A point of view from Michael Ritchie, group head of media, streaming, and gaming at Oracle EMEA, and Ian Broughton, media and streaming director at Oracle EMEA.
The battle to secure our screen time is just beginning. The number of streaming services that any given household can subscribe to has a limit. Changing from one provider to another is easy, and it’s happening with both locally and globally focused content providers, fighting for market share. Media and streaming companies need to be future-ready now and are turning to cloud technologies to focus on operational cost efficiencies while improving performance, personalization, and offering a premium experience.
A multipart solution
Accomplishing this goal seamlessly requires a symbiotic multicloud ecosystem that satisfies many different workload requirements. For example, delivering a livestreaming experience for football fans needs subsecond latency infrastructure to ensure that social media feeds don’t spoil the match outcome for those watching 20 seconds behind what’s happening on the field. Video on-demand requires faster access to cheap storage.
A multicloud play is the way to go. More media companies are focusing attention on building a symbiotic multicloud ecosystem to exploit the opportunities that lie ahead, securing their place at the top table as this booming industry continues to surprise us with what’s possible.
A symbiotic multicloud ecosystem strategy has the following focus areas:
- Multicloud, where media companies use the right infrastructure for the right use case
- Specialist offerings that sit on this infrastructure, driving truly differentiated and innovative experiences for end subscribers from independent software vendor (ISV) partners.
According to Gartner, by 2021 over 75% of midsize and large organizations had adopted a multicloud IT strategy. The media and streaming industry has evolved quickly with widespread acceptance of multicloud and most have a clear strategic focus in using it to scale their offerings, while maintaining high performance, which is essential for subscriber experience, especially as service offerings evolve. For cloud architecture, organizations have various requirements around performance, control, security, location, and so on. So, having different options with high performance, low latency, and comprehensive security measures is of paramount importance.
Combine these needs with a plethora of specialist ISV media and streaming capabilities, and organizations can use multicloud to create, package, and deliver spectacular video and audio experiences. It’s a winning formula.
What Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can do for you
Driving more compute, storage, and networking processes to the cloud gives you more flexibility to get the highest-quality content and innovative services to customers. You want services as close to them as possible—at the edge—making them low-latency and accessible anywhere, anytime on any device. Have a quick read of the following three stories, which bring to life the power of a symbiotic cloud ecosystem.
Phenix, the real-time streaming technology platform, use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and another hyperscaler in their symbiotic multicloud ecosystem to provide an outstanding live video experience for sports fans. Phenix uses its own real-time streaming technology to deliver a video stream tailored to each end user’s internet connection speed and quality. No matter where they are, Phenix makes sure that everyone enjoys the same play at the same instant–without frustration from buffering, delays, and spoilers. They synchronize streams at ultra-low latency and scale using OCI, while lowering the expense of delivering data to end users by 70 percent.
Tippett Studio manages award-winning media in OCI. Tippett has a background in stop-motion animation, and as a character and creature designer for Star Wars and other science-fiction movies of the early 1980s, such as Dragonslayer. Today, Tippett Studio is a high-end character and creature animation media production company. As demand for richer experiences on more-diverse viewing platforms has increased, so too has the demand for more sophisticated and robust technology.
Such innovation require infrastructure capable of storing and rendering huge amounts of data. Sanjay Das, CEO at Tippett Studio says, if an artist changes the light in a scene, the content has to go back to the render farm. There, it takes anywhere from 3 to 10 hours per frame to render, depending on the complexity.
Tippett Studio evaluated a number of IaaS options. Das says, “Amazon (AWS) came close, but its prices were too high.”
When Tippett Studio looked at OCI storage services, Das was impressed with the price and scope of the offerings. “Our use of Oracle technology allows us to recruit people and let them work remotely,” Das says. “So this is becoming a global content infrastructure for us.”
Tippett Studio is leveraging Oracle technology “at the bottom of the stack,” he notes, but the company plans to move beyond IaaS to the next levels of the cloud stack: platform as a service and software as a service.
Crunch Mediaworks delivers improved performance, speed, and cost savings for media optimization. Crunch Video Optimizer deployed on OCI offers unparalleled video optimization. This increased optimization efficiency makes video players up to four times more likely to choose higher-quality video variants.
In a recent benchmark, the Crunch Mediaworks solution on OCI was measured to run 33% faster than AWS, 54% faster than Azure, and 62% faster than Google Cloud. The solution’s cost was measured to be 51% lower compared to AWS, 74% lower compared to Azure, and 61% lower compared to Google Cloud, making Crunch Mediaworks on OCI a leading choice for video optimization.
If you want to learn more how Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is helping other business like yours, visit our Media and Streaming site.
Michael Ritchie:
EMEA Group Head of Media, Streaming & Gaming, Oracle
Experienced commercial professional and industry visionary with over 20 years in sales, marketing, strategy and general management, gained across every continent within the Technology, Media and Telecoms sectors.
Ian Broughton:
EMEA Media Industry Director, Oracle
Ian works with media customers across EMEA to investigate how people, data and machines can drive change to shape a better experience for the end subscriber. Pushing the boundaries of what we thought possible.
