3 Ways Scalable Technology is Enabling Media & Broadcast Companies

We want great content, 3 ways scalable techand we want it now. We are a generation used to instant gratification, and technology has only served to amplify the need to be constantly connected on the go. This has created a unique broadcasting market dynamic in many developing countries – particularly in the Asia Pacific—the era of the Connected Consumer. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) in an article from OnScreen Asia, mobility is crucial to the lives of many consumers and the survival of businesses in Asia Pacific region, due to the combination of a fast growing economy and a lack of fixed infrastructure in developing countries. Broadcast companies must adapt to suit changing consumer preferences or risk becoming irrelevant.

How can businesses leverage mobile device adoption and utilize it to engage a fragmented audience?

Future-proofing—Staying Three Steps Ahead
Multi-platform content delivery is an industry trend broadcast companies are starting to embrace as a new way to engage consumers, monetizing those engagements, and better managing the user experience. This is to be expected especially with the rise of on-demand video platforms, consumer mobility, and the proliferation of smartphones and tablets. New media services deliver web content to audiences through live streaming, as well as on-demand services via PCs and mobile devices.

This converged development of traditional and new media services has led to transmedia storytelling—the development of stories across multiple forms of media to deliver unique pieces of content across each channel. These pieces of sequential content work together to form a bigger picture, serving the purpose of reaching a wider target market. Therefore, the move to IP-based infrastructure becomes increasingly important as broadcast technology buyers continue to look for ways to make broadcast operational environments more efficient.

Broadcast companies, such as Zhejiang Radio and Television Group (ZRTG) in China, are focusing on enhancing the customer experience using intelligent selection to enhance content delivery. Selecting IP storage with EMC Isilon was a forward-thinking decision ZRTG made because it met the long-term performance requirements to access and edit media assets for high quality broadcast content. According to Luo Leiyi, Sector Chief at ZRTG, “One of the most important features of the EMC Isilon solution is the modular scalability, because as a broadcaster we need storage capacity to be quickly added as our programming and content services expand across multiple formats.”

Going Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
In recent times, efficiency has been a key motivation of broadcast technology purchasing. Increased operational efficiency and cost savings have proven to be considerably more significant than cutting-edge technology, according to Devoncraft’s 2014 Big Broadcast Survey. We have seen this with production companies moving to file-based or tapeless workflows—choosing to entirely digitize their content, consolidate silos, as well as streamline processes. This centralized data management and retrieval lowers migration workloads between core online facilities and secondary storage. To put it simply, content is created faster and at a lower cost, thanks to improved management and application efficiency.

Post-production firm, Adnet Global prides itself on same-day delivery for most of their services with EMC Isilon. To achieve this speed, large file and dataset transfers are spread over the EMC Isilon nodes, enabling massive gigabit per second throughput and the exchange of files within a predictable time. Nivas Patil, Senior Manager of Technology at Adnet Global explains, “The files for production are immediately available, which means we have more time to complete each job. Due to the performance, scalability, and high availability of the EMC Isilon storage, we have definitely increased our productivity.”

Time is Money
We all know time is money, and this is even more pertinent in the fast paced broadcast industry. As rich-media file sizes continue to increase and deadlines get shorter, production companies need to evolve the workflow to decrease time-to-market as well as reduce media production costs. There can be no time for downtime, and high systems availability is crucial. Downtime can be very expensive when you are Rising Sun Pictures (RSP), an Australia-based visual effects company which has worked on high profile feature films such as Gravity and X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Mark Day, Head of Systems at RSP comments, “If a single node goes offline, there’s an automatic failover to other nodes in the Isilon cluster. Every piece of work we do is complex. Our software is demanding on storage because we produce more than a terabyte of data per hour. But we’re very confident that our valuable creative work and intellectual property is protected by Isilon.”

About the Author: Yasir Yousuff