Jeff McGinley oversees engineering aspects for the nine markets in which SummitMedia has stations.
“I believe that I first saw a radio station that was operating completely in the cloud at the 2015 IBC Show in Amsterdam, where I was working the Telos booth,” he recalled.
“One of our northern European dealers handed me his phone and walked me through how he had successfully put everything in the cloud and could monitor every aspect and control it from anywhere, including the phone that I was holding. We all knew that it was coming to our industry, but it was still pretty mind-blowing to see it in action in those early development days.”
McGinley feels that broadcasting, like every other technically focused industry, was destined to embrace cloud-based solutions.
[Related: “Radio’s Workflows Have Left the Building”]
“We’re now at a point where the product development has been refined and the applications are ready for prime time. There will most likely be a slow implementation of these solutions for the smaller companies and independent stations because of the initial financial costs, both monetary and engineering time spent to deploy. However, we will certainly see more products that will be able to be hosted in the cloud or run from a container with every year that passes,” he said.
“With most companies trying to demise the physical square footage of the station, migrating over to the cloud for the air chain is a solid long-term financial decision overall.”
Applications of the cloud at SummitMedia include RCS ZettaCloud and AudioDisplay.
“ZettaCloud synchs up with our local Zetta databases and logs from the server in each of our markets. When we need to take a studio down or push Windows updates, we will spin up a station in ZettaCloud and start playing the log, which then streams to a Barix Exstreamer that lives at the transmitter site. It allows us to remain on-air and completely bypass everything at the station, which has been incredibly helpful for a number of situations we’ve found ourselves in.”
Summit also uses RCS AudioDisplay for metadata management. “The application is hosted in the cloud but does require a docker server at each facility to send it the metadata. Both applications are easily logged into from anywhere and are incredibly responsive.”
As far as the pros and cons, McGinley feels that having hosted portions of the air chain is a net positive.
“There are definite cost savings such as not having to deal with owning and maintaining servers or any other supporting devices like a UPS. There’s definitely a time-saving aspect to cloud-based solutions, with less that an engineering staff will have to worry about, such as managing servers and keeping them up to date with patches and other software upgrades.”
That can free up a department that is already taxed with so many other responsibilities.
“The only disadvantages are the hosting costs, which are a bit pricey. As an end user, the learning curve has been minimal, so staff should be able to learn and pick things up without much trouble. There will be more companies moving to hosting-based applications as those hosting and bandwidth costs come down.”
Read more about this topic in “The Cloud Shines for Radio.”
