Modern cloud solutions are quickly transforming the broadcast world and rapidly-evolving streaming market. As content owners, broadcasters, and streamers look to create more efficient, scalable, and cost-effective workflows, cloud-based solutions are increasingly replacing the historical “on-prem only” approach many were so entrenched in.
So let’s take a closer look at cloud-based production’s challenges and benefits.
What are Cloud-Based Production Workflows?
Cloud-based production workflows make use of technology to either enhance or replace traditional workflows to ease scaling efforts, facilitate remote production and collaboration, and streamline production efforts.
The Benefits of Cloud-Based Production Solutions
Scaling in a traditional workflow requires significant investments in hardware such as servers and storage. By utilizing cloud-based solutions, the financial burden of building and maintaining the underlying infrastructure is placed on the cloud solution provider, allowing content providers to focus their efforts and finances on creative and content.
Utilizing cloud-based solutions also empowers teams to work together remotely, greatly accelerating collaboration and time-to-market, as well as enabling companies to utilize talent around the globe rather than being restricted to their own “back yard.”
Cloud-based solutions can also enhance and streamline production workflows by automating time-consuming and tedious tasks, and harnessing the power of AI to accelerate efforts. For example, Prime Image’s Time Tailor can automate the process of tailoring content to fit a specific length, as well as removing ads or inserting ad markers. These critical tasks which take countless hours of manual editing are reduced to a few clicks with faster than real-time results.
The Most Powerful Benefit of all?
While there are many benefits to cloud-based solutions, as enumerated above, perhaps the most transformative for content owners and production organizations is the extraordinary cost-savings these solutions represent.
From scaling to remote collaboration to streamlining workflows, each of these benefits has a corresponding cost in the traditional broadcast workflow:
Scaling costs: Broadcasters and content owners spend an obscene amount of capital trying to build and maintain the technology required for on-premises solutions. And, in many cases, the tech is nearly end of life by the time the req gets processed and approved, a purchase is made, equipment is delivered, and installed. Cloud-based solutions allow you to redirect CapEx investments to areas where your dollar can go further and make a greater impact, while utilizing bleeding-edge tech that you no longer have to maintain, develop, and integrate.
On-site work costs: In addition to the headache of limiting yourself to a local pool of talent to meet your content and broadcast needs, there’s the cost of bringing talent in to work in your space, upkeep of the facilities themselves, and the premiums involved in traveling production talent when and where you need them. Remote work and collaboration, empowered by cloud-based solutions, allow you to lower overhead exponentially.
Production costs: Production companies and content owners have been editing content and prepping it for broadcast the same way for about a century, utilizing extremely manual and painstakingly tedious methods. Using legacy and dated on-prem solutions often means you’re missing out on innovations that are driven, in this modern age of AI and rapid software development, by cloud-based solution providers. Solutions that can ease the burden of the manual and mundane, free your creatives, and lessen your dependence on bays full of editors.
Opportunity costs: As substantial as all those costs are, many are just considered the cost of doing business within the industry. The greatest cost that cloud-based production workflow can solve for is opportunity cost. If you have entire seasons of content that you’d like to start monetizing NOW, how long does that take in a typical workflow utilizing on-prem tech and on-prem, manual editors? And if you make cuts to the content, how long does approval take? Why wait months to start monetizing when you can utilize cloud-based solutions like Time Tailor to get practically instant results?
Enter Time Tailor Cloud
While Time Tailor has been available in hardware and software form for on-prem usage for some time, our cloud-based addition to the Time Tailor family offers greater flexibility for content owners and production houses that are already working in the cloud, or are considering a transition to cloud-based production in the future.
Time Tailor’s cloud solution improves an existing industry standard with new technical and commercial benefits:
- No up-front costs: Time Tailor is an on-demand service with a pay-as-you-go pricing model where customers pay only for what they’re using. No upfront costs; no capex.
- Easy installation: All you need is a designated Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) folder and Time Tailor will show you how to process your content at your desired duration.
- Dynamic scalability: Time Tailor is dynamically scalable as it runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) without the use of costly graphics processing unit (GPU) resources. Large video processing batches can be queued to run in series or in parallel depending on customer needs.
- Custom workflow integrations: Time Tailor has been integrated into some of the world’s largest and most advanced media operations. It can plug in to third-party media orchestration platforms or embed as a customized microservice directly into any customer’s broadcast infrastructure.
- High-touch service: Time Tailor includes a standard support package that delivers Prime Image’s highly responsive technical support. The support experience can also be customized through premium support options.
To see a demo or get additional information, visit primeimage.com or contact sales@primeimage.com. You can also learn more about Time Tailor in AWS Marketplace.
