Reimagining Video Delivery with the Cloud
COVID-19 has created a new dynamic for content distributors and infrastructure providers, as we’ve seen drastic changes in consumer behavior. According to recent research by DPP, the cloud is becoming a reality for many media companies, and this year has made the cloud a necessity for all due to the dramatic rise in the need for remote working, scalable resourcing, and business agility.
There's been a significant increase in at-home digital consumption—specifically video—for work, education, and leisure. That increase has affected all household members and thrust internet connectivity availability and performance into the forefront.
We've seen content distributors reduce streaming quality as a precautionary measure to minimize network operator strain, and internet service providers raise data caps due to increased usage. On the flip side, we’ve also seen advances in access, thanks to both 5G and satellite. While keeping an eye on potential opportunities to leverage these new distribution channels, companies will need to continue to focus on how to optimize the existing processes in this new norm of increased digital consumption. Consumers will not be satisfied with higher latency, lower quality, and slower startup times; companies will need to embrace advanced codecs and content-aware encoding to provide higher quality content at the same or lower bandwidth requirements.
Additionally, everything thus far has been from the point of processing and delivering "finished" content for consumers. As the global pandemic has halted many movie and television productions, delayed global sporting events, transformed how sports leagues operate, and required a newfound expectation of remote collaboration, companies must transform themselves to create, manage, and deliver content "glass to glass"—from the instant a frame is captured to the moment a consumer views it on their digital device, wherever they are.
Companies must establish a digital "camera to cloud" workflow that enables them to transport broadcast-quality content to a global infrastructure for management, editing, transformation, and enrichment. That content is then distributed to partners and consumers—via globally distributed and scalable services on software-defined infrastructure that extends to an ISP's edge. Companies that continue to embrace on-prem hardware and data centers will be spectators to the competitive landscape that unfolds before them. The companies that require on-prem computing as a matter of necessity due to latency, security, or similar limitations can still be cloud-first though, through hybrid cloud adoption that enables them to build, deploy, and manage compute and storage in both on-prem and cloud environments.
Companies willing to be leaders by disruption and to reimagine their video delivery workflow from "glass to glass, camera to consumer"—and optimize that workflow through data insights—will build for the future and ultimately strengthen their consumer relationships.
[Editor's note: This is contributed byline from Google Cloud. Streaming Media accepts vendor bylines based solely on their value to our readers.]
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