Is the audiovisual industry prepared to work in the cloud?

Is the audiovisual industry adapting its processes to this new reality? Are these new solutions being used to improve productivity and reduce costs in an increasingly competitive environment, especially under the current situation? What challenges does the cloud industry face in adapting to the requirements of the audiovisual industry? What are the fears of our sector when using these types of solutions? Numerous experts have responded to these and other questions in the conference 'The audiovisual industry in the cloud, reality or fiction?'

In our daily lives we interact with the cloud constantly through electronic banking, social networks, electronic press, music streaming, multimedia files... and companies also use cloud-based solutions such as CRM, webmail,...

Is the audiovisual industry adapting its processes to this new reality? Are these new solutions being used to improve productivity and reduce costs in an increasingly competitive environment, especially under the current situation? What challenges does the cloud industry face in adapting to the requirements of the audiovisual industry? What are the fears of our sector when using these types of solutions?

Numerous experts have responded to these and other questions at the conferences The audiovisual industry in the cloud, reality or fiction? what VSN, KIM y MRi have organized in Barcelona and Madrid this week with the participation of main actors in the audiovisual value chain such as production companies, content distributors, public organizations, rights managers and media.

The person in charge of opening the Madrid event held this Thursday at the Film Academy was Manuel Núñez Encabo. The Professor of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid has highlighted that the fusion between ICT and audiovisual is a palpable reality although it still poses many challenges to be solved.

"How to take advantage of new technologies to reduce costs and increase production with higher quality? These challenges affect new content, since that is what content is about. New content that will affect many important fields from the social, economic, entertainment or training point of view... The Distance University, for example, is already working in the cloud through virtual classrooms," said Núñez Encabo.

“The challenges are important from the economic point of view, from the point of view of distribution and from the legal and deontological perspective,” he noted.

Manuel Núñez has drawn attention to the need for the different administrations and the European Union itself to promote these new ways that will bring content even closer to citizens and vice versa.

Por su parte, Jordi Utiel, presidente & CEO de VSN, ha iniciado su intervención preguntándose si los servicios que actualmente ofrecen en cloud computing los gigantes TIC (DropBox, Google Drive,YouSendIt…) son adecuadas para un entorno audiovisual profesional.

"One of the drawbacks is the size of the files and the bandwidth and the content security itself. We also ask ourselves questions: Are the providers and infrastructures prepared? How can we save costs in the cloud, what business models can we base on the cloud? What industry applications can we take to the cloud and which ones can't?" Utiel said.

VSN has had a content contribution and distribution system via IP (IPTransfer) for seven years. Utiel has shared with the participants in this conference the advantages that the use of this technology is providing with complete security thanks to the use of watermarks.

What the cloud industry expects

En una mesa redonda moderada por Víctor Jara, director del Foro de Debate Ciudadano, han participado Géraldine Gonard, Sales Director & New Business Development en Imagina; José Garasino, director general de la Academia de Cine; Ángel Gregori, director ejecutivo de Dialevo; y Fernando Garcillán, Cluster Audiovisual de Madrid Network.

Géraldine Gonard has highlighted that Imagina's catalog is made up of more than 9,000 hours of programming that moves in markets and film and television festivals, participating in twenty international events, as well as through commercial missions and personal visits. Imagina has closed sales in more than 145 countries around the world with more than 800 deals closed since 1999.

At this time, Imagina is considering the possibility of structuring all of its content promotion and distribution through the cloud. At this moment, it already has online catalogs and trailers on the corporate website with open access to everyone and the possibility of viewing trailers only in streaming. Regarding materials for viewing by clients, they have episodes and movies on YouTube and Cinando with proven access and streaming viewing. One of its advantages is the cost savings in distribution of materials and the typical problems at customs.

Regarding the sending of broadcast materials, Imagina is looking for a good solution to avoid having to send physical material. For now, only 40% of its catalog is digitized (taken in an external laboratory) on LTO tapes.

To advance along this line, according to Gonard, "we would need to have servers with greater capacity internally, in addition there is no single coding and powerful bandwidth and a worldwide CDN would be necessary. Given this, we need to find services at a more accessible cost whose management depends on the distributor itself in terms of storage, digitization and shipping."

Garasino has highlighted the democratization of the production and post-production process "although costs have not been reduced as would have been expected." Transmedia and multiplatform content that relies heavily on cloud computing are still in the first steps from a narrative point of view, often working with analog patterns of production, creativity and, most importantly, distribution. In the film industry we believe that the Internet and the cloud are the future, but it is not yet present from a content monetization point of view.

Regarding theatrical distribution, Garasino has pointed out that “80% of European theaters are digitized or in process, which allows the elimination of copying and distribution costs, but has created new costs such as the VPF and has caused a revolution in the market because digitization accelerated when the content offer began to take precedence in digital.”

Regarding the end user, "the supply of legal content is monopolized by large companies that may have sufficient technological power and at the same time bring together a large catalog. When there is a generalization of legal, affordable and quality supply, which allows access to a broad and easy-to-manage catalog from any device, this situation could change." On the other hand, it has drawn attention to legislation that is lagging far behind technological development. “The cloud world for an audiovisual industry, made up mostly of very small players, still presents many challenges such as the security of content on the network and improving competitiveness in access to these new services,” Garasino concluded.

Ángel Gregori has reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of the cloud. From his point of view, an important question is "what do you do with what you already have at home, and how do you adapt your infrastructure to new services. Within average companies, it is necessary to define a clear strategy of where you want to go with respect to the use of the cloud.

Fernando Garcillán has revealed that the Madrid Network Audiovisual Cluster is currently working on a market place for companies associated with different clusters. From their perspective, for an audiovisual company the cloud could mean an optimization of the data infrastructure taking into account that audiovisual content is already the main source of Internet traffic. Cloud computing would reduce costs by adapting the infrastructure to the real demand at all times with greater flexibility and security, moving from a traditional approach of normally rarely occupied physical servers to a more rental approach to better optimize services. Another advantage is being able to implement a service much more quickly than a deployment of physical servers would entail.” “The audiovisual environment is suitable for the cloud due to the thousands of concurrent users, streaming, loads and specific projects,” Garcillán concluded.

Answers in the cloud

Fernando Victoria de Lecea, president of the Association of Audiovisual Production Professionals (APPA); Gloria Bretones, APPA online communication manager; Luis Sanz, member of the Board of Directors of the Academy of Television Sciences and Arts; Juan José García Cabrera, Director of Large Accounts at Arsys; Jesús Izquierdo, Digital media consultant; and Enrique Varela, Product Manager at Media Management-Telefónica, participated in the second round table of this day.

The president of APPA has highlighted the rupture of the classic commercialization windows, with which the cloud will end from an international approach. The future is the cloud, although at the moment it is fiction. The future is connected television as a tool for our consumption. Television will once again be the queen of the room,” said Victoria de Lecea.

Gloria Bretones has focused her intervention on the current possibility of being able to consume cinema completely legally, with excellent quality and a good price. “People don't know many of these platforms because they don't communicate and promote the fact that Spanish cinema is of excellent quality,” defends Bretones.

Luis Sanz has assured that among the possible cloud-based audiovisual businesses that we can find, the purchase and sale of finished content, fresh without editing, current edited content and other image and video resources stand out.

“From the professional point of view of production and editing, all content uploaded to the cloud should be transcoded into a simple low-resolution codec that allows editing or streaming viewing, achieving frame-precision edits, manipulation of audio tracks... in the cloud we will never find a Nitris or a Final Cut but we will find enough tools to facilitate the development of many businesses,” Sanz highlighted.

Juan José García has reviewed some of the possibilities that the cloud offers for production, pre-production and development environments such as web platforms (Apache, Tomcat, IIS...), web applications, corporate applications, databases, service replication, server and data backup, among others. “All the infrastructure that an average company can set up in relation to files is already offered by cloud providers, with payment per use, without commitment to permanence, with access to TOP technology in high availability, and 24/7 support,” he commented. From a security point of view, García recognizes that "security is in the provider, not in the cloud. The provider must provide trust in a clearer way than in the past with third-party certifications, reliable CPDs and a good level of 24x support."

Jesús Izquierdo focused his intervention on the role of the cloud in television broadcasting with respect to the CDN, content transcoding, DRM as a service, security derived from watermarking/fingerprinting and video documentation. "The next revolution in video will be metadata throughout the life cycle of the audiovisual product. Its correct use in video distribution, indexing and cataloging will open the doors to new business models," commented Izquierdo.

Enrique Varela, from Telefónica Soluciones, has stated that “the cloud is not the future but the present, with a clear commitment.” In the audiovisual world, the cloud is emerging as a formula to save costs and large investments in media storage by replacing large libraries with tapes and servers, he stated.

"The cloud is an alternative at a reasonable cost for average companies. Even today, there is reluctance to enter the cloud universe due to alleged insecurity. The cloud is totally secure with physical and logical security. Another doubt is usually accessibility. The security of being able to access the cloud minutes before a news program to finish a piece, for example, is ensured thanks to the use of redundant systems," he added.

Success stories

Enrique Varela has revealed that Telefónica has just launched a private cloud project to host all of Mediaset España's content files. Without forgetting that one of the first cloud developments has been the Imagenio platform and its Over the top services.

Por su parte, Carles Rams, VSN Technology & Professional Services, ha expuesto el caso de éxito de Zara, una compañía en la que la información generada por todos sus vendedores es enviada al centro de Inditex para procesarla y tomar medidas desde un enfoque puramente industrial. Haciendo un paralelismo sobre las medidas que podría “copiar” el audiovisual de una industria como la de la moda, Rams ha asegurado que “la coyuntura actual exige mejorar la eficiencia. Es necesario abordar nuevos modelos de negocio sin incrementar los costes y gestionar la cadena de valor audiovisual basándose en procesos y compartiendo recursos. Además, la industrialización permite externalizar estos procesos y para ello podemos utilizar soluciones cloud”.

To industrialize and share we have, according to Rams, tools such as SOA architecture and orchestration with Business Process Manager and Business Intelligence.

Jordi Gilabert, R&D director at VSN, has presented an effective solution for sharing in a connected world in a broadcast environment: VSNIPTransfer. This solution allows for simple, secure and expedited multi-destination shipping in pay-as-you-go mode. It offers a MAM in the cloud with multiple services such as a catalog with permissions, transcoding, watermarking, metadata management, automation, integration with CDN, CMS, encryption... This platform allows you to create a new business in the cloud to be offered as SaaS.

Its modular architecture allows incremental functionality and is compatible with public and private cloud environments as well as broadcast production tools such as editors, video servers... From the point of view of security, it is fully guaranteed throughout the content creation and distribution chain. VSNIPTransfer supports SD/HD PAL/NTSC multiformat and is multiwarpper (MXF, MOV, AVI, M2T, DV, MPG…).

Gilabert has shared with those present the successful experience of the Xarxa Audiovisual Local (XAL), which has launched its new IP distribution platform for on-demand audiovisual content, XIP/TV, for local television stations attached to its network. The application allows you to create Web TV channels for each of the local television stations and offers the possibility that each one can manage its own channel to promote both the contents of the XAL and those of the television stations themselves.

Finally, Carlos González, commercial coordinator of Errequerre, has presented the success story of this content exchange platform based on VSN technology, which in just a few months has positioned itself as a benchmark in the Spanish-speaking audiovisual market.

Errequerre is thus promoting the buying and selling of content that is easily accessible from the platform itself via IP.

González stated that "the integrated audiovisual management system offered by Errequerre attempts to cover some of the needs of production companies and other content generators based on technological solutions adaptable to the current line of connectivity that the market offers, allowing significant cost savings and the possibility of generating added income. It mainly covers two objectives: rights management and logistics solution."

González has highlighted that in just one year of existence, Errequerre has already closed agreements with 118 Spanish content providers and with 40 in Latin America such as Cisneros, Miami TV or Claxson that share and distribute their production through the cloud.