21st February 2022

Disclaimer: Due to confidentiality matters, the names of professionals providing the quotes on this article are not included. All their words were extracted from a private (members only) recent DPP report featuring some of the biggest names in the M&E industry.

As Covid 19 hit, the world went into lockdown and was thrown into confusion. Sending teams and managers scrambling as to how they were going to manage their media workflows in the new remote work situation. The media and entertainment industry was faced with a major challenge in reaching their content libraries, providing their teams with appropriate data access, and enabling remote collaboration.  All vital to continue doing business with the future hanging in the balance. 

Remote work defined in the media and entertainment industry 

As shocking as the initial days of the pandemic were, so was the fear of what was to come.  We had to retain productivity levels despite being in strict lockdowns and unable to access business premises. Media and entertainment companies worldwide were forced to implement remote working to continue with their operations and retain their employees. A new work model was born and a new media workflow management system has to be defined. 

A fundamental part of remote work, more so for the media and entertainment than any, is the transfer of large amounts of data and big files.  Once production is finished in Amsterdam, and your post-production team is in multiple locations around the world, needing to collaborate on edits and the best colour to go with becomes a problem. 

Along with the sheer size of media files, difficulties for the media and entertainment industry in a remote work situation include difficult access to hardware, lack of technology innovation, and the mounting costs associated with storage and data access.

Many were able to get by on their existing VPN or cloud productivity suites that were in place before Covid-19, but they had to scramble to enable operations that had traditionally relied heavily on people being in the physical production location, such as advanced production workflows and deploying remote desktop protocols to enable teams to access studios and production suites remotely.

These short-term solutions facilitated work to continue during Covid-19, but not of adequate quality and still relying on a physical presence which, going forward, will make scaling production capabilities costly and time-consuming.

Innovation through change

Along with Covid-19 and its unavoidable lockdowns, came a change in lifestyle for most. Staying home became the new going out as people were confined to their houses with not much to do.  Streaming services were already on the rise, and Covid-19 put steam behind the growing trend, accelerating demand and placing pressure on operators of streaming services, who had to rapidly invest a great deal in every aspect of their service, from content to distribution networks to monetization capabilities.

The global average for in-home media consumption, primarily through streaming, now stands at 50% of households worldwide, with Covid-19 2020 lockdowns substantially contributing to that number.  Due to Covid-19 production being greatly reduced, media and entertainment companies looked into alternative models, which include ad-based and subscription video on demand to monetize content, with companies like Netflix  pledging $150 million to assist the OTT industry coping with the effects of Covid-19.

Covid-19 has woken us up to the fact that we need to accelerate archive modernization projects.  This means we need to improve storage, cataloging, and distribution systems to maximize the value of content archives and help ensure that viewers get the content most suited to them. Media orchestration and effective media workflow management go hand in hand with these modernization projects in delivering content most suited to the viewer. 

Cloud services: A helping hand in difficult times

An IP-based working environment facilitates better collaboration, especially in our new cross-border, digital economy, thus enabling better communications and attainment of operational and strategic goals. Teams will be able to collaborate on a different level, more suited to global, remote work. Baseband (SDI) served us well when we were sitting in offices on our desktops, but with the onslaught of Covid-19 and the new way to work that came with it, the great transition to IP is what will serve us now. 

The initial argument against the SDI to IP transition was the expense, but with the advantages for media orchestration in the new remote work age, these are null and void. Scalability, flexibility, redundancy, backup, and overall cost savings are some advantages for working on an IP-based network using a media asset management platform and cloud storage solutions. 

I’m glad the pandemic happened now and not five years ago. Cloud has got a positive story to tell there in terms of our ability to carry on business... The first few weeks were pretty crazy but most of that was about settling people at home.” 

Technology Director, Broadcaster, EMEA

Cloud platform as a service, also known as Platform as a Service (PaaS) takes the idea one step further by allowing customized applications to be built and delivered via the internet. Cloud platform as a service or PaaS provides cloud components to certain software and integrates web services and databases.

How are most production houses managing their media assets and workflows for offsite work currently?

Media Asset Management (MAM) is how media assets (videos, graphic materials, multimedia files, etc.) are stored and managed, also describing the workflow and technology used to do so. 

Currently, in the media and entertainment industry, the technology used could be considered quite primitive considering the weight of media asset management and the need in a remote work situation. This results in dampened productivity due to lengthy downloads, poorer collaboration efforts, and other issues. For example, sneakernet is used which only really transfers electronic information and physically moving media like tape, USB drives, and so on. 

Some teams may use a corporate virtual private network (VPN), which works fine across an on-premise, low-latency local area network (LAN), but connecting from a distance results in a bad user experience.  For large file transfer, an FTP for file transfer is predominantly used, along with file sync and share solutions like CentreStack, Dropbox, Box, and so on. 

A better way: The benefits of a Media Asset Management Platform

A Media Asset Management Platform is a digitized system that streamlines media asset management and comes with a host of benefits. Namely:

• Flexibility, durability, and low costs for storage and data access

• The ability to scale resources up and down quickly, without any capital. expenditure, and the ability to leverage the strength of cloud computing power to speed up processor-heavy workflows.

• Cloud storage solutions can enable media and entertainment companies to digitize, store and preserve archives and ensure that media assets are not only secure but also globally accessible.

• Future-proofing and the ability to face new business challenges.

• Automate complex functions, sequential tasks, device control event triggers, and more.

• Be in control of your entire catalog and have every single asset at your fingertips.

• Major OPEX cost-cutting advantages and an opportunity to increase revenue.

The job is the same but how and where we do it is completely different, applying old technology to a new paradigm does not work. This new norm requires innovative technologies that eliminate the need for time-consuming file downloads, ineffective VPN’s or cumbersome FTP sites.

The technology the media and entertainment industry currently has in place enables the industry to ‘get by’. Effective media asset management, which will improve productivity, output, and therefore revenue, needs the capabilities of a media asset management platform to excel in the new remote working world. 

Now more than ever, it is essential for media and entertainment companies to implement a media asset management platform that improves productivity and scalability and enables remote users to stream data directly from the cloud so that they can get on with their new “business as usual” in a globally dispersed world.

#WorkBetter #WorkOnCloud #WorkOnKMH

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