Geoff Stedman, chief marketing officer, SDVI, looks at how media organisations are dealing with the pressure to make the most of existing resources, and how those that had previously shelved serious discussions about moving to the cloud have become actively engaged.
What industry trends have particularly stood out for you in 2023, and why?
The economic realities of the past year have pressed media organisations to increase efficiency across all areas of their operations. Under pressure to make the most of existing resources, such organisations are finding it less and less acceptable to maintain expensive capital investments, lying idle while waiting for work to come. CFOs are more assiduously applying resource utilisation as a metric, and what they’re finding is that on-premises infrastructure is fundamentally underutilised 80-90 per cent (or more) of the time. In other words, there is plenty of room for improvement — and by now media organisations understand that the scalability of cloud resources offers an alternative they cannot overlook.
Media organisations know that they can gain a significant competitive advantage when they are able to respond to market dynamics faster than their competition. Whether the opportunity comes in the form of a new content licensing deal or the right time to launch a FAST channel, the company that can fulfill new deals the fastest is in the best position to capitalise. In 2023 media organisations truly began to connect the dots and recognise how, using cloud-based infrastructure to match resources to the workloads at any moment, they could put themselves in that position, ready to respond to opportunity without having to maintain underutilised physical infrastructure.
What impact are you seeing those trends having on the media and entertainment industry?
Media organisations that had previously shelved serious discussions about moving to the cloud have become actively engaged in how to approach such a migration. They have launched deliberate conversations focused on use cases, cloud-native applications, and how to start their journey. Now that the benefits of cloud migration are clear, and the costs of not making the move are evident as well, the shift has become an immediate concern.
With the cloud, the primary question that media organisations are asking now is “How?” As projects become real, teams are assigned, and money is budgeted, the focus has turned to implementation and doing it right.
How do you see those trends developing further in 2024?
Now that the question has moved from “if” to “how,” in terms of cloud migration, engineering and operations departments are exploring ways that the cloud will enable them to deploy the best-of-breed application for whatever job is at hand. They can look beyond a single vendor’s offering of solutions to a competitive array of applications, one of which is likely to be a better fit for a particular job. As 2024 unfolds, media organisations will leverage their move to the cloud as an opportunity to realise application independence – meaning that they often will be able to use whatever application is best-fit for the task, and only pay for what is used without upfront procurement, deployment, or licensing costs.
Do you expect to see any new trends within the industry in 2024, and what will they be?
As media companies that have taken steps to move their operations to the cloud, some will begin to build interconnected supply chains in the cloud, enabling efficient content exchange between business partners without ever leaving the cloud. With metadata related to media assets as well as granular data related to their supply chain processes, these organisations will be positioned to leverage automation and orchestration to achieve new levels of operational effectiveness and, ultimately, profitability. The more media companies move into the cloud, the more interconnected the media supply chain becomes, and the greater the potential for further benefits across their organisations and those of their partners and suppliers.
