The Advantages of Cloud Computing for Media & Entertainment
We are living in a revolutionary era of digital content and media consumption. As such, media companies are reckoning with the new challenges that come with new times. One of the biggest changes in the industry is consumer demand and behavior. To adapt, M&E brands need to digitally transform their production, distribution, and monetization processes. Cloud solutions are a crucial tool for this evolution, and M&E organizations should prioritize cloud strategy as a core pillar of their business models to address industry-wide shifts and stay relevant in today’s ultra-competitive landscape.
The Challenge: Addressing Greater Audience Expectations and Volatility
Viewing behavior and media distribution has greatly impacted the M&E industry. Entertainment content consumption is at an all-time high, and audiences are finding new and more ways to watch media. Today, linear television is considered old-school, and consumers are favoring platforms that give them the power of choice and freedom. Why would you tune in to your cable television at a specific time to watch your favorite show when you can watch that same show anytime, anywhere, on any device or platform?
With new non-linear television services, media companies have less control over their audiences’ viewing experience. Before, viewers were constrained by broadcasting schedules and immobile, unconnected TVs. Now, audiences have taken viewership into their own hands, and M&E brands must discover ways to retain their viewers’ attention and loyalty in the era of endless options of content creators and streaming platforms.
The Cloud Has the Flexibility and Scalability to Handle Complex Workflows
OTT streaming services are the most popular alternative to linear television broadcasting. It is a solution that meets the audience’s expectation of access to content of their choosing whenever and wherever they want. However, OTT platforms require formatting multiple video files to be delivered to any device with varying connection speeds. As such, OTT streaming services need advanced video streaming workflows that encode and transcode, protect content, and possess storage capacities that continuously grow.
Because OTT broadcasting has complicated workflows and intense infrastructure needs, M&E companies need to consider scalability. OTT streaming that utilizes on-premises data centers will stymie growth for media organizations because legacy applications and software are resource and labor intensive. When OTT services are set up with on-premises streaming, it requires a group of configured live encoding and streaming services to deliver content to audiences.
The in-house services then need to have the computing capacity and capabilities in order to deliver content without interruptions. On top of that, technical staff are necessary to maintain the proprietary hardware, ensure its security, and continuously upgrade it as audiences grow. If companies opt for on-premises OTT streaming, they will not be able to achieve the scalability and quality of experience that they need to keep up with audience expectations.
A cloud-based infrastructure solves all of these issues. To reiterate, on-premises OTT platforms are very resource-intensive with complex ongoing maintenance and high upfront costs. Using cloud services for OTT streaming addresses the downfalls of on-premises streaming by leveraging a network for services dedicated to delivering video files. The benefits of cloud computing for OTT workflows immensely impact streaming latency and distribution, leading to a better end user experience. Cloud infrastructures have the following advantages to on-premises infrastructure:
- Geography: Unlike in-house data centers, cloud servers can be located around the world, and content can be delivered to audiences via the closest data center, thereby reducing streaming latency.
- Encoding and transcoding: Cloud services have the ability and capacity to host rendered files and ensure they are ready for quick delivery.
- Flexible scalability: Providers can easily scale services up or down based on audience demands by simply adding more cloud resources, rather than having to purchase more infrastructure.
- Cost optimization: Cloud cost is based on only the resources a business uses with none of the maintenance and upkeep costs, and the price adjusts up or down depending on how much is consumed. on-premises costs include server hardware, power consumption, and space. Furthermore, on-premises is inflexible based on actual consumption.
The Cloud Can Help You Better Understand Your Audiences to Increase Revenue
Another buzzword we hear often these days is “big data.” As audiences grow and demonstrate complex behaviors, it’s important to capture those insights to better understand what will increase engagement and loyalty. Cloud computing is able to ingest and manage big data in a way that is actionable: it is one thing to collect data, but it is another thing to process and do something with it. For M&E organizations, utilizing this data helps improve user experiences, optimize supply chains, and monetize content better.
Big data involves manipulating petabytes of data, and the scalable nature of a cloud environment makes it possible to deploy data-intensive applications that power business analytics. The cloud also simplifies connectivity and collaboration within an organization, which gives teams access to relevant and real time analytics and streamlines data sharing. Furthermore, most public cloud providers offer machine learning tools, which makes processing big data even more efficient.
From a data standpoint, a cloud platform is an advantageous option for those who are handling big data and want to make data-driven decisions. The compelling benefits of cloud computing for data are as follows:
- Faster scalability: Large volumes of both structured and unstructured data requires increased processing power, storage, and more. The cloud provides not only readily-available infrastructure, but also the ability to scale this infrastructure very rapidly to manage large spikes in traffic or usage.
- Better analytic tools: The cloud offers a number of instant, on demand analytic tools that enable extract, transform, and loading (ETL) of massive datasets to provide meaningful insights quickly.
- Lowers cost of analytics: Mining big data in the cloud has made the analytics process less costly. In addition to the reduction of on-premises infrastructure, companies are reducing costs related to system maintenance and upgrades, energy consumption, facility management, and more when switching to a cloud infrastructure. Moreover, the cloud’s pay-as-you-go model is more cost-efficient, with little waste of resources.
- Better resiliency: In cases of cyber-attacks, power outages or equipment failure, traditional data recovery strategies are slow, complex, and risky. The task of replicating a data center (with duplicate storage, servers, networking equipment, and other infrastructure) in preparation for a disaster is tedious, difficult, and expensive. On top of that, legacy systems often take very long to back up and restore, and this is especially true in the era of big data and large digital content libraries, when data stores are so immense and expansive. Having the data stored in cloud infrastructure will allow your organization to recover from disasters faster, thus ensuring continued access to information and vital big data insights.
The Cloud is Secure
There is a misconception that the public cloud is less secure than traditional data centers. Of course, these are valid concerns: media companies must protect sensitive data, such as customers’ personally identifiable information. As a result, security and compliance is crucial for an M&E business’s migration to the cloud.
We have read about cloud security breaches in news headlines. In most cases, these articles fail to accurately point out where the problem occurred. Usually, these breaches occur not due to the security of the cloud itself, but due to the policies and technologies for security and control of the technology. In nearly all cases, it is the user, not the cloud provider, who fails to manage the controls used to protect an organization’s data. The question for M&E business should not be “Is the cloud secure?” but rather “Am I using the cloud securely?”
Whether M&E organizations use a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, they can be confident in the security of their data and content. Here is how the cloud is as secure, if not more secure, than in-house data centers:
- Cloud architecture is homogenous: In building their data centers, cloud providers used the same blueprint and built-in security capabilities throughout their fabrics. The net effect is a reduced attack footprint and fewer holes to exploit since the application of security is ubiquitous.
- Public cloud providers invest heavily in security measures: The protection of both the infrastructure and the cloud services is priority one and receives commensurate investment. Public cloud providers collectively invest billions in security research, innovation, and protection.
- Patching and security management is consistent: Enterprises experience security breaches most often because of errors in configuration and unpatched vulnerabilities. Public cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, which includes patching of infrastructure and managed services.
-Anthony Torabi, Strategic Account Executive, Media & Entertainment
