19 YOUR TAKE Workflow Automation
become more distributed. With everyone working from home, a lot of effort and urgency has gone into enabling staff to exchange files securely, reliably and quickly. ADAPTING TO CHANGE One of the key challenges that media businesses have struggled with during the Covid-19 pandemic has been quickly adapting to changing needs. For example, many weren’t ready for production and operational requirements to change as quickly as they did when employees were forced to transition to remote working, which presented the urgent need for flexible content access and flexibility. If they didn’t know before, media organisations have learned that being agile and having the ability to scale infrastructure as required are essential. Indeed, business continuity has depended on it. For example, one of our customers added 250 terabytes of ingest capacity in a single day to enable their employees to continue working effectively from wherever they sheltered. But this emphasis on agility doesn’t just apply to new workflows. Media organisations also face the challenge of quickly adapting existing workflows without impacting production. The ability to experiment with key workflows and implement changes, but with a minimal amount of downtime, has taken on a new- found importance. With employees increasingly working outside of the corporate network, security is also a greater challenge. Organisations have to ensure that only properly authorised people have access to their video content and infrastructure, while also making sure that these people aren’t misusing that content. With staff away from the production facility, companies need to track content usage and how people are interacting with production tools to guarantee a way of working that’s secure and meets video production needs. While video orchestration challenges such as these are by no means easy to overcome, embracing technologies like cloud computing, workflow automation and artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly proven its value. These technologies will shape the future of the industry. DRIVERS TO PROGRESS Let’s start with the cloud technology, where a definite inflection point is taking place. While many media organisations have typically focused on public cloud, the future will likely see a sustained move towards hybrid environments that include
ANDREA DI MUZIO IBM Cloud Integration Expert Labs practice manager at IBM Aspera
a mix of public and private platforms. Media companies will increasingly build and manage their own private cloud infrastructures, which will bring several key benefits. Having access to a private cloud puts more control of cost and security in an organisation’s own hands and provides the flexibility to add or remove components as needed. It also makes it easier to orchestrate workflows and scale infrastructure. AI will also continue to increase in importance. The more the technology grows, the greater impact it will have on media workflows – particularly when it comes to managing content through enrichment of metadata. By automatically analysing content and extracting key information, AI will make it easier for businesses to organise assets and find content that meets specific requirements, like a particular subject, location or event. This combination of cloud and AI will enable greater automation, which will reduce costs and enable organisations to scale up the amount of content they can handle. Automating mundane, administrative tasks will reduce the risk of human error and free up production staff to focus on more creative tasks. Finally, we expect to see some interesting developments around security and traceability. More than ever, media organisations need to guarantee trust in how content is handled. This will pave the way for the introduction of technologies such as blockchain, which, together with AI, will be an essential feature of future media workflows. Recent events have accelerated the shifts we were already seeing in the media industry. The future of video orchestration is quickly taking shape, and media organisations must be prepared to fully embrace this digital world. THE FUTURE WILL SEE A SUSTAINED MOVE TOWARDS HYBRID ENVIRONMENTS THAT INCLUDE A MIX OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE PLATFORMS
anaging video content libraries is an evolving challenge facing everyone in the media and entertainment industry – from
film studios and broadcasters to OTT platforms, sports teams and other content owners. With IT infrastructures becoming more complex, ensuring the security and availability of video assets is no easy task. Media organisations have to manage content libraries that are growing faster than ever before, while ensuring production staff can access and retrieve assets in real time, regardless of where personnel or production sets are based. As such, more media organisations have embraced cloud computing and automated key processes across ingest, playout and archiving in recent years. These trends have accelerated recently as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While traditionally smaller companies have been slow to adopt new technologies because of cost and lack of technical expertise, we’re starting to see a movement towards workflow automation in media organisations of all sizes. This is primarily because the amount of file movement has increased as workflows
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