Cloud workflows: “We need to take traditional IT efficiencies and bring them into production”

Lewis Smithingham, Executive Vice President (EVP) of Monks, said: “Media production has been done the same way for 60 years. The biggest change has been the way we have to deliver. Audiences are more fragmented and are across a wide number of locations. We cannot use a straight line of sight anymore since there is no primary platform.”

The strategic consultant said he believes in cloud native agile production (CNAP).

“We can use software running in the cloud to get to these new audiences – because software moves at a much faster rate. There is a misconception that the cloud is expensive. Well, yes, it is, if you leave it on the whole time. If you leave your air conditioner on the entire summer, it is expensive. As an industry, we need to take traditional IT efficiencies and bring them into production.”

Base was one of the first organisations to offer cloud media services. Fran Burnham, CEO of Base, said: “We essentially put our clients on large digital transformation projects. We help migrate them to the cloud, which is a very important first step. Then we create content paths and transform their full end-to-end workflow.

According to Burnham, there has been a massive shift in the number of customers wanting to move to cloud-first architecture as more and more clients want to collaborate in different countries.

“We are also seeing vendors shift to the cloud and SaaS [software as a service]. The buying process from our clients has completely changed.”

Suitest has developed a QA testing innovation so that applications can be ported to platforms at scale. “This would not be possible without a team whose culture is to be curious, naïve, and stubborn,” asserted Mirko Nedeljkovic, CEO of Suitest. “We are people who don’t accept any status quo.”

With such a high device fragmentation in the market, it is practically impossible for customers to test their innovations on them all in a manual way. “You need automation for that. What we offer to the market is unique – an object-based test automation solution for OTT devices.”

David Davies recently investigated how the streaming sector is reducing its environmental impact through increasingly powerful analysis platforms, infrastructure optimisation, improved resource utilisation and new methods of compression. Discover more here.