Over the past decade the media industry has hailed the adoption of the cloud as a way of introducing new efficiencies, as well as improving content protection and business continuity. For many media companies so far, the cloud has been all about storage. But of course, storing content is far from the only thing the media industry does. In some ways, the current iteration of the cloud, let’s call it Cloud 1.0, is not built for the needs of complex media workflows and what comes next must address these concerns. So where is cloud today and where is it heading, and could Cloud 2.0 be on the horizon?
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Ivanka Vassileva is CEO and co-founder of systems integration specialist PBT EU, offering customised solutions to the broadcast, media, and AV language services industries. Products include the EXEcutor™ broadcast server line, subtitling platform SubtitleNEXT, and Profuz Digital’s business process management system LAPIS.
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While it is generally acknowledged that the broadcast industry roadmap leads to a fully IP-based infrastructure, there is still plenty of uncertainty regarding the exact route that will be taken to get there. Currently the industry can be characterised as being in an extended implementation phase which concurrently overlaps with the R&D efforts necessary to make IP workflows optimised throughout an organisation.
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The world, slowly but surely, is re-opening its tired eyes to what we called ‘normal’ before COVID-19 struck, shutting down everything and anything worldwide. Measures are being reworked and we’re able, in some locations, to return to normality by heading back to the office, going to the movies and resuming face to face contact.
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This narrative begins in 2006. One of the more forward-thinking European broadcasters began the search for a system to take their single national feed, that was funded through traditional ad break advertising, and produce just over 30 variants of this channel. Every channel (regional feed) would now include some regional advertising content, replacing the national advertising breaks at specific times of the day. Starfish Technologies was awarded the contract to design and supply this system. It was implemented using SDI based technology located at each of the regional distribution hubs, the majority of which were unmanned. This system worked well and generated a significant additional revenue stream, so the broadcaster requested an ‘upgrade’ to this system that would also enable local news bulletins and late changing schedules to be inserted into every regional feed. These requirements were best implemented by moving to a centralised architecture and building a complete regional channel system located at its main transmission centre. The first centralised Starfish Technologies system went live in 2009 and again proved reliable, commercially rewarding and with the significant benefit of providing viewers with locally relevant news content.
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Over the last three decades, we’ve seen a shift from specialised units for various video and audio functions, to high performance hardware platforms which can be repurposed on-the-fly to support any AV processing, and now to virtualized media applications and microservices which can be spun up and deployed (and paid for) only when you need them.
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This Regional Trends Report provides insight into the latest broadcast and media industry developments for the Americas region.
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This report delves into one of the major long-term drivers of change in the media industry, identified by IABM in its Special Report published in September 2020: viewing technology only as an enabler. The research puts the spotlight on this specific structural driver of industry change, analyzing the ultimate business, technical and creative values that technology is enabling as well as one of the rising operating models behind them: the cloud model. Our main objective is decoding these topics to shed more light on the economics underpinning media factories.
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In the old days, post-production may have been viewed as a licence to print money with post houses competing with each other for the biggest city centre facilities, the most inventive décor and the biggest espresso machines.
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One of the most important aspects of any training set up is that it provides relevant experience for students on industry standard equipment. For the broadcast industry that can be a problem. Not only is technology in the industry moving at a rapid pace, but the educational institutes that handle an increasing amount of training nowadays aren’t always as well-resourced as they wish to be.
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