and experience more users coming to their sites, the need for them to be able to respond to that demand has become quite critical. So, these high profile organisations need services that ensure that their environments just won’t go down. So, it doesn’t matter if at present it is unprecedented. I guess demand is where the challenge is for any organization and Matt will be able to talk to that. When you are sitting down trying to conclude how successful a site or an event or an environment is going to be, it’s very hard to dictate. So, I think where the evolution for us certainly has been and certainly where cloud has come in to play is the ability to deal with those very peaky demands, the demands that you just don’t know whether they are going to be there or not. So, that’s really been our focus for the last couple of years - to build out these services. We have done it in a way that is not just pure infrastructure, it’s very much around managed services, and typically the relationship we have with our customers managing up to the operating system or right through to inclusive database and application as well. So, a lot of the infrastructure managers in the market place that provide cloud style computing don’t mange a full service, they manage just infrastructure and the rest of it is either the customer or somebody else’s challenge.
Our challenge through this process to support our customers has been how do we develop that style of service that can grow on demand while still managing what’s critical to the customer which is the applications and operating system as well. So, I think that gives sort of general perspective of where we are going/the direction we are taking. The focus of the future will still very much remain online and digital media, that’s where our parent organisation wants to see us spend that time. Ultimately what we are doing is leveraging where our expertise and proven track record and skill is. So, there we go a quick review of Hostworks.
Moderator:
Matt Costain of SBS, Shane Baker and Adrian Britton of Hostworks discuss their definitions of cloud computing.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
I am Matt Costain, the Tech Director of Online at SBS. I have been there about two years and it’s a pretty broad role. It involves, first and foremost, looking after the networks of websites that we have as well as the technical strategy and direction for those sites and the products that we are launching. As SBS has moved from a very traditional TV broadcast and radio operation to online, the role means encompassing integration with the changing broadcast technologies, online video delivery, content delivery and site delivery, how we get our products to market, what they are going to look like and at the moment it’s a bit of a catchall for anything else that isn’t strictly broadcast or radio, so mobile or IPTV technology. I was invited along today as we used the Hostworks platform to deliver the FIFA World Cup quite successfully.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
There are obviously a lot of definitions for cloud out there at present and you are not doubt currently getting 400 million of them. I think it’s quite important to understand what cloud means from an online digital environment and Hostworks perspective.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
At SBS our core mandate is delivering content. Often we have unprecedented loading of content, which means we do not necessarily know what the consumer base/level is going to look like but we still need to be able to deliver to that volume quickly if necessary. So, essentially, technically we deliver based on our reference architecture, reference architecture that delivers compute, storage egress into the internet to the application platforms that can grow and shrink as customer demands require.
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
Our definition of cloud is very much to do with being able to deliver content based on the ads and the flows of consumer demand from the site. To do that, we have made a large investment in automation platforms. In late 2008 we acquired an automation platform that we run holistically within our business. The ability of the automation platform is that as consumers come to an online entity the site grows, so specifically that’s the adding of hardware behind the scenes, the delivery of operating systems on to that hardware, the delivering of application stacks on to those operating systems, the delivery in some cases of the content on to those applications, the adjustment of load balance and frameworks, the adjustment of content delivery networks so that holistically that application now grows to the consumers’ demand and vice versa as the consumers move off so the platform wraps back down again.
We have got a comprehensive toolset that we use which we call ‘user experience monitoring’ which measures the amount of time that key business transactions take to expend on a customer’s platform so when tolerances are reached we are not only able to grow our infrastructure to add extra horsepower but also able to identify bottlenecks very, very quickly to see the underlying message that the media organizations in this world require so that they are able to give that message out strongly to the internet via either video, website or any of the other kind of digital media forms in a flexible way. So, for us cloud equates to flexibility – flexibility of technical delivery, flexibility of commercials but above all is the ability to act very, very quickly to unprecedented consumer demand.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
One of the things that I have might have missed in my introduction of that change is things that we have been hearing from our customers for a period of time and I think that is very relevant to the industry (and SBS) is the challenge of being able to get new environments up and running quickly. Historically it has been typically dedicated infrastructure in this industry. What I mean by that is a lot of very large online customers want it as “that little patch over there is mine, I own that hardware, that infrastructure and all the services associated with it.” This also allowing their infrastructure to be segregated from the security issues and other perceived challenges as a result of having that particular kit separated.
One of the issues that came from this option was that it became highly expensive for the industry. You were paying for the maximum load. You had to predict what that load would be and then buy the infrastructure to be able to support it. So, if you assumed (and I guess the challenge that Matt would have experienced with the World Game) is that if you assume a 10-fold growth – and I am planting words in Matt’s mouth here, so he will talk to figures – but if you made that assumption that it could possibly be 10 times of what we have experienced in the past, in the old world, you would have no choice but to buy 10 times the usual infrastructure. The reality is, you may only use a very small percentage of that additional infrastructure for that particular event and, in our experience, more often than not (and again better answered by Matt) it is usually the end of an event or of course in this case where Australia didn’t do particularly well, that you don’t experience the predicted peak in demand. So in essence you are spending the money unnecessarily.
The other issue associated with dedicated infrastructure in the past has been the delivery. So, by the time you made the decision that you want to proceed in purchasing the infrastructure, you go out, buy the hardware, rack it, build it, test it, the customer puts applications on it and does their our testing – that could easily be 3-6 months from the date when you made the decision to more forward. I guess the other big challenge that the industry really started to face was we are paying for something that we just don’t know we are getting value from. Therefore, how the change for Hostworks came about was, as soon as the technologies evolved to be able to start looking at things differently (and I will pass this topic over to you Adrian) is that we started a number of years ago looking at ways to be able to distribute content outside of just physical pipes going out to the internet.
So, we started with a content distribution layer within our own facilities through load balancing. This was a way to start taking load off the back-end from customers and give them some level of redundancy. The next phase was when virtualization came in. We had the ability to start providing that peaks and troughs in demand for customers through using these sorts of technologies, but the challenge was that it still sat on customers dedicated infrastructure. This meant that whilst you still got the benefits associated with meeting demand and delivering required capacity, the capacity could exceed what the underlying infrastructure could support, which led back to the same problem.
It has been and continues to be an evolution. I think the next stage is the one Adrian touched on and can talk to in more detail. The next phase is more advanced monitoring and the introduction of automation tools which allowed for the better understanding of what was happening with those environments and within applications to be able to make decisions when additional capacities require in advance of when that hardware maxed out. Hostworks invested in that and then the final stage now is bringing all that together with technologies that exist in the world today to turn that into what the market now term ‘cloud.’ This is what Hostworks has termed ‘utility’ or ‘elastic computing’ where it brings all those components together and allows you to be able to deliver that demand based upon user volumes and user experience rather than us having to try and predict what that future is going to look like. I guess that’s a Hostworks’ perspective.
Now is probably good time for Matt to give more of a customer’s perspective of the challenges you face I think and why you needed to see change from the market.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
A couple of years ago, even as recent as two years ago, we would request and specify dedicated hardware for all of our environments. The main reasons for this were some of those that Shane touched on a moment ago, namely that we could have it cordoned off into a little area of data centre where we knew that no one would make configuration changes by mistake. I have seen that happen plenty of times in the past when we were on shared infrastructure.
So it became “let’s get dedicated hardware to run those. With virtualisation we certainly needed to have one to one machines but running a virtualized environment on dedicated hardware meant that you actually had to and part of your contract was generally to go and buy the machines that the VMs ran on. So, these were expensive apart from the fact there is an initial investment in hardware, there is also an investment in actually keeping them maintained. As Shane also said, as a major organization, we need to be able to respond quickly to events - which in our world are generally catastrophic news events or scheduled sporting events. Now, if we haven’t actually planned for the maximum capacity then we are going to be behind the game, we are going to be losing out to the other networks; we are going to be losing out to other media outlets. So, that’s just something that we had to say as an organization “Okay, well, this is the capacity we can meet” and if we can say that, then so be it.
The environment that Hostworks provisioned when we were in the World Cup worked incredibly well for us. We planned out at a pretty high level initially and so we were like, “Well, here is the load that we are expecting. Let’s sort of plan for around five times that with capacity in reserve to maybe double that again if need be” and while we never actually needed to turn that on knowing that we could have turned it on was a real important thing for us. So, we went out there with a fair amount of fire power and it looked pretty good, things were running well, running better than expected. Then there was one morning, it was the third Australian match against Ghana where it was a little bit later in a day; it was a critical result for Australia and there were some another matches at the same time. We did actually see increased load, about four times what the average had been for previous games, and we did start to slow down. It was only a phone call away to be able to get the other machines turned on, they came on within 3 minutes and the problem went away. We left them on for two days and turned back down again. We would never have been able to do that with a more traditional website hosting environment.
Moderator:
Matt Costain talks about the load on SBS World Cup website during the peak load of the Ghana versus Australia match.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
It was a new order of about 2000 requests per second, I think, and we were probably looking at around about 15,000 concurrent sessions.
Moderator:
And that was your peak over the whole World Cup?
Matt Costain [SBS]:
No, it wasn't but it was a very instantaneous peak which kind of took…wreaked a bit of havoc. I mean, it's a fair load. I mean, requests per second is the one thing and having people on the site pulling video, looking at scores, having the scores update, we don't have huge amounts of caching on the site for live scores because again it's a market critical thing. We sort of pride ourselves on the trying to get that stuff out faster, so we do need to back it with our infrastructure; but across the event, we did around about 40 million ad impressions. So, around about 4 million videos, had 1.4 million unique browsers…
1.4 million. What that actually translated to in peak, I am not entirely sure and I would suspect it happened probably around an Australia match in the morning when people came in to work and jumped online to comment, to look at the scores, to look at the highlights. The highlights came up; we cut the highlights as soon as we possibly could, so the video was available almost immediately. The deal we have with FIFA means that we can leave them up for four years with full-length match replays which have got a little bit of long tail appeal I guess.
Moderator:
Shane Baker describes how Hostworks automates the process of increasing capacity within a private cloud service.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
What you heard from a customer perspective is the challenge faced and how Hostworks responded to that challenge. Matt also raised another situation where Hostworks really adds value, which is automation and how we can bring load online. This was the start of us taking this style of service to market for a major customer.
The SBS experience, where we have the ability to bring that capacity online very quickly, is further being developed.
The investment that we are making beyond that which Adrian can talk to us how we are automating that process. So, the conversation we find ourselves having now with a customer is “how quickly do you want the additional capacity to become available? What would those thresholds look like?” and then the commercial arrangements because the interesting challenge I think that also comes from the commercial perspective with cloud computing is if it's driven by demand whilst you are not paying for something you don't use, you almost don't know how much you are paying for because if that demand actually goes through the roof, then you are paying for capacity that you may not even have expected to ever use. So, there is some commercial parameters that is set around these things when we are having a conversation with a customer of what that cut-off point might be because they may not want to build this five times what their average monthly bill is, so they might want to be able to throttle at certain points and that's all the complexity that gets built into modeling out on a customer by customer basis. So, that's probably a valid point to talk to as well which I think is a different approach to the way that competitors deliver private cloud to the market. Basically, it’s turned on, you have got infrastructure and it will scout whatever you want. By the way, if you get a bill that exceeds what you expected while you have the capacity, we think about it much more deeply when we are engaging the customer how we bill that out, you might want to talk to that.
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
Within our reference architecture we have got a number of stimuluses, stimuluses that could trigger the additional automation jobs, additional loading in to the environment. One of the key stimuluses that I have spoken about briefly before is the user experience monitoring, which monitors the amount of time for transactions to take place. We have all the normal metrics of CPUs and memory and all that kind of occupancy type metrics. The key differentiator here is that user experience is key for most of our customers if not all of our customers to being able to measure the amount of time it takes for a transaction to run through and be able to make adjustments based on that, dropping below certain criteria is key. The automation framework essentially is a work-flow tool. So, it works through the technical steps required to bring additional application layers on board. So, our engagement starts with working very deeply with the customer's application team or our own application team. Essentially, the orchestration kicks in, a number of automation jobs run through to bring the applications online, and then the billing side has the ability to charge a customer based on per unit of time.
At the moment, in this situation or the product we are limiting our units of time to per week or per month, but there is no reason why that can't become more granular as time goes by. The important aspect is that as the load drops the commercials adjust. That's one of the flexible commercial models that we can bring to market. The second one is much more around a price certainty. So, no matter what consumer demands dictate, the price will remain the same.
Moderator:
Matt Costain talks about the advantages of using cloud solutions in planning budgets and capacities.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
Having a capped spend is of vital importance to us in the past we will probably still continue to do this. We have actually looked at negotiating rates for the bandwidth or services where they do cap-off at a point and if we run them to the max then that's great. If we don't run it to the max, well at least we know we are not going to actually be spending more than we are actually capable of spending.
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
It's truly worth talking about some additional technologies that effectively wrap around the edge of the elastic compute product. The content delivery network is something that we have made the conscious decision to build out ourselves. This is infrastructure that we now have running out on multiple locations. The purpose of the content delivery network when matched with the elastic compute facilities is for customers to have the ability to move certain types of contents in certain ways through the environment. Content can be delivered either via transactional applications or the more static content can be delivered via caches or appliances at the edge of the network to allow a more distributed sending of data or more distributed delivery of content to the outside world. Again, this fits very closely to our media strategy of being able to work with our parent company Broadcast Australia to deliver video content where it makes sense be it through the browser, be it to the flat-panel TV on the wall via a set-top box or via a connected TV device.
Moderator:
Shane Baker and Adrian Britton talk about convergence of broadcast and the internet.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
There is much more demand and expectation now for content to be online. I know a challenge that Matt and I have discussed that he [and SBS] experiences on a daily basis is the demand and expectation for content to be available on other devices as well. It is not just the browser, it is about the content being available on a phone and iPad and perhaps an Xbox. There is also bringing the content straight to a Set-top box and plasma. We are seeing that evolution of change in the market place and what Broadcast Australia recognised as an existing gap in how they could support their existing customers – online. Hostworks achieves this for them.
A lot of the focus for Hostworks today is, to a large degree, business as usual of supporting high-end online and digital media customers but also the future direction of convergence. SBS and the World Game experience is a beautiful example of the new world of audience where you have someone who is watching a TV that could be 2D or 3D, they are wanting to interact online in blogs and forums and look at results of other events that are going on within the game. They also want to be on their mobiles. I think that's really where our parent organisation [Broadcast Australia] has got us focused - how we can bring the two organizations together to delivery these channels of communication.
Adrian and his team are constantly tasked on how do we work with the companies out in the marketplace to get content directly to a plasma screen or directly to a variety of set-top boxes or to an XBox or to an iPad and really try and take that challenge away for our customers. Now, having said that, there is a big applications challenge that comes with that as well but from an infrastructure and delivery perspective that's really our mandate. So, when Adrian talks about building a content distribution network, it’s being designed with the expectation that that is our ability to send content to any device in the marketplace and that's where really I think the next big challenge is.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
Our content delivery network is something that we have used through various providers for at least as long as I have been at SBS and probably for about two years prior to that. We wouldn't consider pushing our video out solely through a single source mainly because of the speed and the reliability that we get through using a CDN and historically…
Moderator:
What is a CDN?
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
Content Delivery Network. Historically as well, CDN’s have been able to offer competitive pricing due to the amount of bandwidth pushing through. The real challenge to delivering down to multiple devices for us though is that every end device has a different specification that we need to deliver to. So, to what Shane was saying, for the World Cup we were pushing video out to TV which isn't really anything I have much to do with but it was something we did. We had the 3D TV, we had the digital TV, we had the analogue TV. There was delivery to third parties that would then take our content and put it on mobile. They would identify codecs that we would use for the online video. We were delivering to the Sony Bravia TVs, their IP at Bravia TV service; and again, that was a different codec to what we are currently using online.
If another party wanted to come on board and say “actually, we need it in this format”, then we would have to potentially recode the video to deliver it to them. Therefore we have got an encoding issue and then we have got a delivery issue. Where the cloud can help us is that services are coming online now where we can throw content up once, choose where it's going to go, choose what format it's going to be and have it rendered and delivered in the formats that we need to the people that we need to. We are not actually using that at the moment. We are doing all of the encoding and handling of video in house mainly because it has really been the only viable proposition for us to this date due to again being able to manage the cost of it.
That's changing, it's getting cheaper. We can start looking at using these services as long as we can get the reliability and quality of service that we get by maintaining our own infrastructure and relying on other people to play the content out for us. So, I think that's probably something we will touch on later around issues of using cloud itself.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
You are right Adrian services are becoming way more cost effective – even free. You can even start up – if you are handy with open source, you can download code or upload on to a service like that offered by Amazon instant and have your own transcoding engine up in the cloud and you don't even need to engage a third party up in the cloud provide it themselves to do it. So, it's definitely a changing marketplace and these things are becoming a little bit more commoditize or wrapped up with services which is where the opportunities are for organizations like Hostworks.
Moderator:
Shane Baker talks about the opportunities and challenges of providing online content and how cloud solutions enable online content delivery.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
The opportunities and challenges that we have seen time and time again have been through a number of different genres – education, sport…in today’s online world, everyone wants to get content live on their site but they do not really appreciate the value of their content i.e. they don’t know the level of audience interest they are going to gain. One of the opportunities we see if where we would like to be able to move to a provider platform that has the flexibility to allow businesses and to some extent relevant bodies of sport (i.e. FIFA in the instance of the World Game), for example, to be able to put that content up and test it.
Obviously there is a challenge that exists due to rights ownership. In no way, shape or form can it be competitive to who owns the rights of that particular content. The challenge I think is – note that I haven't had this conversation with Matt, so I may be wrong however – there might be a whole back catalogue of content that SBS has that could be of interest to put online and make available but to have a significant cost attached to that would be questionable because they don't know what necessarily the user interest in that would be. Our goal as a company is to be able to provide services and platforms that would allow companies to put their content up and test it.
Commercial arrangements can be pay for the service, it could be revenue share, it could be a variety of things and we have the flexibility from a commercial perspective which again is a value of cloud because you don't have the massive infrastructure cost to be able to put these services in place, but that certainly the direction that the company will head - over and above infrastructure.
Moderator:
Adrian Britton and Shane Baker talk about Hostworks’ facilities
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
We run out of two primary, what we call, content source locations. We ran out of a facility in South Australia and a New South Wales based facility supported by a number of secondary locations where the specific customer demands necessitate additional locations.
Moderator:
All in Australia?
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
There are examples of customers where we manage infrastructure around the globe but our focus is Australia. Typically looking at the network layer, we have material egress into the internet through multiple telecommunication providers. So, we subscribe to multiple 10 gigabit per second pipes if that makes sense. We diversify the telecommunications carriers that we use. This is all to increase user reach, user experience. We are constantly evolving what we call our egress network through a process that we call traffic engineering which has to do with moving content from one location to another location and adjusting the capacities and the throughputs associated with those data links and plus we tie our data centres together with a private back hold network as well.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
To add to what Adrian was saying regarding our offshore offering, Hostworks’ primary focus at this point is Australia, to deliver the best quality of service. We don't have any immediate plans to go offshore in terms of our physical location but our plan for our customers is to support their international growth. We do have services delivered from other parts of world which we support from Australia. The companies that are successful in Australia more often or not extend to include an overseas presence and then have a need to be able to support that. It is a great opportunity for Hostworks to provide this necessary support.
This leads to our acquisition of space within international facilities. We have in some cases equipment that is on site with the customer that we manage as well as the equipment present in our data centres in Australia. We are in the process of expanding to include more than just those we possess today. The idea of our existing data centres was, in the past, that one was production and the other was DR. Today, again the beauty of the new technologies around this cloud style computing is that we have been able to mirror the infrastructure and services in those multiple locations which means we can deliver it out of either or both (ideal).
In terms of applications and databases, we live in two data centres and it will be through the content distribution network delivered from the point that's closest to the end-user routed through to the right location that you receive the service. So, the benefit of that is of course not just from end-user experience perspective but if a data centre does go down for whatever reason from a user perspective, they don't know because the other facility is still up and running. And again, the beauty of elastic computing is it allows us to be able to bring up additional capacity quickly for the customer, so as to not allow the experience of any major issues from the user perspective if that was to occur. In the previous world of dedicated infrastructure, it was very difficult to do that. I think it's fair to say that most of our customers would have always aspired to have DR, but DR in the old world meant to duplicate the physical structure. The cost associated with doing so would prohibit this from being a viable option.
This new world of cloud and utility style computing has given us flexibility to allow us to genuinely use a second facility and will allow us to bring on others very rapidly as the need arises – both here and globally. Anywhere that we can take space or even build ourselves, we can leverage cloud capability in other parts of the world and drop the instances in to these locations and run it from here in Australia. We have built the tools around the monitoring and the automation that can expand and support services on a global level. Whilst we would like to take forward our plans for global expansion, our global focus at present is to assist our customers achieve their global requirements.
Our main operation today is the facility based in Adelaide. We have a long term lease and it is a facility that was originally built by the South Australian government for the South Australian State Bank. Therefore it is one of those very much purpose built designs which is stand alone, located on the fringes of the Adelaide CBD. It is robust as you can imagine, above the water plains, you cannot infiltrate it. Long term however we did not want to tie ourselves to any one particular facility in to the future, which is why we built a relationship with Equinix here in Mascot, Sydney. We will certainly always maintain the facility down in Adelaide. This is where approximately 80% of our traffic is delivered from today but this will change. So therefore we are progressively building out Equinix and we will see a shift to that facility. There is a strong likelihood of the distribution of traffic becoming 50:50. We will bring more and more facilities online in Australia as we build up.
Moderator:
Matt Costain of SBS discusses the challenges facing ISPs and broadcasters to deliver online content and the importance of the National Broadband Network.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
Over 50% of our video users (which represents around 35% to 40% of our unique browsers), consume video at the highest peak rate we offer which is currently 1 mega second. We are looking at where we can take that at the moment to maximize the experience for users against the cost of storing the video files and the cost of delivery. Cost of delivery is getting cheaper. So, it's sort of coming down to the storage issue and also the time it takes for us to transcode it down to the higher bit rate files which becomes an operational cost.
With ADSL, theoretically the fastest that you are going to get is a little bit over 2 megabytes per second. That's a fairly high bandwidth; people are pulling down 720-page content off YouTube with their ADSL connections. So I guess our goal is to meet at least that if not more moving forward. We actually deliver higher bit rates to the Sony Bravia platform currently mainly because the screen is bigger and it's a better experience if the bit rates are higher. Where the NBN fits in, the greater topic today, the cloud, I think it's incredibly important because it's not just about video delivery. As services are increasingly become more demanding whether they manifest as video or otherwise, that bandwidth is going to become more and more important.
Moderator:
Matt Costain, Adrian Britton and Shane Baker discuss global best practices with broadcast services for non-traditional platforms.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
There have been a few organizations that are sort of at the forefront of innovation within the broadcast and digital media space. I think that BBC what they did with iPlayer and then what ABC did with iView are fantastic services and the willingness that these organizations had to jump on platforms which are non-traditional such as Playstation, Nintendo, and so on is great. We are looking at doing a service like that; we just want to get it right. We do have catch-up services online. We have got round about 50 different programs going up online every week. We have got round about 85% of primetime broadcasting online in terms of catch-up but it's not under a brand of player with all of the trimmings that you get with an iView or an iPlayer.
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
How does Hostworks ensure that we are up to speed globally with all best practices? We leverage our vendor partner community. We hold a very strong two-way relationship with all of our vendor partners. We work with them in terms of not only what we are requiring but also leveraging what other of their customers are requiring around the world. As Shane mentioned, we have quite a strong connection with numerous sister organizations out there. We leverage the UK operations of Arqiva for example.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
When we think about how Hostworks moves to ensure we are ahead of the game in regards to global best practices, there are two aspects to discuss. The first is where we talk about media services and then there is the other which is the technical infrastructure behind it, and then how these two come together. It is very much a matter of Hostworks sitting with our customers, such as Matt, and asking about the challenges that they are facing combined with keeping abreast of industry best practices and the direction the industry is taking both in Australia and globally. Another key question we ask ourselves is “how do I better utilise content into the future and what does that mean?” as this is something that concerns both Matt and a number of our customers. We need to think about how we can help them do that because they have the services that we need to leverage in the market. So, we are out there talking to the media style organizations to think through that process, but in terms of the technical underlying services, now that we are very clear on who we are, we select our partners very carefully. Organisations such as HP and Computer Associates allow us to then have conversations with them that are very real around “these are the challenges that we are facing, the direction that we are taking. How can you help us do that and where are you seeing those other challenges being dealt with around the world?” So, they can have a look at what they might be doing for Disney, for example, or typical organizations that would be in the same field that we are. That way we know that when we bring those services to market, we are bringing services that are consistent with our strategy aligned to what our customers are needing to see and also in most instances where we can are being proven. That is the challenge for us. So, I think as a small organization in Australia we leverage those partnerships greatly. It's very hard to have an international reach in terms of benchmarking when you are a small Australian organization. Therefore, you need to leverage those partnerships close. The other thing that Adrian mentioned is our sister companies, so we can see what's happening in the UK and through Europe, we can challenge ourselves to whether or not we are more advanced or behind in various areas and bring that through to Hostworks. We have very close relationships through with those sister companies, with BBC and a variety of those seamless sort of organizations. So, we use that as the way to challenge ourselves and benchmark.
Moderator:
Adrian Britton, Matt Costain and Shane Baker discuss security challenges.
Shane Baker [Hostworks]:
The internet is full of people with a good meaningful existence, but there is always going to be the few parties out there that try to make your life hard. Part of any technical evolution is to ensure that you have got the right security parameters and the right measures and countermeasures to cover activity such as Denial of Service attacks or any form of intrusion.
Matt Costain [SBS]:
While people are generally responsible digital citizens, if we were to take our firewall down even for just five minutes, I have no doubt we would be DOSed, we have before when we accidentally changed something. I mean website security is one thing, another is content security. It has always been an issue for the different studios producing content relating to different markets. They have had a hard time actually keeping up with technology and some of the demands that we get placed on us by the content owners/studios before we can actually make the content available for catch up – almost unreasonable and sometimes really stringent from a technology perspective. It's not too hard to meet them though because of the people that we partner with, people that are actually doing the digital media delivery for us. With content delivery networks, Australian web hosting companies are all able to tick the boxes when asked. It’s always going to be that DRM that unfortunately doesn't seem to want to die. It's still alive and well, but again moving services away from a download service or you purchase content and suck it down to your machine and increasingly start streaming things through the cloud, I think those problems do go way inherently. There will always be a place where people who record stuff and throw it out there and make it available for all, but that has been a problem with media since day one ever since recording device was invented so to say. Don't expect it to go in a hurry.
Adrian Britton [Hostworks]:
I think for us it's really just keeping on the edge of what technology is available to support that because I think certainly in terms as Matt has suggested, you go back over the logs over the years, there is not a day that goes by that someone is not trying to attack one of the sites that we support but I guess the robustness of what we have got in place won't allow that to happen, but I guess the more interesting challenge as these cyber thieves if you like become smarter is around fraudulent activities. So, it's about being able to claim that they are an SBS employee for example, and do something and it's how you monitor and can control those sorts of things and I think that's probably where the next wave of challenge is. Thankfully though, technology is pretty good around being able to do that and even monitor emails that are distributed, and whether or not they are genuinely the customer's emails and so forth, but I think that's probably where the challenge into the future is how you deal with fraud, it is becoming so smart that it appears to be a legitimate transaction.