Media and entertainment customers face industry-wide transformation, with companies reinventing how they create content, optimise media supply chains, and compete for audience attention across streaming, broadcast, and direct-to-consumer platforms. Like many people when first introduced to the idea of cloud computing, the media and entertainment industry has been hesitant because of concerns over privacy and security. However, in this section, we look at how the advantages of using cloud computing are helping the M&E industry.

(1) Agility, Speed and Continuous Expansion: Agility, Speedier Time to Market, and Continuous Expansion of Content are important in the M&E industries. To stay competitive, content creators in the M&E sector are under pressure to produce and (or) distribute original content more frequently and faster. Without the cloud, it would be almost impossible to store, manage, and deliver these huge quantities of digital content in an agile, dynamic and cost-effective manner.

(2) Scalability And Flexibility: Today’s consumers of media and entertainment content expect flexibility and choices. In addition, consumer demand is unpredictable, with spikes and surges in viewership that has to be dealt with in real-time. The on-demand characteristics of cloud computing provide the levels of scalability and flexibility that the M&E sector needs to cost-effectively meet volatile demand, automatically spinning servers up and down as demand ebbs and flows.

(3) Cost-Effective: Cloud computing in the media and entertainment industry offers opportunities to contain technology and storage costs to balance the rising costs in other areas. By shifting from a CAPEX model to the cloud’s OPEX model, for example, M&E companies can reduce their sunk costs in storage and delivery technologies and infrastructures. Also, using the different tiers of cloud storage SLAs for their hot vs. cold digital assets can reduce storage costs considerably for M&E companies.

(4) High Production Performance, Minimal Downtime: High streaming performance, with minimal delays and downtime, is critical both in terms of user experience as well as advertiser expectations. A six-second delay in streaming an ad for a hit show, for example, can cost a media company hundreds of thousands of dollars that they have to give back to the advertiser. The cloud provides ample opportunities for dispersed and redundant architectures that support high availability and high-performance SLAs, such as multi-region, multi-cloud, and hybrid deployments.

(5) Improved Collaboration: One of the biggest advantages for people working in media and entertainment is to use cloud computing to collaborate within companies or with creative talent across the world. The cloud opens up doors to hand off projects to other creators to expand collaborative efforts. Current advancements can even allow real-time collaboration to work with colleagues across different cities on the same project frame-by-frame with full compositing and visual integration.

Credit: netapp.com