Agile Content - Agile Live
Categories Production
Agile Content’s Agile Live is a new unified production solution that enables true remote and distributed TV production using cloud and internet technologies. Using readily-available technologies, innovative GPU deployment, and a new transport protocol, it offers a transformative solution that delivers high-quality programming, significant cost savings and a substantial reduction in up to 90% of CO2 emissions for broadcasters or content producers. The solution does all of this by replacing traditional broadcast stacks with cloud-based applications for remote, distributed production.
It uses standard internet connections to produce and contribute content in real time from any live broadcast cameras and/or consumer devices. Agile Live is completely cloud agnostic and can be deployed on bare metal COTS, within private data centres or in public clouds. The GPU- and cloud-based solution features web-based proxy editing for fast turnaround live post-production, HTML graphics (which can be burnt-in or delivered separately), 3D video effects, and interactive graphics or personalised visuals. All of this comes together to allow broadcasters and content producers to widen their reach by more easily facilitating viewer-centric formats on platforms like YouTube, Twitch, Kick or TikTok.
A key innovation that helped realise Agile Live was the development of an open-source transport protocol; EFP (Elastic Frame Protocol). EFP not only ensures quality adjustment based on bandwidth and preferences but also achieves perfect camera synchronization. This enables the seamless integration of diverse video sources on-the-fly, allowing any connected device to contribute to the production process. Where traditionally, the synchronization, mixing and curation of live content have all been confined to the local domain of high-bitrate SDI, Agile Live’s internet-based infrastructure allows a diverse range of sources, operating in low latency and low bitrate, to be configured for mixing, graphics, and audio, with action commands sent to the high-quality delivery feed in the cloud for seamless playout. Agile Live makes engaging increasingly disparate audiences across multiple platforms easier by transforming today’s production workflows.
For example, it can create completely synchronized TikTok-curated versions of programming elements with portrait-style videos and other platform-specific adjustments. Ahead of the development of Agile Live, Swedish Television (SVT), Sweden’s public broadcaster and a long-term partner of Agile Content, used Agile Live to successfully broadcast its first entirely cloud-based remote live sports event in July 2023; the Royal Rally of Scandinavia, a new 16-stage, 185km round in the 2023 season of the European Rally Championship. With an architecture that is designed to bridge production and distribution workflows, Agile Live’s ability to lower production costs meant that SVT could cover the entire three-day event with a significantly reduced budget. Additionally, following the event, SVT surmised that its partnership with Agile Content on the rally had substantially cut the production’s environmental footprint when compared to rolling out standard solutions. Agile Content’s GPU and cloud-based production solution, Agile Live is an efficient, eco-friendly and cost-effective platform that is futureproofing broadcasting for broadcasters and current and emerging streaming platforms.
