To continue operations amid the ongoing pandemic, media companies of all sizes have had to quickly make the switch to remote production to cater to a fully work-from-home environment.

Production teams are being challenged to adapt to this significant disruption and work in a very agile fashion. They’re having to collaborate on projects remotely, seamlessly share content and assets, quickly roll out different services to different sites and not be as tethered to physical data centers as they once were.

This shift is driving interest in cloud-native technologies and container-based deployments. Platforms such as OpenShift and Kubernetes offer reproducible, high-availability, fault-tolerant infrastructure solutions that allow media businesses to move their workflows to or from any public or private cloud environment without having to rearchitect the infrastructure.

With production teams working remotely, the spotlight has also become more focused on high-quality IP-based streaming and cloud security. It’s now more important than ever for media companies to secure their workflows to protect their content and revenues, meaning media businesses have a lot to think about if they want to operate effectively and efficiently amid the “new normal.”

CONTAINERS TAKE HOLD

Containers are a virtualization technology that enable users to package and isolate discrete application components with the precise dependencies and configurations required to run, thereby providing a streamlined way to build, test, deploy and redeploy applications on multiple environments. This offers many benefits for media organizations. For example, containers provide the flexibility to efficiently manage new remote workflows and infrastructures consistently across all applications, such as encoding, transcoding, graphics rendering and video transport.

Most importantly, they allow businesses to very quickly scale up workflows automatically and on-demand to meet fluctuating requirements and leverage the power of the cloud to apply additional resources when needed. Although there are costs associated, the flexibility means workflows can be scaled up and down to meet spikes or dips in demand for production traffic. Containers are managed by orchestration platforms, most dominantly based on the open source Kubernetes project. 

Another area where containers and their orchestration platforms impact the media industry is availability. Media workflows are highly time sensitive, meaning the availability of services is a key concern for production teams in terms of delivering content to tight deadlines. Kubernetes offers a consistent way to ensure an ultra-high level of availability, while removing the complexity associated with traditional, vendor-specific approaches.

In the past, businesses had to engage with all their technology vendors independently when developing a strategy for high availability. This required additional resources for infrastructure management, as businesses would have to learn the nuances of each product when monitoring for availability. Evolving to a container-based model streamlines and consolidates the monitoring of critical workflow resources, thereby reducing both complexity and cost.

The key for businesses is to make sure that they don’t end up with a bespoke set of tools that’s harder and more complex to manage. This can be avoided by embracing the communities around platforms such as OpenShift. These communities often spearhead new innovations, so staying abreast of the latest trends in the community when building a container-based environment—especially one that comprises different technology vendors and providers—can help guide the process. As a result, businesses will be more likely to adopt a standard toolset that makes it easier to manage the lifecycle of the tools and service in their workflows.

THE FULL PACKAGE

These factors are prompting more and more media businesses to work with external partners to evolve their public cloud resources and workflows into container-based environments. Although the media industry has been relatively slow to adopt containers compared to other sectors, we’re seeing growing interest in Kubernetes and the consolidation of media offerings onto a single platform powered by containers.

But container technology isn’t the only innovation enhancing remote production workflows. IP-based streaming is also taking on a growing importance, particularly in the current climate where remote productions have fewer office-based IT support staff than ever before. Media businesses are operating on skeleton crews, and IP-based streaming offers a flexible and cost-efficient way of operating remote production sites without requiring a full IT staff, while also ensuring a more streamlined workflow.

And linked to this, of course, is the issue of security. As productions continue to become increasingly remote with employees working from different locations, security must be considered as a central part of any end-to-end workflow. Ensuring proper identity management is becoming increasingly important, presenting a need to integrate technologies such as intelligent authentication, credentials encryption and secure key management integration with BYOK (bring your own key) capabilities. 

BYOK enables businesses to easily and cost-efficiently rotate their encryption keys, and can be supplemented with other cloud security innovations such as forensic “watermarking-as-a-service” to counter piracy. This all can help businesses ensure security by following the principles of zero-trust environments when auditing key workflows, providing a high level of control and protecting valuable content in the most effective way possible.

Ultimately, it’s becoming clear that container-based deployments will become the dominant infrastructure solution in a remote and hybrid cloud world. These cloud-native technologies are vital to supporting agile and secure operations, giving media businesses the tools to enhance their remote production workflows and adapt to any situation that comes their way. 

James Wilson is head of Aspera Engineering and Operations, IBM.

From enterprise IT to finance, manufacturing and everything in between, it’s no secret that blockchain is set to dramatically transform a host of industries. New blockchain-based applications and use cases are constantly emerging as the technology continues to extend beyond cryptocurrency and usher in a new era for the internet.

Simply put, blockchain refers to a distributed database that can be shared by multiple systems contributing to the same body of data, creating a shared system of record among those who have the required access privileges. One of its great strengths is that the data can’t be tampered with—i.e. it’s immutable—because every transaction is recorded chronologically and validated by other members of the network.

As such, blockchain networks establish trust through a combination of transparency, traceability and state-of-the-art cryptography. Relevant parties are granted visibility into the history of every single transaction through intelligent access control mechanisms, so users can be sure that the data is both secure and accurate. When thinking about the media industry specifically, it’s this trust—combined with enterprise-grade security and authentication capabilities—that will be essential to the technology’s future success.

Of course there are still some hurdles that will need to be overcome as the technology develops. But, blockchain’s inherent transparency and security benefits make it ideally placed to provide a fresh and innovative approach to content distribution and monetization. Add to this its ability to autonomously execute smart contracts, and the massive potential impact of blockchain in media is clear to see.

BLOCKCHAIN IN M&E

So, what’s driving all the excitement around blockchain in the media industry? Despite its relative infancy, several foundational solutions and use cases are starting to showcase blockchain’s immediate potential and pique the interest of media organizations.

One such example is blockchain’s role in verifying the provenance and pedigree of assets to enable collaboration across the industry. Digital assets are exchanged between multiple parties throughout their lifecycle, traversing many hosted services and multiple IT solutions in multi-cloud infrastructures. This presents a significant security challenge. Parks Associates estimates that video piracy will cost pay TV and OTT providers $9.1 billion in lost revenue this year, and that number is expected to grow by 38% to $12.5 billion by 2024, meaning media organizations have to secure this exchange of content to avoid leaks and unauthorized access.

However, this security often comes at a price. Aspects such as data transfer performance and speed of asset exchange can suffer as a result of increased security measures, highlighting a need for technology that’s both secure and performant. Only then will it truly add value to these collaboration and asset exchange processes.

Read more: Need to Know: Blockchain

The good news is that blockchain meets these needs, offering the ability to: establish trusted networks through an immutable chain of custody; build an additional layer of security around assets; enable forensic auditing; and reliably execute commercial contracts over the internet. In practical terms, this means a global registry of assets could be created, providing an interconnected network of metadata and integrations with different databases and systems. This would enable media organizations to take any registered asset and gain access to data around who has come into contact with it, what corrections or VFX techniques have been applied to it and who has the rights to it—providing full and accurate visibility into the asset’s lifecycle.

Having this infrastructure in place would then let members of the media community set up ad-hoc networks between relevant participants for specific projects, offering a secure, auditable and transparent way for organizations to manage collaborative projects.

Such a future isn’t far away, as multiple disparate frameworks based on blockchain technologies are already in development today. However, it has become apparent that concerns around blockchain networks being too open and potentially compromising the confidentiality of high-value assets are holding the industry back, with many members of the media community yet to be fully convinced.

For real progress to be made, organizations need to be given the confidence to embrace a blockchain-powered future. This is where a combination of standardized frameworks, open source tools that can be examined and adopted by any developer, and integration with standardized IT tools (such as high-speed transfer software) comes into play.

STANDARDS NEEDED

What many in the media industry have realized is that a standardized framework that clearly lays out blockchain’s role in enabling the movement of assets through many different entities and participants in an ecosystem needs to be in place before blockchain can go mainstream.

Vendors, customers, content producers and standardization bodies will have to come together and reach an agreement on how these new networks should work. This will enable the industry to move away from disparate systems and create a global network that people can use to identify and track assets through their lifecycle.

Moving forward, users will benefit from various enterprise-grade security and privacy capabilities as these standardized networks grow in size for larger content production and distribution workflows. For example, smart contracts could be used to negotiate the secure exchange of encryption keys through integration with modern key store services, as well as enabling use cases like watermarking, which creates unique assets to mitigate piracy and leakage.

When it comes to blockchain, media organizations have to remember that the ability to build trust is a key aspect of blockchain technology—hence why we call it a “trust network.” Trust has the ability to reduce both overheads and frictions in collaboration, making it a precious commodity in the media industry where businesses are dealing with extremely valuable data, assets and intellectual property.

There is undoubtedly a huge opportunity for media organizations to leverage the power of blockchain to securely identify and distribute content and broker transactions. It all comes down to the standardization of tools and a solid technical foundation to encourage organizations to take the leap. With this in place, the media industry will be ideally positioned to be a technology leader and a pioneer for all in its use of blockchain.

James Wilson is director, IBM Aspera Hybrid Cloud,IBM Aspera.