Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 IBC Show | Page 45

PLANNING YOUR JOURNEY TO THE CLOUD By JEFF ROSICA, PRESIDENT, AVID When we introduced our Avid Everywhere vision in 2013, the industry was facing a period of unprecedented change. The rapid digitization of the media value chain made it difficult for content creators to connect and automate workflows, and increased the cost and complexity of monetizing assets. The consumerization of content creation and distribution forced media organizations to adjust to a new reality of diminishing control over how audiences consumed content. At the same time, declines in traditional revenue sources required a recalibration of business models and the relentless pressure for operational efficiency challenged an industry filled with disconnected people, tools, and work- flows. These were the core issues the Avid Everywhere vision and strategy set out to resolve in 2013. And now, just four years later, the transformation of our vision to reality is complete. We’ve creat- ed the most open, tightly integrated and efficient media platform that enables media organizations to more effectively connect disparate teams and accelerate their workflows. And new distribution and monetization capabilities are helping them connect with their audiences in much more pow- erful and profitable ways than ever before. Yet even as technology advances, urgent opera- tional and financial challenges remain. Pressure to create ever-greater volumes of high-quality content is immense, yet technology budgets aren’t increasing; they’re straining to keep pace. Heritage production environments aren’t as flex- ible or efficient as they need to be to handle the load and fast pace. Increasing operational capac- ity requires expensive, often redundant staffing and capital expenditures. And production facility real estate makes it very costly to house hard- ware. Compounding the problem, many organiza- tions that have overprovisioned their on-premise hardware capacity are actually underutilizing their systems invest- ments. THE BENEFITS OF MOVING MEDIA PRODUCTION TO THE CLOUD Extending media pro- duction to the cloud—in the way that best suits an organization’s unique operational realities—opens the opportunity to both increase production capacity and ease the financial burdens of content creation and dis- tribution. Media organizations gain the licens- ing flexibility and business agility to align their deployed technology solutions with the needs of their production environment. They can also connect and collaborate from anywhere, whether Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com • 45