While overseeing vast libraries, managing transitions, and dealing with the vagaries of audience demand, media and entertainment companies have faced unprecedented challenges in recent years. Media and Entertainment companies are using AWS to accelerate cloud migration. Here, we will explore the advantages of cloud migration in Media and Entertainment, and in the article below, you will find an AWS migration checklist to help you move to the cloud.
Regardless of the degree of uncertainty, however, the media seems to have a prosperous future ahead of itself; according to PwC’s Global Entertainment Media Outlook 2023-2027, the media industry is projected to grow into a $2.8 trillion industry by 2027. Therefore, to further advance new and better approaches to creating rich content delivery and support such numbers, M&E companies are suggested to use cloud computing.
Through its AWS media services, AWS uses a set of solutions customized to the needs of the media and entertainment industry. AWS casts itself as a disruptor in an industry where a digital middleman is not a system.
Why Should Media Companies Move to the Cloud?
There are several reasons why the cloud is so important to media organizations: faster time to market, collecting, storing and reporting on vast amounts of data, the ability to scale up to manage workload bursts (notably live events), and so on. Many businesses still have to get the cloud and not simply adopt it by building on familiar on-premises infrastructure and business models. Still, those who’ve blazed the trail to using cloud-based tools and services demonstrate a unique ability to rapidly adapt to marketplace changes, take advantage of scalable resources, and optimize spending managed against dynamic workloads.
AWS Media Services is an initiative launched in 2021 to provide purpose-built services and solutions from AWS and AWS Partners for content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, and distributors. With AWS, M&E companies can achieve better performance, agility, and scalability for their business, improving customer and end-user experience.
Remote Content Production & Infrastructure Localization
According to Micah Sachs, principal at CMA Strategy, in 2018, the NFL Network spent about $1 million per game (for a total TV operating cost of $200 million per year). The BBC estimates a one-off live event costs between £40,000 and £400,000 per hour (including logistics, staff, facilities, talent, producers, content distribution, and more) in the UK.
It depended on a production workflow centered in one place: studios. This meant that geography dictated production, it was expensive to run, and studios required a lot of on-site equipment.
AWS’s Amazon Nimble Studio is a resource-management tool that helps companies produce content quickly. The studio allows remote artists to collaborate worldwide, accessing virtual workstations, high-speed storage, and scalable rendering over AWS’s global network.
For instance, an animation studio that produces some of the most acclaimed shows on Netflix, including Big Mouth and The Midnight Gospel, used Amazon Nimble Studio to ensure business continuity for animators and artists who had to rapidly switch to a remote work environment amid the COVID-19 pandemic. During this period, Nimble Studio enabled Titmouse’s animators and artists to access virtual workstations on the Cloud and seamlessly continue working on animation projects remotely from home while maintaining high efficiency and productivity. The platform provided the correct set of tools and infrastructure to enable the collaboration of artists in remote locations for designing, storyboarding, and animating various shows.
Similarly, in film, animation, and visual effects, AWS offers solutions, including AWS Thinkbox Deadline and Edit in the Cloud, which automatically manage render farms and optimize infrastructures to deal with the computational complexity of creating complex computer graphics projects.
These tools are essential for big media companies, as they value production – not just production efficiency but production as an enterprise process that they can scale and shift as needed.
Netflix is becoming a leader in producing visual effects and original animated content worldwide. It taps into remote workstations to attract the best artistic talent. Using AWS; the company increases global content development by building flexible collaboration tools and workstreams that enable teams to work from anywhere.
Media Asset Management and AWS Content Storage
Another is dealing with massive data files and content: companies can use a Media Asset Management (MAM) system to catalogue, store and retrieve their media assets. Paired with AWS Content Storage, media firms can cope with unexpected peak demand, such as the extra load caused by significant live events.
Within this context, by storing your data redundantly across multiple devices and independent locations, Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier services allow the media company to have a high-performance storage (via Amazon S3) for their most accessed data, and a cost-effective mechanism (via Amazon S3 Glacier) for near-infinite archival storage. Such a combination enables media companies to manage their media assets efficiently, providing the necessary infrastructure to store media in AWS securely and meet the industry's needs.
More importantly, AWS offers a variety of advanced security tools, such as encrypting data and securing the network. These tools are beneficial for protecting users’ personal and financial information (such as in sports betting platforms).
Streaming & Broadcast
AWS broke the status quo with facilities built around purpose-built services that catered to the latest trends in streaming and broadcasting, including the wave of 4K resolution and High Dynamic Range (HDR) content, and going beyond images to anticipate shifts in audio by integrating next-gen audio formats.
It also provides tools suited for Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) and streaming, including AWS Elemental MediaLive for live video processing and AWS Elemental MediaConvert for file-based video transcoding, which helps consumers enjoy a live video or watch video on-demand with no interruptions. Utilizing AWS Elemental MediaLive and MediaConvert, providers can create highly personalized content experiences and set themselves apart from the competition.
AWS is the foundation of the world’s most popular streaming platforms, including Netflix, HBO Max, and Hulu, which entrust AWS with the massive, messy scale required for their infrastructure: scale and messy scale.
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Massive user bases
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Global content delivery
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Continuous updates and optimizations
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High-definition video streaming
AWS is streaming for millions of viewers worldwide as the de facto cloud provider of the streaming industry.
Monetization
In September 2023, AWS introduced a monetisation solution area that allows media companies to enhance and modernise their approach to advertising, licensing, subscriptions, and marketing technology (MarTech). The AWS monetisation solution will enable media companies to maximise revenue collection and business performance by leveraging multiple tools and strategies.
AWS Elemental MediaTailor is a server-side ad-insertion service that enables video providers to create linear OTT (over-the-top) channels from existing video content libraries and monetize those channels with targeted in-stream advertising. When Amazon’s video streaming service, Amazon Prime Video, secured the rights to stream Thursday Night Football, regular-season games from the NFL (National Football League), to more than 200 countries and territories worldwide in late 2017, it aimed to provide millions of fans with the best experience possible, while incorporating targeted ads as part of their viewing experience. During the 2017 NFL season, Amazon Prime Video relied on AWS Elemental services in six regions. MediaTailor was used by Amazon to insert real-time, region-specific ads into the stream, in a process involving optimisationnered from video, personalization of the ad experience, and monetization that aligned with the video being streamed.
Thanks to access to AWS’s dozens of cloud Machine Learning functions, the NFL can also improve the game-day experience in real time. Inputs from data derived from box score statistics will be fed through thousands of operations in less than a second and then sent to Amazon SageMaker models, which are then used to create results such as formations, routes, and events directly during the games.
Data Analytics and Personalization
AWS continues to drive innovation in analytics by creating database engines that are highly optimized for media and entertainment. Importantly, these solutions are highly flexible, enabling organizations to scale resources up or down as demand requires. For instance, during periods of low demand, resources can be scaled down to save money and improve virtual resource utilisation. Likewise, during times of high demand, such as a major sporting or music event, an organization may scale up resources to easily ensure performance and responsiveness. In this sense, cloud computing improves data security. It provides a highly elastic infrastructure that scales very simply (for example, if new users were accessing the system in their millions) when there is a risk of a performance hit, for instance, during a major sporting event.
One is on-demand resources, while another focuses on content provider user experience. These are handled by personalisation solutions, whose recommendations for personalised content rest on the shoulders of Amazon Personalize. These solutions shape the M&E industry’s future of analytics and customer experience while cementing AWS as a holistic provider to its beloved customers.