When done right, gradually moving media operations from on-premises deployments to the cloud can bring efficiencies and savings, writes Dan Goman, founder and CEO, Ateliere.
By Dan Goman
Mergers, acquisitions or the great consolidation, call it what you wish, but business dynamics in the media and entertainment industry keeps shifting in front of our very eyes. These measures are often designed to stay competitive, avoid subscriber churn or justify a dwindling streaming service.
Such radical, often sudden, strategy shifts come with major technology and financial pitfalls, particularly in the media industry, where delivering complex products to highly fragmented consumers is the order of the day.
Merged and acquired companies each come with their own media supply chain (even multiple chains!) and technology baggage. How these can be efficiently unified for cost-savings remains a difficult challenge to streaming success.
The broken media supply chain
As it’s become obvious from recent financial announcements, the cost of operating streaming services, often alongside linear broadcast or cable TV offerings, is extremely high. Media companies are being asked to deliver more content to more outlets with the same traditional tools and processes. Streaming has broken the current production and distribution media supply chain.
And when streaming companies need to efficiently integrate a business acquisition, media supply chains are often the last priority in boardroom’s discussions. Yet, each media organization comes with thousands of large files, fragmented metadata, siloed departments and aging data centres. How to efficiently integrate content and workflows into a unified infrastructure that serves the purposes of the newly-formed business? This is an expensive puzzle to solve.
The missed cloud opportunity
Although the media industry has been slow in adopting cloud infrastructure, moving media operations from on-premises deployments to the cloud can bring efficiencies and savings – when done right!
This is particularly true when streaming services are looking to combine their offerings, as is the case with the recent Paramount Plus and Showtime bundling initiative. A global media supply chain in the cloud makes significant business sense as it helps centralise content libraries, simplify workflows and localise content.