During the quarantine period, media streaming sites are growing increasingly popular.
According to Variety, binge-watching has become increasingly popular, with Netflix alone reaching a new high of 15.77 million paid customers in the first quarter of 2020.
The media and entertainment industry’s revenue is expected to reach 2.1 trillion US dollars in 2021, according to Statista.
Disney, YouTube, Netflix, Comcast, and many of smaller businesses make up the media and entertainment industry, which includes both online and print media.
Cloud applications in Media businesses are growing at the same time as the media business itself.
Media and entertainment firms throughout the world, large and small, are capitalizing on the cloud’s arrival and adapting their business models to provide fast, seamless, and digital content delivery to their clients.
Users in today’s world have become so accustomed to a seamless and comfortable experience that they demand immediate access to videos, movies, specials, and related content rights on their bed or couch.
Content generation has increased as a result of the rising consumption of content in the sector. But what’s the impact of cloud applications in the media and entertainment industry?
In this insightful media blog article, we’ll look at the advantages of cloud applications in media and entertainment business, as well as how media organisations have adopted Kilowott’s Innovation 22 platform to remain ahead of the competition.
Demand in Media Industry is Unpredictable
SelectUSA created a report in 2018. It stated that the global M&E sector was worth $2.1 trillion, with the United States accounting for $678 billion of that.
By 2023, the entertainment sector is predicted to have grown by 23% to $2.6 trillion in value.
Household names such as Comcast, Disney, Time Warner, YouTube, and Netflix are among the main players, but the industry also includes thousands of small-to-medium businesses, which employed more than 1.6 million people in the United States alone in 2017.
Demand from consumers has become more flexible. Because of this unpredictability, media companies must cope with viewing spikes and surges in real time.
Cloud application’s qualities are ideal for providing the scalability and flexibility required to meet objectives in a cost-effective manner.
Continuous expansion of content
The media and entertainment sector is continually developing, producing, and distributing new content in order to stay relevant in the competitive content creation and content distribution world.
It would be impossible to manage, store, and deliver such a large amount of content without the use of cloud computing applications.
The Cloud makes it possible to deliver material in a cost-effective manner. Hybrid or multi-cloud deployments can provide a lot of flexibility, allowing workloads to be moved between private and public infrastructures smoothly.
Cloud computing can assist the new ‘media and entertainment businesses’ keep storage costs down while also balancing off increased expenditures in other areas.
Companies can decrease their invested costs in delivery technologies, storage, and infrastructure by switching from a CAPEX to an OPEX cloud model. Cloud storage is also divided into several tiers.
Minimal delays/downtime
A high streaming performance with low delays and downtime is critical in terms of user experience and advertising expectations.
A streaming delay can cost media firms thousands of dollars. There are numerous options and architectures that support high-performance SLAs with the use of cloud computing applications, such as multi-Cloud, hybrid deployments, and multi-region.
Enhancing storage and delivery through Cloud
Data storage is critical because files must be backed up and protected. Data storage and delivery are improved with cloud computing, which is beneficial to the media and entertainment business.
Demanding Consumers
Consumers of media and entertainment content today need variety and choice. Furthermore, consumer demand is unpredictably variable, with spikes and surges in viewership that must be handled in real time.
Cloud applications’ on-demand capabilities provide the scale and flexibility that the M&E sector requires to meet volatile demand cost-effectively, autonomously spinning up and down computers as demand ebbs and flows.
Agility and Quickness Time to Market
Constant Content Expansion Material makers in the M&E sector are under pressure to generate and/or distribute original content more regularly in order to stay competitive.
It would be nearly difficult to store, manage, and transport these massive amounts of digital content in an agile, dynamic, and cost-effective manner without the cloud.
Hybrid and/or multi cloud deployments can provide even more flexibility by allowing workloads to be smoothly switched between public and private infrastructures.
Companies that want to use cloud technology can receive tailored cloud hosting plans from media-focused, top cloud services providers, which will help them distribute content faster than their competitors, virtually instantly when compared to traditional methods.
Over the last two decades, media businesses and broadcasters have been forced to manage their production costs and digital content delivery within the same budget constraints, which is extremely difficult in this era of increasing economies.
Furthermore, legacy methods based on outmoded technology have outlived their usefulness, and it is time for a new technology that is both reliable and cost-effective, which is where cloud computing comes in.
Cloud computing enables M&E companies to not only offer their content more easily without the need for system operators to manage it, but it also enables them to cut all of the costs associated with content generation and distribution, hence increasing their quality and revenues.
Cloud Computing’s Cost Advantages
New trends in television broadcasting and agile, low-cost OTT (Over the Top) enterprises that sell and/or transmit streaming audio, video, and other media directly to consumers over the Internet are posing a threat to traditional M&E distribution corporations such as cable or broadcast television.
The increased costs of content licensing, as well as reduced technology lifecycles, are also putting pressure on the bottom lines of content-oriented M&E organizations.
Cloud applications in the media and entertainment business can help to balance rising expenditures in other areas by lowering technology and storage costs.
M&E businesses, for example, can lower their invested expenditures in storage and delivery technologies and infrastructures by switching from a CAPEX to an OPEX model in the cloud.
Using multiple tiers of cloud storage SLAs for their hot vs cold digital assets can also help M&E organizations save money on storage.
Minimal delays/downtime, high performance
In terms of both user experience and advertising expectations, high streaming performance with minimal delays and downtime is crucial.
For example, a six-second delay in streaming an ad for a popular show might cost a media corporation hundreds of thousands of dollars, which they must recoup from the advertiser.
Multi-region, multi cloud, and hybrid deployments, for example, present numerous opportunities for distributed and redundant architectures that meet high availability and high-performance SLAs.
Scalability
The scalability offered by cloud applications in media is unrivalled.
Cloud computing may assist any M&E organisation that requires a big number of processing and networking resources to handle surges in workload, which can include some concerts or live events.
When compared to other technologies, cloud computing’s scalability is unrivalled, allowing businesses to quickly scale up or down resources as needed.
Furthermore, geographic constraints are no longer an issue with cloud computing.
The number of companies in the media and entertainment industry that are adopting and accepting cloud computing is continuously growing. Companies who can embrace early will have a competitive advantage and will improve considerably faster than their competitors.
If a corporation insists on using old, traditional practices and refuses to change, it should prepare to join the ranks of the obsolete.
Over-the-top content (OTT) & Cloud Applications
Using old broadcasting methods and delivering content historically is just not possible for broadcasters and Media & Entertainment firms, especially in this age of the digital world and current economic circumstances.
Adopting via-the-top content, where digital content such as audio and video is supplied directly to users over the internet without the involvement of any system operator to manage and distribute the content among the viewers, might be a game-changer for any Media & Entertainment organization.
OTT is a game-changer for the media and entertainment business, and any organization that wants to avoid being left behind and complications should stay up with the digital shift and use this technology.
Cloud technology emerges as a leading solution for businesses looking to make this transition, since the cloud makes it simple for businesses to distribute, manage, safeguard, and monetize all of their digital information.
The media company or agency that embraces cloud technology will have some strategic advantages over its competitors, ranging from increased collaboration to a proportionate increase in revenue.
M&E companies who have adopted or are about to adopt cloud technology have a better chance of growing and gaining more income than their competitors.
Cloud technology applications are unquestionably the way of the future, and businesses who embrace it will experience exponential development.
How Can Kilowott Help Media Distributors Scale Up?
Customer success stories from M&E cloud service providers will help you, as a media distributor, to make final decisions on tools and services to track and manage storage and compute utilization and prices.
Complex cloud infrastructures that straddle multiple—and often siloed—cloud users inside the company, as well as hybrid and/or multi cloud deployments, may not be adequately met by cloud-native tools and services.
In the media and entertainment business, Kilowott’s Innovation ‘22 data management solution, which runs as an instance on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud storage, delivers a wide range of cost-containment and embed benefits of cloud computing.
Numerous media distributors have adopted to Kilowott’s media distribution solutions to save costs, improve performance, and overcome cloud computing issues.
Every day, Kilowott’s content creation and delivery platform helps authors and coordinators manage tons of digital assets while serving numerous multimedia tales, readers and viewers across five continents.
Nickelodeon, Netflix, Volant, & Snero are some of our clients.
Kilowott has been tasked to solve media distribution pain points related to scalability, agility, and innovation.
We have improved their ability to publish various destinations throughout the world at the same time.
We help improve the speed with which new features are developed.
We solve the major pain point of low resilience. If one node in the cloud application fails, workloads fail over to another node promptly and automatically, ensuring uninterrupted operations and fault-tolerant business continuity.
Data management solutions by Kilowott reduce workloads by migrating effortlessly from on-premises to the cloud and back.
If your business wants to optimize the running of source data, Kilowott can build a resource-efficient incremental technology solution to clone writable volumes immediately and at zero capacity no matter the size of the source data.
This allows Kilowott to quickly spin up and tear down dev/test environments. It also serves as a cost-effective manner to relocate data assets where they are needed to meet latency and data sovereignty requirements.
Let’s assume your company operates a radio station somewhere in Europe and there is a massive collection of nearly 1,00,000 hours of programming content.
One pain point that you would face is getting those programming hours from fragile analogue tapes to digitized archives.
We can build you a cloud solution where you can shift those assets from tapes to cloud with one singular step. That’s digital transformation right there!
The entire programming history is not available to the public thanks to a successful cloud transfer.
Add to that, Kilowott can build a cloud management system that can manage both on-premises and cloud-based data storage from the same interface.
It can be a single-pane interface with complete visibility and management over your hybrid and multi cloud installation.
Migrating to the cloud enables storage optimizations that automatically compress, deduplicate, and compact data to lower cloud data storage costs, resulting in a 70% reduction in storage expenditures.
We build backup and recovery cloud systems for media that backup and recover a replica site up to date and in compliance with strict failure recovery standards.
We help reduce downtime and delays as much as possible to keep up with the fast-paced nature of real-time publishing for media files.
We help media distributors consolidate its editorial and advertising systems onto a single infrastructure and content management system.
We help establish disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure for business-critical cloud apps.
Exceeding the RTO (recovery time objective) and reducing costly storage sprawl are two key advantages of bringing a change to your distribution management system.
Planning your move to cloud applications for media distribution?
We’ve seen the benefits of cloud applications in the media and entertainment business so far.
How can you ensure that your move to the cloud is a success once you’ve made the decision?
Researching and exploring the numerous cloud computing solutions available on the market is the first step to develop a successful media cloud application strategy.
Before taking a decision, look over the many options to discover what best suits your needs.
As the cloud market grows, additional cloud storage providers emerge, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, and others.
