Julian Wright, CEO of Blue Lucy Media, examines why cloud- based service provision has not caught on in broadcast and television production sectors the way it has in other industries
EXPLOITATION OF cloud- based computing services in the broadcast and video production industries has failed to take off in the same way that it has other sectors such as image libraries. With many of the ‘heavy
lifting’ video processing functions such as format conversion being ad-hoc and infrequent through the production process, the ‘use it when you need it’ nature of in-the-cloud processing would naturally lend itself to the business of programme making. This, coupled with the significant costs associated with video processing components and software, would suggest that the pay-per-use economics of the cloud should have driven growth.
However, there are actually
very few cloud-provisioned processing platforms and some vendor-specific offerings are something of a ‘cloudwash’, i.e. cloud in name and architecture but without the economic benefits. The principal reason for this is largely attributable to the internet bandwidth cost of transporting large video files. The bandwidth cost, particularly for HD content, is expensive and even a single, short production enjoys little or no savings when compared to buying expensive processing systems and storage and deploying them at a production facility. Many productions are sporadic/project based and in such cases expensive
software systems can sit idle for long periods. The chief benefits of cloud computing in this context — namely cost savings and pay-per-use/pay-as-you-go models provided by on-demand processing — are not realised. The economic model for video processing in the cloud doesn’t yet make sense. Even extrapolating Moore’s Law from transistor density to technology costs — or applying Nielsen’s La, which forecasts a doubling in ‘to the door’ internet capacity every two years — makes it clear that we are some way from the financial benefits driving a shift to video processing in the cloud. Notwithstanding the costs
associated with moving content
And not a cloud in sight! Some content owners struggled with the transition from tapes to black box disk arrays …
to the cloud, the benefits afforded by pay-per-use storage don’t stack up either — again due to the file size. Long-term archive storage with the cloud model therefore makes little sense for large amounts of
content when compared to an in-house storage solution. The medium-term outlook of the cloud for video content owners isn’t economically clear either because there is a further, more emotive, barrier to the
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