When the Covid-19 engulfed our normal lives back in February 2020, nobody was certain about the intensity and height of the pandemic. Months long quarantine and work from home became the way of our lives. Depression, severe anxiety, and stress surfaced everywhere as by-products of the lockdown. The only escape one could imagine, and practice was the entertainment and media industry. Netflix, online streaming websites, and gaming portals humbly entertained us and provided for the change. The appetite for entertainment and digital content grew with the longevity of the lockdown. Although the IT revolution and digitalization had long been making waves around the world, the entertainment industry was slow to accept the change. It took a catastrophe in the face of a pandemic to realize how the media and entertainment industry must be digitalized with a help of cloud computing for agile and efficient working amidst the chaos.
Desperate times seek a desperate measure
Vloggers, content creators, and broadcasting and production crew were left at the mercy of remote working without access to their modern production facilities. It is then, the content creators realized the importance of interactivity, digitalization, electronic revolution, and multi-platform globalization. The digital content became a major source of bread and butter for people. Therefore, the need to digitize the content and cloud innovation became inevitable. The move to cloud computing for remote production and digitalized workflow has accelerated at a warp-speed. Cloud services caters to the following parameters
- Broadcasting and distribution mechanism
- Content creation or acquisition
- Preproduction and Postproduction service like editing, and saving
- Digital Cinemas or online streaming
The New Cloud Architecture for Content Creation
During the pandemic, directors or content creators worked from home along with their broadcasting teams. An online survey suggested that 35% of broadcasters and content creators felt the need to shift to cloud computing for production and postproduction tasks. Through Cloud computing, they designed a sophisticated architecture for creating, managing, editing, and distributing their content. Cloud hosting has forever altered the preproduction, production, and postproduction facilities. As the world is gradually opening, new innovative ways are being explored to make the most out of it.
The Need to Harness Cloud Computing
Along with easy collaboration, sophisticated workflow, and data management, cloud resources have prevented huge data losses and generated high-quality content. Intelligent transition and application of cloud managed services not only enable innovations but also address challenges of remote working like loss of data, poor content quality, etc. Whether it is the production companies or advertising agencies, cloud technology stood up for the safe and productive working of their employees. The digital advertisers as we call it, are strongly endorsing the digital strategy and cloud computing for implanting e-commerce into their content. Thus, cloud solution has demonstrated higher ROI using the digital strategy for their content.
Monetary Benefits of the Cloud Architecture
The revenue streams are improving now that the cloud sourcing has improved monetization along with harnessing of content using artificial intelligence. The experience generated through cloud computing for the media and entertainment sector is more attractive and financially lucrative for content creators. Not just this but the cloud is becoming a great tool for measuring consumer engagement in digital content. The virtualized content, and migration from traditional to cloud-based platforms, is becoming a cost-effective option as the consumer needs changes.
From Traditional to Digital
Some challenges amidst the traditional content creation and distribution are
- High content licensing cost
- High cost associated with storage and delivery infrastructure
- Delayed content streaming
- Changing or volatile customer demands
With the advent of cloud computing solutions, now the content creators are better able to address the above-mentioned concerns. The high licensing, storage and delivery cost is overshadowed and minimized by moving to the OPEX (operating expense) model of cloud computing. The delayed content translates into a loss of a customer to potential competitors. The cloud allows high and uncompromised performance along with the ability to deal with rapidly changing customer demands.
To sum it up…
The media and entertainment sector have no choice but to make a leap of faith towards the changing digital environment. The laggards or slowpokes in us must realize how important is it to adapt to a change. We must not wait for another chaos to define our lives and workflow. Let us make the transition and save ourselves and future generations from technological misconduct.
Join Our Webinar
Xavor and ADDO AI are organizing a webinar in partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services). It is aimed at Igniting the Digital Content Experience in Pakistan. It is FREE to attend and you can register for the webinar. The webinar will be held on Oct 22, 6 PM (GMT+5).