The missing piece in the cloud

This change is mainly driven by FAANG – the “big 5”: Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google. The audience changes, just like content, storytelling and distribution models do. This change will just go ahead in the future, with innovation, platforms and product lifecycles speeding up.

Viewers turn from a passive audience into users, interact with the content and become content creators.

What triggered this development?

The internet and subsequent technologies: network everywhere (IP to the home, Wi-Fi, NGMN), computer power and screens everywhere (mobile devices, IoT), immediately available infrastructure (cloud).

Let me give you an example: The market for professional video editing was served by a handful of well-known vendors such as Avid and Adobe who provided highly sophisticated editing tools within dedicated environments.

Just recently a major European broadcaster found out that the most commonly used video editor in enterprises is Wochit: a web-based editor for quick editing and publishing to social media and online channels and with a repository of public content. New technology, new business model, new content for new users!

How should a media enterprise react to such change to benefit from it rather than losing traction?

One answer is to look at the technologies that are the foundation of the success of the internet economy. Let’s group them as “cloud-platforms”. Media enterprises now have the opportunity to make use of the same cloud-native tools, technologies and architectures that fuel the networked economy.

Broadcast and media related services are now available in and for the cloud. Almost every vendor has some “cloud” story to tell and it looks like you can move your entire digital media supply chain into the cloud.

But at that point, things start to get a bit complicated. You face lots of products and services running in different public clouds, managed for or by yourself and in different legal, financial and SLA conditions.

A single product or service usually does not provide direct business value. Moreover, a monolithic cloud environment will not adapt fast enough to your continuously changing business needs. All services need to be integrated into your end-to-end systems.

The FAANG platforms have solved this issue by investing money and resources to pay hundreds of developers to accomplish this.

What about media enterprises with limited resources? In our industry, we need to develop the tools for solution design and system integration using cloud-native technology.

Qvest Media have been embracing this issue and have transcended our system integration expertise to develop a management platform that enables third-party cloud applications to be networked into one integrated end-to-end workflow: Qvest.Cloud.

Qvest.Cloud provides a central user interface on a multi-cloud environment meaning business processes and media workflows can be accelerated, made agile and can be adapted easily to the changing market conditions and business models.

I believe Qvest.Cloud is the missing piece to benefit the technology that fuels the change in media consumer behaviour and to keep up with the pace of innovation cycles and consumer expectations within our industry.

Ulrich Voigt is Head of Design at Qvest Media