A More Efficient Media Operation Starts Where? If You Said “In the Cloud,” Take the Rest of the Day Off!

And now this, from the Department of the Obvious: The media and entertainment industry is transitioning. It’s a transition that’s happening as a result of the need to deliver content more quickly and in a higher quality — and there is no better way to do it than streamlining the content production process. The move from static, SDI-based communications, to the flexibility and power of IP-based communications is already here.

The next evolution is on its way – namely, the transition from bespoke boxes, to a media production environment based on software, running on standard servers, in a virtualized environment, in the cloud. The opportunity for media providers is to increase flexibility and achieve significant cost savings, but also to provide more personalized content, at a level of quality that did not exist until now. It’s achievable now because of the evolution happening in networks, servers with GPUs and the availability of cloud resources.

But everything good has its price. The challenge that comes with this transition is complexity: How to efficiently manage media applications in a virtualized and hybrid environment. With complexity as an entrance barrier, media companies sometimes prefer to continue on the path they know, which involves proprietary, bespoke appliances.

When the forward path is clear and the challenge is known, what is the solution?

In our view, it’s a matter of orchestration. To be precise, an orchestration platform that can manage virtualized and cloud environments. Such a platform should hide any complexities, deploy applications in hybrid environment, configure on the fly, repurpose virtual machines … the full automation package.

The end game here is a virtualized environment that seamlessly integrates public and private clouds to achieve full resource flexibilities. It’s about manageability and agility, and the availability of media applications for multiple shows and locations. It’s also about being able to test new ideas quickly, and to bring content and new experiences more swiftly to market.

Virtualized media infrastructure, enabled by cloud orchestration, is also a key for CAPEX savings. These days, applications and software licenses are replacing costly appliances. Standard servers are efficiently serving all purposes — with virtualization that makes them fully usable — all the time. Add to this the economics of the cloud, and you get a winning formula to reduce cost for media production.

Cisco is the first in the market, to our knowledge, to bring virtualization and hybrid cloud orchestration to the media and entertainment industry. But don’t take my word for it — click here to see how cloud based operations are allowing CANAL+ to fully utilize its infrastructure and optimize the way its business runs. But much more than that, it’s allowing them to create new customer experiences, in ways that were not economically viable before.

To learn more about cloud orchestration in media and entertainment, I invite you to click here.

The post A More Efficient Media Operation Starts Where? If You Said “In the Cloud,” Take the Rest of the Day Off! appeared first on Cisco Blogs.