The broad and ultimate goal of the Multi-Vendor Software Live Media Exchange project is to shift from current dedicated media exchange technologies to a software-based, native live media exchange. This will be able to harness HPC interconnect and compute resources asynchronously, a move that not only adds immense scalability, but also flexibility, cost savings and future-proofing into the bargain.
That goal has been much discussed over the years, but progress has been incremental, not least due to the complexity of the undertaking. Andy Rayner, CTO at Appear explains the big picture: “It's making use of compute, as compute naturally behaves. Compute naturally behaves asynchronously in the way it does stuff, so we're aligned to that, and also in doing that, we're not tying ourselves to the linear timing legacy, which would mean we incur lots of unnecessary latency as well. As a theoretical result, we can let compute run more efficiently, and we can allow concatenated processes to actually work much more efficiently, with much lower latency too…”
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