FRANKFURT, Germany—Software solutions provider manifold technologies has announced that its manifold CLOUD was selected by NEP Belgium to provide a signal processing and multiviewer solution for an annual international sporting event in Asia that was produced using a virtual OB setup.
“In January 2024, we deployed our new virtual OB concept for the first time,” explained Geert Thoelen, director of technology for NEP Belgium. “Virtual OB is a completely software driven and virtualized solution for live television production at the highest level. After careful evaluation we chose manifold CLOUD as our multiviewer and signal processing solution. The technology worked perfectly, and manifold CLOUD proved to be a reliable, well-developed product with enormous potential.”
The company explained that manifold CLOUD provides users with access to an on-demand pool of easily configurable functionality available as services through a single-sign-on web UI. Developed to target Tier-1 live productions, manifold CLOUD can handle the most demanding live sports, entertainment and news productions while providing the benefits of scalability, resiliency, quick deployment, and unified control, the company said.
The platform is designed to run on COTS FPGA acceleration cards from multiple manufacturers. Services are quickly created and configured on-demand within a private cloud environment and automatically assigned to an accelerator card. Services are combined into production clusters that operate independently and simultaneously - each supporting an individual production, such as a sports event or news show. In the event of a hardware or network failure, services are automatically restored on another accelerator card for maximum resiliency.
In addition, manifold CLOUD offers unparalleled scalability, automatic provisioning and inherent resiliency while supporting large, live uncompressed workflows with subframe latency with 90% less power consumption than CPU/GPU-based solutions, the company said.
Added Thoelen, “manifold CLOUD has been a great addition to our tech stack. It complements the intuitive interface, scalability, technology agnostic approach that are integral to NEP’s proprietary broadcast control platform, TFC, and delivers tremendous value to our clients.”
