Digitalisation in media has led to a gravitational shift from broadcast media to OTT (over-the-top) media, such as Youtube and Netflix. However, in the last few years the broadcasters are catching up. Almost every broadcaster today has its own OTT platform. As they modernise their infrastructure, I see a lot of them asking themselves – what is the value-add of the cloud for a company that already has an established and well functioning broadcast infrastructure. This is especially true for teams working in traditional playout centers – the emphasis on changing everything seems unjustified – even irrational
Let’s start with the fundamental question – Why should a traditional broadcaster want to use the cloud, anyway?
Because that’s where the users are:
The users are consuming content over the internet and traditional broadcast technology is not suited to serve that channel.
Additionally, COVID-19 and the emergence of newer technologies enables traditional broadcasters to leverage the cloud better. From a technology perspective, I see the following reasons why a move to the cloud is required.
The cloud will enable you to stay current.
The cloud gives you access to a continually improving hardware stack, reducing the risk of ending up with ‘legacy’ systems in a world where technology change is accelerating over time.
Remote Work Vs. Location Independent Work
Traditionally, the content and the people were in the same location i.e. the office. It was assumed that they cannot be separated. An exception was remote work – when the employees could still access the files remotely (through a VPN).
During Covid, companies were forced to separate the content from the people. They realized that moving the content to the cloud enables remote workers to access it, edit it, even create new content independent of their location. Security and governance are much more granular in the cloud and independent of the network.
Offline editing in the cloud is now possible with newer technologies
Full video editing needs a lot of processing power because of the large data volumes involved in the editing process. It is an essential part of media workflow and the most important reasons people give to keep it on-premise. Traditionally, it has been done by pushing the content to a high-powered laptop and using editing tools on the laptop.
Now, we keep the content and editing tools in the cloud and use newer technology such as PCoIP (PC over IP) to edit it. We combine it with better codecs to stream the data from the cloud location to your computer with minimal latency over the internet.
The average age of the TV viewer is now in the 50s for most industrialised countries. The broadcasters need to move quickly to get where the younger users are.
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