Broadcasters in the Cloud “feel the need for speed”

Image by: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/sound/soubar2.html

Okay, sorry for the obnoxious Top Gun reference circa 1986, but it’s true when it comes to what’s being talked about at NAB this year relative to the cloud.

NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) is one of the worlds largest conferences for audio/video production and distribution. No doubt it is a technology rich show, and what would a technology show be without some focus on the cloud these days?

At NAB this year, there is a Cloud Computing Conference track touted as a “full-day Conference that will demonstrate how software developers are addressing two major concerns with respect to cloud-based solutions for video delivery – reliability and security. Experts will provide a senior management overview of how cloud-based solutions positively impact each stage of the content distribution chain. From collaboration and post-production to storage, delivery, and analytics, decision makers responsible for accomplishing their content-related missions will find this a must-attend event,” according the the NAB website.

GigaOM provides a great summary of some of the tech companies sharing their cloud technologies including the likes of Amazon and Microsoft who just so happen to have recently launched an increased focus on digital media according to GigaOM.

What’s it take to produce video these days? Whether box office movie, documentary, TV programming, or commercial, it’s become very complex.  There are multiple touch points (ingesting, editing, finishing, mastering, delivery) in order to take a video from original shoot to the viewer, and in the day and age of specialization, each touch point can be handled by a different person, or even company. When you have such complexity in the workflow, the cloud sounds like an ideal solution, especially when it comes to moving content around.  Today, many companies actually hand deliver hard drives from one stage in the process to the next due to the extremely large file sizes, and the slow upload speeds.

One solution is to have all of the touch points in the workflow use the same cloud infrastructure as CloudSigma CTO Robert Jenkins points out in the GigaOM article.  The goal is to make the cloud faster.  Putting everyone in the same cloud is one way to do it, but there are others like Aspera’s  Direct-to-S3 software which boosts the file transfer feeds to and from any object based cloud storage like Amazon’s S3, from anywhere in the world.

As the rest of the corporate world slowly by surely gravitates portions of their enterprise compute and storage resources to the cloud in the name of agility, cost, efficiency, so will those enterprises that film, cut, edit, master, and deliver the movies, TV programs, commercials, news, etc we love.

It all comes down to filling that need…that need for speed.

Related Posts:

The shift to the cloud and its two masters

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Can I move my data from cloud A to cloud B? Nope…sorry

2012-04-19T12:18:20+00:00

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