M aybe it’s no accident that ‘cloud’ is an anagram of ‘could’ – because the cloud, it seems, can do almost anything. It can be a time-saver, a cost-cutter and a world-shrinker, a flexible friend and a business tiger. Above all, it is an enabler of rapid expansion, smarter working, content discovery, laser-sharp targeting and a myriad of other solutions to the kinds of issues that keep denizens of the C-suite awake at night. “The cloud has become a Swiss Army knife for production, taking the workflows that traditional broadcasters have used for decades and making them nimble, lightweight and easy to turn on and off,” says Ben Hayes, director of client services at Bitfire. “Cloud-based workflows in broadcast and streaming now span the entire production pipeline.” If you can name it, you can probably do it in the cloud. Creation, ingestion and editing content, asset management, personalisation and regionalisation, live production, transcoding and delivery across multiple platforms – all are available at the flick of a switch, or at least the ping of a payment. Fashionably late The IT world embraced the cloud years ago, and most of us use a raft of cloud-based applications – from Google Docs to Microsoft Teams – without a second thought. But broadcasters have come late to the party, and some are only now waking up to the possibilities. What has changed, according to Dominik Birgelen, CEO of Oneclick, is a confluence of technological maturity and commercial urgency. “A decade ago, cloud technology wasn’t mature enough to support professional media workflows. But today, cloud vendors have upgraded their media-specific capabilities, offering GPU-accelerated processing, near-lossless compression, high- throughput data transfer and ultra- low-latency streaming pipelines. “In parallel with that, broadcasters are now under pressure to serve
REMOTE POSSIBILITY Bitfire’s cloud switcher being used at a technical director’s home on one coast for a live show on the other
fragmented audiences, support multi-format delivery and operate more flexibly, especially in a post- pandemic world where remote collaboration and virtual production are business necessities. And the dramatic rise of AI and cloud-native media tools have made cloud an integral part of a broadcasting ecosystem. It’s no longer a matter of if cloud fits broadcasting, but how fast companies can transform to remain competitive.” Cloud applications are not necessarily new. “In most cases, they’re the same trusted software platforms that media professionals already rely on, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve and Autodesk Flame,” says Tim Burton, managing director of 7fivefive. “What changes is the delivery model. These applications are now hosted on powerful virtual workstations in the cloud, connected directly to users. Cloud resources can be scaled and tailored to different creative functions, therefore editors, colourists or producers can work
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