HITS

The rise in OTT platforms has shown us that consumer demand for instantaneous content is greater than ever. For consumers, on-demand viewing is no longer a luxury, but an expectation, no matter our location, the time of day or the device we have in our pocket. Through cloud technology, the ability to meet these demands is now a reality.

With social distancing and self-isolation measures in place as a result of COVID-19, it is anticipated demand for OTT content will continue to grow.

Alongside this demand for content, a shift of large sections of the workforce to transition to work-from-home environments will require additional acceleration in the move from on-prem production to cloud-based production tools, aided by organizations such as Seagate Powered by Tape Ark.

This article discusses some practical steps M&E companies can take to prepare for this migration to cloud-based production and distribution and how other industries have transformed the way they work in the cloud.

A tale of two business models

Whether you’re a content producer or distributor, forecasting your data storage requirements for the next five years can feel like gazing into a crystal ball. Due to the shortening and quickening pace of technological advancement cycles, data storage and management is capital-intensive and challenging. Hardware investment decisions today are at risk of being obsolete tomorrow.

As the industry embraces new technologies, formats and advancing capabilities, predicting data storage volumes is becoming increasingly difficult as tape libraries fill and the tape shelves begin to pile up.

The resulting predicament many organizations find themselves in is shelves begin to pile up The resulting predicament many organizations find themselves in is far from ideal, with the only practical means of accessing this content being the manual loading of tapes into the tape library, in turn metaphorically ejecting the possibility of agile workflows and negatively impacting remote team environments.

There is an alternative approach however, with a cloud storage model that offers a scalable approach to efficiently managing and accessing your data when, where and how you need it with the added bonus of a flexible cost base. There are no hardware refreshes, no overcrowded tape libraries and no remote access issues. You simply pay for what you use. Data stored in the cloud becomes instantly available and responsive to your business needs.

Even further, with a range of access controls and new security processes, you can arguably apply a higher degree of data security than an on-premise setup.

The cost of cloud storage has been steadily reducing over time, with Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone delivering over 70 price decreases over the last decade. This trend likely will continue into the future as data volumes increase. This cost decrease has been a key driver for adoption in the M&E industry. After making the move, however, many of the other benefits become more apparent.

Enhancing capabilities

Once content is in the cloud, the opportunities for enhancing capabilities through value- adding applications increase significantly. Data accessibility and discoverability are amplified when machine learning can automatically identify and tag celebrities, logos, brands, offensive material and emotions; capture sentiment; and ensure on-screen text becomes a searchable feature.

This helps production teams locate the right scene fast and could rapidly increase the volume of licensable content. Additionally, these tools are also widely cloud agnostic and work on a consumption model.

Agile workflows

Along with the shift to cloud storage many production and distribution workflows have followed suit and now offer completely cloud-based environments.

This has considerably reduced the dependence on physical infrastructure and provides a seamless experience for teams working across time zones or remote locations. It is ideal for maintaining a business- as-usual approach that has never been more imperative than during our current uncertain time. No more calling an East Coast office to load a tape or worrying about limited computing power to run a large transcoding project.

Responsiveness

A cloud approach drives agility and enhanced capability to respond to consumer expectations, market opportunities and changing environments. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us many things, none more apparent than highlighting our operational vulnerabilities and the importance of having our content in the cloud.

One only needs to look at the sports broadcasting industry, which was in the process of finalizing its live spring schedules amidst the early signs of COVID-19.

Within weeks, live sporting events across the world were canceled, leaving broadcasters with empty content slots. No matter how prepared many may have thought they were, an inevitable content scramble commenced, with critical questions being raised and answers suddenly required to avoid losing audiences, advertisers and commercial partners. “What content do we have?” broadcasters asked. “Is it in the right format? How quickly can we access it?”

In a cloud-enabled environment, these questions can easily be answered. Content is instantly accessible 24/7 in desired formats, so rerunning previous seasons is a responsive and seamless exercise. Furthermore, running seasons that match audience expectations is no longer a technical challenge. Creating new content with highlight packages is straightforward as AI and ML tools can identify and tag content, making it easy to accurately identify players.

Image discoverability is enhanced through contextual searches: “Player X, looking happy, saying ‘touchdown with Player Y.” All this work is undertaken remotely, business operations continue, and the impact of a global pandemic is limited.

Starting the cloud journey

For many, the first step to improving data accessibility and security while opening up future potential revenue streams, is to migrate your content from tape bound media to the cloud. Tape Ark has created a dedicated technology stack that helps M&E companies take the pain and time out of tape-to-cloud migrations.

Without using any customer hardware, Seagate Powered by Tape Ark coordinates safe and secure receipt of all tapes beforehand, applying its parallel processing solution to restore content and metadata before migrating it to the preferred cloud platform. Not only will this act as an additional archive of content, it is positioned at the ready for immediate use in the cloud-based production system.

* By Kyle Evans, Director of Sales, Business Development, Tape Ark

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