In an increasingly hypercompetitive media and entertainment (M&E) industry, having great content is no longer enough. M&E players need to integrate their content into high-quality user experiences, with customised content and personalised viewing recommendations that are accessible anytime, anywhere, from any device.
With this in mind, organisations across the US$2 trillion M&E industry are moving to digital-first models by adopting solutions relying on cloud, data, and analytics.
“Media and entertainment customers face industry-wide transformation. Companies are reinventing how they create content, optimise media supply chains, and compete for audience attention across streaming, broadcast, and direct-to-consumer platforms,” says Eric Iverson, Director, AWS M&E.
The cloud is transforming the M&E sector in a variety of ways. Iverson explains that today media organizations can improve costs and unlock opportunities to expand faster than has been possible with physical data centres and playout hubs. Industry leaders such as Netflix, FORMULA 1, Discovery, and Disney are among those that have realised enormous value from leveraging the cloud to disrupt and reimagine content creation and delivery. In the Middle East, Anghami, MBC Group, OSN, and STARZPLAY are also utilising AWS to great success to build innovative end-user solutions.
“AWS’s cloud solutions allow companies to deliver massive video-on-demand catalogues or live stream content to millions of viewers,” explains Iverson. “No matter where the audience is, our customers can reach them globally through 216+ points of presence, a private network backbone, and software that have been tuned and enhanced over the last decade.”
Iverson highlighted the importance of providing specific solutions for M&E that cater to their needs around delivery and low latency. For example, AWS offers M&E tools such as Amazon CloudFront, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that has been highly optimised for industry workloads. AWS Media Intelligence Solutions automatically converts audio and video assets into fully searchable archives for highlight generation, compliance monitoring, content consumption analysis, and monetisation.
AWS also launched AWS for Media & Entertainment, geared towards making it easier for companies to discover, implement, and deploy purpose-built capabilities and partner solutions.
“AWS for Media & Entertainment offers nine AWS services, 11 AWS Solutions, dedicated AWS appliances, and more than 400 AWS Partners—against five solution areas to help customers transform areas such as Content Production, Media Supply Chain & Archive, Broadcast, Direct-to-Consumer & Streaming, and Data Science & Analytics,” says Iverson.
Iverson further highlights that the initiative makes it easier for customers to select the right tools and partners for their highest-priority workloads, accelerate production launches, and see faster time to value.
“We also introduced Nimble Studio earlier this year, an offering which allows customers to set up a creative studio in hours instead of weeks, with near-limitless scale and access to rendering on-demand across AWS’s global infrastructure,” he adds.
Like in every industry, the pandemic has thrown a curveball to M&E firms. The unprecedented global event fast-tracked many digitalisation initiatives that were already underway and forced naysayers to get with the programme.
“Faced with extraordinary audience demand for new content and a global pandemic accelerating the transition to remote production, creative studios turned to cloud technologies to quickly set up remote artist workstations and collaboration platforms,” says Iverson.
With many companies opting to continue operating in a hybrid or remote model even after the pandemic, AWS is supporting them by continuing to deliver purpose-built capabilities for M&E firms, ensuring that they can focus on content rather than infrastructure.
“Moving forward, remote production and virtual production will allow creative collaboration across the globe like we’ve never seen. Remote live production unlocks the ability to support more events in more places to help improve yield per asset. The cloud eliminates the overhead of managing physical infrastructure and minimises the administration of installing, configuring, and maintaining creative, compute, network, and storage resources,” says Iverson.
