The Media and Entertainment (M&E) industry advancements anticipated over the next 10 years will be nothing less than astonishing. As media organisations look to streamline current operations and enable new revenue, workflow efficiency will become a critical need and the M&E vendor community must lead the way in pioneering these efficiencies.
It is resoundingly clear that the M&E industry will continue doing many of the same activities it has done for over a decade; creating, processing and delivering great digital content. However, the consumer’s appetite for digital video choices and experience flexibility is changing dramatically. It is in satisfying that appetite where the vendors need to help pave the way for the future not only for the consumer, but also for the content owners and others in the content handling ecosystem.
The M&E industry is not immune from the need to do more with the same or often more with less. In many cases, the objective is to move content to the finish line faster than ever before. This has become exponentially challenging due in part to increasing resolution as well as the sheer volume of content. Finding ways to bypass unnecessary steps in the assembly line of content processing is one of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to save time and reduce cost.
One of the most time-consuming workflow congestions points is when media assets complete one stage and are moved so they can be processed by another stage. This moving and queuing methodology causes significant processing delays. Clearly, the larger the asset or more numerous, the longer it takes to move the assets from one storage location to another and consequently, more time to final results.
Possessing technology that is flexible and versatile enough to complete multiple sequential and simultaneous transformative media processes without needing to move the source or the resulting assets is essential. Imagine being able to:
l Ingest mezzanine assets, edit, add special effects, colour correct, colour grade, composite, render, transcode, and playout or multi-platform content delivery all from the same storage platform without ever needing to move or copy anything
l Do any of those stages simultaneously
l Edit different segments of the same asset with multiple editors from multiple manufactures all at the same time.
It is easy to recognise that the old paradigm of waiting is wasteful and the effort put into the collaboration of consolidated workflows leveraging an extensible scale-out storage platform is the way of the future.
The economics of the entire industry are changing. Saving costs through increased operational efficiency is the primary topic with our global partners and customer. Consolidation of workflows into streamlined and collaborative environments allows for radical changes in cost structures and speed to market. The vendor community must take a hard look at workflows end-to-end to help the M&E industry generate and grow profitability, both in the near-term and as technology evolves.
