Scaling up with cloud storage

Thanks to advances in broadcast technology, coupled with globalised operations, nearly every modern newsroom has adopted some form of hybrid workflow. Whether it’s to cover the Olympic Games or a major international election from abroad, remote production is now the norm – and cloud-based asset management facilitates the real-time collaboration it requires.

Stated simply, the cloud is a theoretically infinite online storage space, accessible from anywhere in the world. While content was traditionally stored on local systems like physical hard drives, this on-premises-only workflow is outdated, limiting what broadcasters can cover – and how quickly.

“Cloud storage provides elasticity, geographic reach and rapid scaling for unpredictable workflows,” begins Rhian Morgan, product marketing manager at Pixitmedia. But the cloud hasn’t replaced legacy systems entirely – nor should it. “Generic cloud storage can be unpredictable, and latency-sensitive tasks are vulnerable to outages or bandwidth limitations,” Morgan notes. In contrast, physical storage devices offer reliability, performance and control.

Plus, migrating from an old workflow to a new one can be time consuming, costly and temporarily disruptive. The process requires identifying ‘which workflows demand local performance, and which would benefit from cloud scalability,’ according to Morgan.

Companies like Techex, for instance, guide clients through this transformation. Previously partnering with the BBC, Sky and Warner Bros Discovery, Techex specialises in linear, over-IP distribution. Most recently, they designed a cloud-based media production environment for Formula E and a monitoring solution for Dazn.

Techex is especially involved with TAMS (Time Addressable Media Store), an on-the-rise technology which cuts large video files into seconds-long chunks, making editing more efficient and ‘bringing the best out of cloud infrastructure,’ says David Mitchinson, the company’s solutions director. “Traditionally, broadcasters have been working with growing files. For example, to do an edit on an asset, you have to take that large file and send it over the network in its entirety. That asset would then be changed, but its length would remain the same, and then you’d have to store that monolithic asset in edited form afterwards. What TAMS tries to do is break that,” he summarises.

While not necessarily reliant on cloud-based storage, ‘TAMS plays into the hands of what cloud is trying to achieve,’ states Mitchinson. “Software ecosystems are becoming quite different from the hardware solutions that they’re replacing,” he explains, capitalising on years of IT advancements that have only just begun to touch the broadcast industry. “One of the big benefits of the cloud is that you have infinite scalability, and anybody who is authorised can access that server wherever they are. It’s a totally transformative technology.”

The cloud excels in certain circumstances, such as content-heavy global events, natural disasters and live sports – all of which benefit from on-demand, outside-the-studio storage. “The cloud is ideal for handling scenarios where that scalability is a key factor,” says Mitchinson.

As broadcasters continue to store increasingly complex content – ‘rising volumes and higher resolutions,’ describes Morgan – cloud-based asset management and related technologies (like TAMS) will need to keep up. “As UHD, 4K and 8K content grows, expectations around real-time retrieval, predictable cost, low-latency access and stronger governance are becoming more prominent,” suggests Morgan. Similarly, AI-enabled infrastructures aid in metadata creation and categorisation, while cybersecurity remains a key concern. All of these factors combined are ‘driving continued investment in hybrid architectures,’ Morgan says.

But both Morgan and Mitchinson predict that hybrid ecosystems are the way forward. “Media workloads vary too widely for fully cloud or on-premises,” states Morgan. “The future will lie in a unified, horizontally integrated model that blends the strengths of both.” Eighty-five percent of M&E companies already plan to adopt one.