Change is inevitable in the media and entertainment industry, and that aura resonates throughout a business transformed through consolidation. Today’s most recognized global broadcasters have largely grown through acquisitions, developing into corporate conglomerates with many different independent divisions and teams.

Naturally, the technology choices these teams made as independent entities must come together in ways that ultimately serve a common purpose. The challenges in bringing these disparate systems and technologies together are often complex, and there is no greater example than considering cloud strategies.

Businesses of all types typically standardize on a singular cloud provider upon entering the cloud universe. They invest time and money into cloud provisioning, the process of choosing, deploying and managing software and hardware resources. The next step is to build out an infrastructure that emphasizes the cloud-specific features most important to the business’s operations. As businesses advance through their journeys, they invest more resources and essentially attach themselves to the specifics of the cloud they selected.

As companies grow, the transition to a multi-cloud environment is inevitable. The different teams that suddenly come together have all made substantial investments in accepting and building an infrastructure around a specific cloud provider. They have favored providers that meet their expectations for network jitter, bandwidth costs, and/or loss characteristics across ground-to-cloud links. In the end, they need to develop an interoperable multi-cloud solution that abstracts the different networking realities of each cloud.

The Road to Multi-Cloud 

While multi-cloud may be inevitable, it’s not easy. For broadcasters, the journey typically starts with building a hybrid network in which some likely workloads are migrated to the cloud first, and run in parallel to on-prem workloads. Ultimately the desire to have unified processes leads to a grander vision -  a properly configured hybrid network that seamlessly integrates the broadcaster’s on-premises network with a public cloud network with a common media workflow supporting both.

Initially, most broadcasters build their hybrid cloud networks with independent processes that  separately support their on-prem and cloud networks. That approach requires two different skillsets, two different sets of deployment methods, and two different product suites. When confronting the requirement to integrate multiple clouds into those hybrid workflows, the problem becomes even more complex.

The reality is that the public clouds are very different, with unique provisioning processes and networking realities. When the time for multi-cloud arrives, it’s critical to have what we at swXtch.io call a common data plane implemented across on-prem broadcast networks, on-prem distribution networks and cloud networks to make a multi-cloud strategy work.

swXtch.io and its cloudSwXtch virtual overlay network provide the foundation to establish that common data plane, which normalizes the network behavior of each cloud provider. For example, broadcasters using a virtual machine within one cloud may experience a sudden reduction in bandwidth because of that cloud’s service agreements and congestion state. cloudSwXtch accounts for those differences and makes the network behave similarly on different clouds. 

cloudswXtch provides a self-configuring network that reduces the reliance on the network specifics of different cloud services. cloudswXtch also offers a common set of features across the different clouds in a multi-cloud network, reducing the need for multiple teams with cloud-specific solutions. This provides a single view of packet flows with many benefits. For instance, if an application in one cloud originates a source stream that is added to a multicast group, that stream can natively flow into another cloud’s multicast-aware endpoints using a standard IGMP join command. 

Using cloudSwXtch, the broadcaster’s multi-cloud network can function like one global network, with a common data plane connecting all clouds, on-prem and edge distribution networks. As media businesses scale, whether through acquisitions, expansion into other regions, or a general need for more capacity, redundancy, or elasticity. Ultimately, enabling homogeneity among the cloud networks that account for their different idiosyncrasies is an important consideration in making a multi-cloud strategy work.

More information is available here. 

For many companies, Signiant has become an important abstraction layer, allowing IT to choose different storage types for different use cases, while giving creative professionals and partners a means to access and transfer content without having to think about where files are stored.

Read the eGuide to learn:

• What storage independence is and why it matters
• Three cases where file acceleration software should support different storage types
• How software that supports storage choice provides your business the flexibility it needs to grow

Download Now!

Across industries, research shows that most companies are still in the early stages of their cloud journey—approximately 20 percent according to Ovum. When cloud first began, it was all about renting compute power to help increase productivity and decrease costs. As the next chapter of cloud begins, the focus is all about taking a hybrid and multi-cloud approach to unlock real business value from data and drive new growth.

The media and entertainment industry is ripe for innovation in this next chapter of cloud.

The industry itself is no stranger to disruption. The rapidly changing nature of content creation and consumption means that content companies face unique challenges. In order to stay competitive, the speed at which companies must produce and distribute content is skyrocketing. This is met with rapidly evolving customer preferences and behaviors including unpredictable viewership spikes and expectations that content can be streamed on-demand in real-time via any device. Even the revenue models are shifting with subscription and advertising-based models being adopted to keep consumer costs low.

A recent survey, for example, found that U.S. consumers use Netflix to watch video content more than any other platform, leaving other cable and broadcast providers scrambling for new ways to attract viewer attention and gain market share.

For these companies, the cloud is about more than just infrastructure-as-a-service. The real opportunity will be leveraging the cloud to rethink how they deliver new, interactive and highly personalized experiences to consumers.

For example, new cloud-based video, data and AI tools enable content providers to produce and deliver user-focused programming and fan experiences tied to popular television shows and sporting events. The result: harnessing their data to deliver specialized content that offers fans a more intimate connection with their favorite shows anytime, anywhere.

The breakout success of the USA Network’s "Mr. Robot," for example, inspired the network to launch the "Mr. Robot Digital After Show," hosted by The Verge. The "After Show" is a livestream that immediately follows each episode, allowing fans to discuss what happened, hear from some of the actors and learn about hidden messages they might have missed.

The network turned to the cloud to run the very popular "After Show’s" livestream as a way of keeping its popular "Mr. Robot" property top-of-mind while also rewarding loyal viewers. By adopting cloud, USA Networks could focus their efforts on providing innovative, real-time content as opposed to focusing on the reliability of the infrastructure, according to the network.

USA Network’s efforts with its prized "Mr. Robot" brand are only a taste of what’s to come for media companies as they take a more open and strategic view of the cloud.

Fox Sports turned to the cloud last year to give sports fans a glimpse of the future. The broadcaster’s FIFA 2018 World Cup coverage relied on a collaboration across multiple network properties and programming with the help of artificially intelligent software. The broadcaster tapped IBM Watson Media’s cloud-based specialized AI video technology to quickly classify, edit and access game highlights in near real-time, despite the production team sitting thousands of miles away in Los Angeles.

Fox Sports and Watson Media also launched The Highlight Machine, an interactive online site that allowed fans to browse FIFA’s archive of past matches and create custom highlights—by year, team, player, match and play type—from both historic footage and content from the 2018 tournament.

These are just a few examples of how the cloud can help companies differentiate and keep their content competitive. Adopting a hybrid multi-cloud strategy is already enabling companies to connect, integrate, synthesize data—regardless of where it resides—and then activate those insights across content offerings, ad products and user relationships. This is just a taste of what’s to come as the next wave of cloud computing helps to drive transformation in the media and entertainment industry.