At the beginning of this year, I shared insight into why broadcasters continue moving storage to the cloud. Since my last article, the rate of adoption has only increased, which has emphasized how vital the cloud has become to broadcasters – and the media industry as a whole. This trend is supported by research from Gartner, which forecasts that spending on public cloud services worldwide will grow by 20.7% to $591.8 billion by the end of 2023, up from $490.3 billion in 2022. 

This evolution of the cloud comes at a critical time for the industry. With the growth of audiences and multiple platforms at their disposal, broadcasters face an almost-constant challenge of delivering high-quality and engaging content 24/7. However, delivering this much content is expensive and it is time-consuming to create. But, with every problem, there is a solution, and in this case, it comes in the form of cloud archiving.

What is Cloud Archiving?
Cloud archiving is not necessarily a new concept, but its capabilities and benefits are still not fully recognized. To put it simply, a cloud archive is a storage solution that keeps data secure and accessible at any time and from any location. A cloud archive makes it easier to manage large amounts of information, and it also allows vast content libraries while also being more cost-effective to maintain.  

Cloud-based archiving is revolutionizing broadcasters’ approach to content creation because it allows them to leverage their content libraries in much more effective ways. By taking such an approach, broadcasters are in a better position to increase audience loyalty and reduce content spending simultaneously. Such flexibility is key in today’s marketplace, as the cloud has become the hub for using all that content to keep viewers watching long after the credits have rolled on the program they tuned in to watch.

Benefits of Utilizing the Cloud
I have already touched upon the benefits of the cloud to create more content, but that is not all. The cloud is helping organizations streamline their operations and grow their bottom line. Here are some examples:

As we are all too aware, budgets are tighter than ever, partly due to increased content production costs, so broadcasters need to find ways to make the most of their content libraries, all while ensuring they meet the evolving needs of their audiences. The cloud holds the key. It is cost-efficient and easy to use, so businesses can save money by reducing expenditure and operating costs. 

The cost-efficiency benefits may seem obvious, but little understanding remains of cloud archiving having a positive impact on content strategies. With access to greater cloud storage, broadcasters can re-use library content that is a good fit for today’s market and share it quickly, empowering content owners to stay ahead of their competitors and nurture audience loyalty.

A further benefit of cloud storage is its flexibility - and reliability - for disaster recovery (DR). DR has been a major talking point for years, and with the vast amount of content and data at stake, the consequences of not having the right tools in place can be severe. Ensuring you have a robust DR strategy should be an integral part of any business plan. The cloud gives that scalable safety net broadcasters need, reassuring them their content will be protected.

Metadata's Crucial Role
As broadcasters look to leverage their content libraries, the management of metadata has also become a critical part of their content archiving strategy. Metadata allows organizations to understand their customers’ viewing habits better. Armed with this information, broadcasters are available to implement strategies that can retain and attract new viewers, in turn generating new revenue streams.

The uses of metadata range from simple but valuable additions, such as text transcripts created from audio content, to advanced applications. The cloud's metadata capabilities deliver a long-term ROI to keep content up-to-date and future-proof video libraries.

In addition, since the cloud makes content more accessible than on-prem storage, content owners can use metadata to keep archive videos optimized to align with their changing strategies. These advantages are no longer the exclusive domain of the major players. Smaller broadcasters can also unleash their potential and become more competitive in the industry due to the lower costs and availability of cloud-based workflows.

Conclusion
These cloud capabilities support the continual growth of audiences and platforms, and the content necessary to maintain them. The challenge of delivering high-quality and engaging content is seemingly unrelenting, but with innovation continuing I believe the industry is in good shape to prosper.

SAN FRANCISCO—It’s a technology that continues to prove its worth and defy its detractors, boasting of speed and touting reliability as a high-capacity storage vault, a means of disaster recovery and a way to share content. 

And now, as archiving in the cloud continues to mature, the technology continues to win over large broadcasters and small production houses alike. It has proven to be secure, the capacity to handle massive amounts of data, and support for collaboration between geographic locales separated by continents. 

The next steps: Driving long-term value, improving search functions, meeting the needs of different types of customers and addressing thorny issues like cost of egress and long-term adaptability.

Not Just a Simple Migration
“People have become much more comfortable with the reliability, security and affordability of the cloud for content archives,” said Geoff Stedman, chief marketing officer of SDVI. “But what people are also realizing is that simply lifting and shifting an archive to the cloud is not [always] the right approach.”

While the explosion of SVOD, AVOD and FAST channels offers new opportunities to monetize content, that scenario only works if the content can be found, accessed and transported through a media supply chain and then prepared for a distribution partner, Stedman said. “[Migration to a cloud archive] presents an opportunity to standardize and normalize content file formats, clean up and enrich metadata and create an archive of golden masters that can be monetized across many different distribution outlets.”

In addition, it’s not just important how you migrate your content into the cloud, but rather if you have visibility into cloud—and the ability easily retrieve it. 

“An organization’s cloud environment can be a bit nebulous,” said Brett Beers, vice president of technology for TMT Insights, a professional services and software development company. “I predict there will need to be more of a focus on investing in productivity and operational tools that will widen the net in terms of the user type that can both interact and manage cloud technology.” 

Plus, customers moving their archives to the cloud are not just looking to migrate a tape library; they are looking to derive more long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during the ingest process, said Evan Statton, senior principal architect of M&E for Amazon Web Services. 

“When cloud archiving first came on the scene, simply moving massive amounts of content to and across clouds was the clear challenge,” said Jon Finegold, chief marketing officer for Signiant. “The tools provided by those early cloud systems simply weren’t cut out for massive media archives.”

Today’s software can now effectively move petabytes of content into and out of cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure and Wasabi.

Migration Trends 
Across the content creation marketplace, there is new, significant interest for companies of varying sizes to consider migration to the cloud. For some, a lift-and-shift approach might be the right step, particularly for an organization new to the technology. For others, designing a digital supply chain from scratch is a more valuable approach. 

“Regardless of the path you pick, the first step is visibility,” said Beers. “What do you have, and then the next step is action: what am I going to do with it?”

TMT Insights faced such a scenario when working with a post house in Burbank, Calif., that was moving from a fully on-premise operation to a 100% cloud-native digital supply chain. “For this engagement, they were able to decrease the time to market and enable rapid innovation by not having the challenges that come with having reliance or integration [with] their legacy systems,” Beers said.

The next challenge: How to help customers easily find and access content archived in the cloud. Several companies, including Signiant, have solutions that automatically index assets and create preview files so customers can perform simple searches across their archives—whether those be on-prem or cloud—without having to move the assets. “Archives need to be actionable,” Finegold said about the company’s Media Engine software. “Accessing them must be quick, easy and cost-effective. When asked for a clip, users need to be able to search, preview and send those assets anywhere, fast.”

TMT Insights also sees increased demand for this type of functionality. The company’s Polaris operational management platform allows users to manage their end-to-end cloud-based media supply chains via a file manager module within Polaris. That module enables enhanced visibility and gives users controls to manage their ingest and prequalification workflows. By providing users access to the cloud in a purposeful way, one of TMT Insight’s clients was able to increase their on-time delivery from an average of 65 percent to 99 percent, Beers said.

Mining Your Value
Another key trend in the cloud movement: Ensuring customers derive additional long-term value from their assets by applying meaningful metadata during ingest. AWS helped Formula One (F1) achieve this using the AWS Media2Cloud solution when it migrated more than 4 petabytes of archived video content to Amazon S3 and now uses artificial intelligence/machine learning services to reduce the time it takes to catalog content. 

“Additionally, we’ve learned from our customers that ‘one size does not fit all’ for archive retrieval patterns,” Statton said, referring to the Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class and Flexible Retrieval storage class, which are designed to help customers fine-tune retrieval performance based on the needs of archive usage.

The cloud is proving attractive to organizations of all sizes. Giving small creative groups the ability to easily access the cloud was the impetus behind a new release from Quantum that integrates a media asset management module and shared storage software. The goal was to remove the complexity that can often hamper a smaller creative group when it comes to configuring separate devices and setting up separate production workflows.

Quantum’s H4000 Essential provides a standard set of features—automatic context indexing, shared storage—but doesn’t require specialized IT skills to support. That was the case for the creative agency Switch, which works on multiple projects simultaneously via the StorNext collaborative shared storage system and the Quantum cloud-based analytics software. 

The benefit: A small creative company can quickly deploy production-ready shared storage in the cloud, allowing for collaborative, remote video editing in the cloud.

SDVI is seeing this as well, as companies of all sizes realize they can become more efficient and agile when they take advantage of cloud technologies, Stedman said. “Moving their archives and media processing to the cloud, even at a relatively smaller scale, frees them up to focus on their core creative business because they no longer have to spend time procuring, deploying and managing on-premise infrastructure.” 

AWS is seeing demand from all types of customers, from TV stations to larger broadcasters looking to migrate hundreds of linear channels to AWS. The company was recently awarded an Engineering Excellence Award from the Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) for its “Color in the Cloud” cloud-based remote service that enables customers of all sizes to perform high-fidelity color grading in
the cloud.

Egress Costs
Challenges remain, however. While the cloud has proven its mettle at handling shared content with speed and reliability, there are instances where a cloud gateway linked to a high-capacity storage infrastructure may be a better fit. As veteran media and entertainment tech companies have long known, storage on LTO data tape can be lower in cost per terabyte than primary disk storage.

And in some instances, the best archiving solution is a combination of the old and the new. Software from companies like XenData can be used to create a hybrid archive that links together on-premise storage with the cloud so that file-based applications can write to and read from cloud storage. Using a XenData S3 Server interface with a XenData LTO archive creates a private cloud storage solution allows an organization to keep the attractive aspects of LTO storage onsite. In this scenario, files can be remotely downloaded free of any egress charges.

And that’s another lingering issue for archiving in the cloud to address: The cost
of egress. 

Though the industry is moving in that direction, workflows requiring heavy visual effects and editing work are still not fully realized within the cloud to run at scale. So files sometimes must be pulled down and worked on outside of the cloud, with a heavy price tag to boot.

Understanding those types of cloud economics continues to be a key challenge for customers when it comes to archiving in the cloud. “Customers are capturing so much more content and want to preserve all of it,” Finegold said. “But for how long? How much content will be retrieved? When will it impact things like egress costs? These and other questions make predicting costs a real challenge.”

Others say the cost of egress is generally not an issue for content companies moving their archives to the cloud since content deals can be struck between content owners and cloud-based streaming services that are fulfilled without content ever leaving the cloud—with a majority of local, on-premise editing accomplished using proxy files that are a fraction the size of the original master in the cloud. 

The most important priorities in an archiving system will be familiar to anyone navigating the modern content creation space: Agility. Adaptability. Visibility. Ideally, as Beers from TMT Insights put it, “Our goal is to make the shift to the cloud less intimidating, to show clients the way and give them the tools they need to navigate that path themselves.” 

NEW YORK—With the onset of 4K and higher-resolution video formats comes the inevitable impact on storage. By some accounts as much as 12 terabytes of content is being produced daily, and it has to be stored somewhere.

The cloud is increasingly becoming an option. Cisco’s annual Global Cloud Index report predicts cloud data centers could execute 78 percent of all IT workloads by 2018, compared to just 22 percent for traditional (on premise) data centers.

A GOOD TIME FOR TRANSITIONING?
Numerous broadcast vendors, as well as major players such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon offer off-site storage solutions where video can be transferred for longtime archiving and backup. With so many options, the time to make the transition to the cloud could be now, especially if existing hardware systems are due for an upgrade.

“For those operating on production systems that were installed in the 2007–09 timeframe, they are reaching the end of life, and now is the time to look to an infrastructure that is cloud-ready,” said Jay Batista, general manager of Tedial’s U.S. operations, a division of the Spanish-based provider of media asset management software.

The cloud can be used to archive content and also provide access as needed.

“This is a great time to look at your business,” Batista added. “If you are producing scripted programming and push it over to a distributor or syndicator the cloud offers a way to save daily raw cuts as well.”

Production facilities can also leverage the cloud and pump up the storage or ramp it down as needed for short-term storage said Batista, especially as there can be times when more media comes in due to peaks in a sports or news cycle.

Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations “For those looking at the news model or daily content that might need to be retrieved often, a privately hosted cloud service works best,” said Mike Palmer, vice president of business strategy at Masstech Innovations, a Markham, Ontario-based provider of digital media management systems. “It offers immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

It may be necessary to watch key performance indicators to determine when more or less cloud storage is needed in the short term.

“Those business analytics are available, and can be set up to measure traffic and how it corresponds to storage on the cloud,” said Batista. “It is this cyclical nature of business that will determine the best way to leverage the cloud.”

SEND AND FORGET
Although increasing file sizes could prompt more broadcasters and media companies to turn to the cloud for longterm archiving, the move is not without issues. In many cases the cloud could be a “send and forget” option primarily.

There are three main issues to consider when determining whether to archive to the cloud, according to Alex Grossman, vice president of media and entertainment at Quantum, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of storage management systems.

“The first issue is how secure is the cloud, so that you know it is archived but won’t get touched by anyone,” Grossman explained, adding that content owners should be able to feel secure that the cloud is reliable. “Are multiple [backup] copies maintained and how do you prove that?” he asked. The only way to ensure that the content has been actually backed up is to do auditing by downloading it and that can cost money.

The third issue isn’t just that the content will be there but that the cloud provider will be as well.

“What happens if the cloud vendor opts out of the business?” Grossman asked. “This leads to how you might move the content to a new place. These are the things not so much to worry about, but to consider when moving content to the cloud.”

The biggest issue however could remain cost, especially as video production moves to 4K, where files truly put the “big” in big data.

“One aspect to keep in mind with the cloud is that this isn’t a onetime payment,” said Chris Luther, director of professional services at SGL Broadcast, a U.K.-based provider of archive and storage management software for post production, news, sports and government. “You are in fact paying for that storage every month forever. It might only be a fraction of a cent per file, but files larger than 2GB often have to be broken up, and consider that 4K is about a gigabyte a minute. So every production needs to be broken up into two-minute chunks. In many cases we are seeing that broadcasters may be expecting too much of the cloud at this time.”

Michelle Munson, CEO, AsperaON THE DOWNLOAD
What goes up to the cloud will need to be downloaded when needed, and this is another factor that has to be considered, especially as cloud facilities could be geographically far from a production facility. The cloud is only going to be as reliable as the infrastructure to transport that data over vast distances, and should the connection be slow or unreliable, the data can be difficult, even impossible, to download or otherwise access. This creates more pressure on available bandwidth, according to Michelle Munson, CEO of Aspera, an Emeryville, Calif.- based next-generation software technologies transport vendor.

“We’re seeing that volume has grown and that only serves to take more bandwidth on the pipe,” she said. “Today you need to move terabytes of data, and we are striving to make all storage equal, independent of location or the amount of any data.”

The size of the files remains that issue, for the up and download.

“It is a double problem,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst of nScreenMedia a research firm that covers online media. “Today’s video files are massive if they are uncompressed and this takes up a lot of bandwidth, but every time the file is needed it can take a long time to download it.”

The time it takes to download is the other half of the equation, as the content might be safely archived but not immediately accessible when it is needed.

“It can take a long time to get the content, so in many cases you need to plan around it,” said Savva Mueller, director of product management at Masstech Innovations.

PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?
Some of the issues surrounding cloud archiving can also be overcome by creating a private cloud as opposed to utilizing a public cloud-based solution from Amazon or Microsoft.

“Public [cloud] at a price per gig can add up, and that can be a hard model to justify for archiving,” said Palmer. “Local storage to your own cloud servers can be a larger upfront cost, but you own that [cloud server] forever.”

Such a solution could be hosted externally or in a company’s own data center, and could take advantage of the economy of scale. A lot of this depends entirely on the type of content that is being archived and when it might be needed.

“If you are looking at a news model then a privately hosted model could be better,” added Palmer. “There is immediate access and the storage cost is low.”

By contrast, for short-term storage with a finite amount of data, a public cloud could be the better option. Yet the public option does mean giving up some control.

“There are still a lot of execs out there who are worried about the cloud,” noted Tedial’s Batista. “The content may not be secured and that can be a problem.”

In some cases these concerns are magnified based on where the public cloud may be located.

“You don’t have control where the data is stored,” said Luther. “Why would anyone trust that their content might not end up on a server in China and be replicated even before it is officially released in America?”

For the coming year, Munson expects that demand for cloud storage will continue to grow, even as issues such as file size, security and cost need to be addressed.

“The use of cloud infrastructure will become more commonplace,” she said. “It is no longer an experiment. We are seeing the industry take techniques from high-performance computing and tie it to video production.”