Imagine Communications – The balancing act

For today’s broadcasters, the choice between deploying services on-prem or in the cloud has become a critical decision. On the surface, it’s a simple one — on-prem systems require significant investments in physical infrastructure and time, while cloud solutions offer rapid deployment without the maintenance headaches.

However, if you dig a little deeper, the choice isn’t so clear-cut. To balance costs and their environmental footprint, broadcasters must determine when using cloud over on-prem solutions makes the most sense.

GB Labs – Unlocking efficiency with NAS-like cloud storage

Media organizations today face the dual challenges of adapting to new ways of working and responding to the increasing demand for high-quality content. Fresh technological advancements, including NAS-like cloud storage technology, have emerged as key enablers of the streamlined, collaborative remote workflows, efficient resource utilization, and increased operational flexibility essential to overcoming these challenges.

Projective – Breaking free from the hardware cycle: a new era in postproduction

When considering traditional technology deployments within post-production and broadcast companies, the term “cycle of hardware” highlights a common situation for media technology buyers. Every 2-5 years, companies find themselves entangled in a relentless cycle of sourcing, implementing, powering, and retiring physical hardware – servers, storage systems, backup solutions.

Amagi – Embracing cloud technology for a sustainable future

Like many others, the broadcast industry is facing increasing pressure to reduce its environmental impact. While essential for delivering high-quality content, traditional on-premises infrastructure often consumes significant energy and resources. This is due to several factors, including a few that I will be discussing below.

GB Labs – Changing the landscape of modern shared media storage

GB Labs is a well-known provider of industry leading storage, focusing on media-based production storage, from traditional on-premise to innovative solutions, that are ideal for remote and hybrid working needs. The company was established over two decades ago on the premise that regular shared storage has multiple restrictions and complications that can make it expensive and problematic to use.

What is the Cloud? Surprisingly a question still asked today

It’s 2024 and I (wrongly) assumed that the ‘cloud’ was a well understood concept. That said, one of the top Google trends on the cloud is still surprisingly questions like “what is cloud computing?” and “the cloud”, and it shows that what I thought has long been common knowledge might still need some ‘clarification’.

In addition, I have had some ‘interesting’ conversations with some production companies and studios that also suggest that the cloud still is not well understood. Without mentioning any names, one of the funniest conversations I had recently was with a producer who informed me it was company “policy” not to use the internet or cloud, and yet the entire business was entirely dependent on cloud hosted SaaS services like Google Drive!? When I (politely) challenged this, they went on to explain how their files were on their computer, not in the ‘cloud’ (despite having shared links to these files with me via Google Drive and other cloud services). It was conversations like these that inspired me to write a course on the cloud for the IABM. Given that this is still happening, I thought it worth a super-simple summary of what the cloud is in this article.

Studio Network Solutions EVO Cloud: BaM Award Winner, Store

Studio Network Solutions (SNS) is a leading media technology company in the broadcast and post-production industry. Best known for their high-performance EVO shared storage solution, SNS has turned heads with the launch of EVO Cloud, a fully cloud-hosted solution for media production teams that is setting a new standard for remote and cloud-based creative workflows.

Three Media – Driving towards business agility

I think it is safe to start from the assumption that every media business is moving from a smokestack approach – a production line of bespoke, application specific devices – to a software-defined, cloud smart architecture. This will include large elements of intelligent automation, eliminating the mundane to let people concentrate on where they generate real business value.

Signiant – Bridging the gaps between files and objects for media

File and object storage are both common technologies used for persistently storing digital media. While files and objects have many similarities, there are some notable differences.

A key difference is that while the contents of a file can be changed at any time, the content of an object can only be set when it’s originally created. An object can be replaced with an entirely new object with the same name (or “key”), but parts of an object cannot be changed independently. Simplifications like this facilitate improved scaling, reliability and data durability when all that’s needed is a mechanism to reliably store and retrieve fixed blobs of data.

Blue Lucy – Bringing the cloud to earth

I was quite pleased to be asked recently by a Canadian colleague what our “theme” would be for the upcoming IBC show. For me, theme reflects the ethos of the Blue Lucy approach to trade shows; we don’t tend talk about product features or the specific capabilities in our roadmap.

IABM Journal