Although still in its relative infancy, esports has gone from a niche sector to a global billion-dollar industry that is drawing huge investment and has a rapidly surging fan base around the world.
The new ‘content continuum’: meeting the demand for a wider spectrum of live and near-live programming through the cloud
The way we consume content has evolved tremendously over the years – from the TV set to the laptop all the way to the smartphone, the way people use media has taken tremendous leaps along the way. Since the birth of social media, traditional media is no longer a one-way stream of communication as consumers embrace always-on, interactive means of learning from and engaging with one another. Younger consumers in particular are shifting away from the conventional habit of watching full-length award ceremonies or sports games, instead preferring to catch up on the latest news, big plays and viral moments via short, snappy, on-demand highlights.
Defense by Design: How Caching Enables Resilience
Business resilience depends on reliable cybersecurity, but relying only on traditional security tools can leave aspects of your business vulnerable. Resilience for digital business starts with high availability and scalability – guaranteeing performance and uptime for websites and apps, no matter what levels of traffic are thrown at them. This can be achieved with caching technologies.
The data domino effect
When designing a storage system for a production or post facility, it is easy to concentrate on capacity and throughput, and think that is all you need. However, a very real issue is data safety and how to guard against it. That is a particular problem in our industry of media production. Once you start considering the issues around data loss, the potential problems start to escalate: a real domino effect.
The Path to Business Resilience and The Cloud. From Sonic Boom & Crispy Chips to Kubernetes & Culture Change.
John O’Loan is CEO at iOMedia Group LNS. After launching Sky News, he assisted in the launch and operations of more than 40 other news, sport and documentary channels around the world. He holds an Executive Masters Degree in Culture Change at HEC Paris and The University of Oxford. In this article, he discusses how companies can best protect themselves from cyber threats.
Mitigating the effects of ransomware on television post-production
Unlike a car crash, a ransomware attack is most likely uninsurable. So, the effects on a major media enterprise, production company or post facility can be totally devastating. Here’s why we should all be concerned, however big or small an organisation.
Protecting Media Assets – Risk and Resilience
The sudden shift to remote working within the media industry saw an incredible turnaround, with workflows being instated quickly to ensure that quality content creation could continue. Existing media tools were adapted to enable workers from around the globe to access content and contribute to production, all whilst the industry came to terms with wider logistical challenges. A quick rollout of infrastructure saw big changes in how the industry managed their assets; suddenly, data that would have been very difficult to access needed to be available to workers from their homes.
Content Protection – more things to consider
The recent IABM report on content security trends in conjunction with our good friends at Axinom made for some interesting reading. As Roger Thornton mentions in his summary article, perhaps the most surprising takeaway is the discrepancy between a stated intention to invest in content, and a far lower priority in investment in content security technology to safeguard against the theft of that content, especially given the financial, operational and potentially creative resources that will be required to produce or acquire it. As Roger summarises, this seems counterintuitive, but budgets are finite and it could be argued that prioritizing content over business processes is where dutiful media providers should concentrate their majority resource.
BT Sport United – a co-ordinated, company-wide commitment to Diversity, Inclusion and Sustainability
BT Sport won the IABM Award for the Most Inclusive Company in December 2021. The sports broadcaster collected the award in recognition of a wide range of action across its operation to promote Diversity and Inclusion. We followed up with BT Sport COO*, Jamie Hindhaugh, to uncover he story behind his inspiring BT Sport United initiative, dive deeper into the programme, discover what’s coming next – and also talk about BT Sport’s sustainability push, which is delivering astonishing results.
Delivering Wider Reach for Women’s Sport
Women’s sport has enjoyed a great start to 2022, with the Women’s Super League (WSL), Six Nations, and Women’s Cricket World Cup, proving key to record UK television audiences. The Women’s Sport Trust found that “UK women’s sport viewership increased 140% from 1st January to 15th May” and Sports Pro Media recently highlighted that WSL broadcast consumption was up 285% in the first year of the Sky-BBC rights deal, based on data from the same study.