The emergence of cloud computing is enticing that almost every sector is leveraging the cloud advantage. One such industry which definitely is adapting to these growing trends is the Entertainment & media industry.

Regardless of the size, both big and small media and entertainment companies from across the world are making changes and moving to cloud which gives them a seamless platform that helps them with digital content delivery to customers.

With the growing demand to consume large digital content, customers usually demand fast access to videos, movies and other related content at their fingertips. More and more people working from home, the demand has definitely increased multifold and customers want to access these videos regardless of their location or the device that they are using.

The digital content is readily available on so many different platforms and most of them are accessible also on any device. The users are not always bothered about the permission or formats or protection, they need an interconnected system that is available 24×7.

It is precisely these demands that are pushing media and entertainment companies to embrace cloud computing. More and more broadcasters are now successfully adopting cloud technology since they have control over the entire chain i.e managing all content, right from ideation, creation, storage, post-production and more. Having a single cloud platform helps them deliver things on time and also gives the users what they want, when they want.

Connection between Over-the-top content (OTT) & Cloud Computing

In the age of digital world and present situation, continuing with traditional broadcasting methods and delivering content in the old fashioned way is just not possible. Adoption of cloud computing could be a game changer for the media and entertainment industry, where digital content is delivered directly to users without the involvement of any system operators. OTT in many ways is the futuristic way ahead for the media & entertainment industry and any digital content producer must upgrade to cloud if they want to catch up with growing trends and keep up with digital changes happening around the world.

Benefits of Cloud Computing for Media & Entertainment Industry

Cloud technology has emerged as the leading solution for the media & entertainment industry since cloud platforms provide resources that can be easily distributed, managed, protected and even monetized for all the digital assets produced.

Let’s look at industry specific benefits of how adopting cloud can help M&E sector:

Opting for the right cloud partner will definitely simplify processes, cut costs, and enable more productivity by automating tedious tasks. It also gives enough time for businesses to adapt and cater to ever changing demands. The number of Media and entertainment companies that adopt cloud computing is rapidly increasing. If you haven’t yet signed up for a cloud partner yet, now is the right time to take your media and entertainment business to cloud.

1. Enhanced Collaborative Production
   Collaborative workflow is extremely important especially in content production that is possible through cloud computing. Many media companies have successfully switched to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and achieved collaborative content editing , file storage, and even resource allocation. Cloud offers immediate benefits by providing excellent user experience.
2. Global distribution: While dealing with content distribution to multiple regions, the demands can be unpredictable. A majority of large OTT platforms are run on cloud and use content delivery networks (CDNs) to serve videos to its viewers. In such cases, the cloud allows you to scale as per demand. It also helps deliver live broadcast grade content without hassle and also offers viewing channels online, just like how many providers do during major sporting events.
3. Secure Remote Work : Cloud has played a major role in enabling remote work, especially during the pandemic. Mobile working that is supported by collaboration tools needs powerful security that cloud offers. It helps protect employees’ applications, devices and most importantly crucial sensitive data. With single sign-on and multi-factor authentication (MFA) staff can easily access tools and resources from anywhere and anytime.
4. Faster Content Delivery: Cloud-based workflows speed up the supply chain. Once content is available in the cloud multiple people can access it at one time directly without a series of distributions. This is specially useful during news broadcasting and live sports because it allows for better coordination. Be it sharing of a breaking news or a winning goal or match outcome, it can be shared with all distribution channels in almost real-time. Over a period of time, the entire process can be automated too.
5. Better Resilience: Be it power outages, equipment failure or cyber attacks, traditional data recovery is not only time consuming, but is slow, risky and complex. Replicating a data center in terms of having duplicate storage, servers, networking equipment etc as part of disaster preparation is generally a tedious experience as well as heavy on the pocket. To add to the woes, legacy systems take a lot of time to back up and restore. This holds true especially when dealing with big data and large content libraries. Having your data stored in the cloud allows you to recover from disasters faster and also ensures that you have continued access to information and do not lose out on important data.