26 TVBEurope IBC Wrap-Up


Cheeseman scouts the clouds for Sky


Cara Cheeseman: “50 to 60 times a day, people try to get through Sky’s firewall”


Neal Romanek talks with Sky’s head of advanced production and innovation on the broadcaster’s relationship with the cloud


CARA CHEESEMAN is no stranger to new technologies. She was 3D post production supervisor on Sky’s groundbreaking nature series Kingdom of Plants 3D which used a bewildering variety of cameras and photographic techniques to make the greenery of London’s Kew Gardens come alive in astonishing ways. This summer, Cheeseman became of head of advanced production and innovation at Sky. At IBC, she took part in a panel discussion on the current and


future uses of cloud production, hosted by Aframe founder David Peto [see ‘Breaking the production chain’, page 27 ]. Among Cheeseman’s


responsibilities is helping Sky develop and streamline its tapeless workflows. Given Sky’s enormous library of assets, its need for security and reliability, and the difficulty in predicting how technologies will develop in the future, Cheeseman’s job is a complex one. Sky has already made forays into cloud production and was introduced by a production company to cloud video production platform Aframe. They have employed Aframe on several shows, including A League Of Their Own and Duck Quacks Don’t Echo. Part of Cheeseman’s job has been weighing the pros and cons of adopting an external cloud platform on a wide scale. With a long history in post


production, Cheeseman understands the immediate


benefits in cloud-based production, most obviously in practical time savings: “You don’t have to physically move files around, preparing disks, sending copies to commissioners. When you add all those things up, they take up a lot of time. And media is generating larger and larger file formats. At the same time, people are expecting quicker turnaround times.” Sky’s relationship with


Aframe has been positive, which has not been the case with every cloud solution Sky has investigated. “We’re always testing new products. We did a lot of testing when we looked at cloud solutions,” Cheeseman said, “Some have worked. And some have not worked at all – even the bigger ones.” Heavyweight broadcasters like


Sky are understandably slow to hand over the security of their most valuable assets to an


“A lot of


60 times a day, people try to get through Sky’s firewall.” There are hints that the industry might be at the beginning of a cloud gold rush, with any company with a data centre offering a cloud solution. Cheeseman underlines that Sky approaches partnership with cloud providers with much due diligence.


Cheeseman believes cloud


platforms will certainly grow in number and breadth of offering in the next two years, but the very thing that makes the cloud so valuable – it’s near-infinite flexibility — can be a stumbling block to some cloud service providers. “A lot of companies are trying to do everything. Everyone has different needs. But it’s important to understand what you do and not try to be everything to everyone.” Sky also needs to be sure that


companies are trying to do


everything …but it’s important to


understand what


you do and not try to be everything to everyone” Cara Cheeseman


outside enterprise. Sky has an enormous amount of content to store and manage, and being such a high profile company also can make it a target. “I have to make a business case for every decision and every purchase. One of the big things we struggle with at Sky is getting security right,” says Cheeseman, “It’s a big issue for us. Fifty to


any company-wide solution is scalable – and there are not many companies in a position to offer that kind of scale with the level of security Sky requires.


Cheeseman wouldn’t say whether Sky would follow Sony in developing its own internal


platform, but it’s possible that the best cloud provider


for a big broadcaster is the broadcaster itself.


Transitioning to a post-tape


world, with data universally accessible and able to be endlessly repurposed, may sound like too much change for anyone to cope with, but Cheeseman points out that the digitisation of workflows actually helps companies adapt, as they become less married to hardware which requires endless updating: “The cloud is a buffer to change”.


www.tvbeurope.com November2013


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