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For broadcast, media and other creative content companies, the cloud offers a great deal more than flexible data storage capacity – it paves the way to a wealth of new opportunities.

This is according to the managing partners of media technology specialists RelianceCloud, who were speaking ahead of a webinar on cloud-based content management for media, to be held on 14 July.

RelianceCloud managing partners Dennis Mashigo Herold and Simon Zindaba Herold say that traditionally, media and entertainment companies have shared and sent footage on hard drives and tended to store it in unstructured systems on-premise.

“This makes it very difficult for them to find specific footage years later, and also puts them at risk of losing the content forever if their hard drives or servers should crash,” says Dennis Herold.

“By putting it into the cloud using strategic tools and methodologies, organisations can enhance and improve the structure of their precious data, video files and media,” he Herold. "We are currently helping a client to migrate to the cloud in this way, structuring the content properly by using the right file naming and conventions, and tiering the storage according to how often you will access it, so that they can easily drill down into the material they need. With 50TB of content now stored in this way, the client is excited about how easy it has become for them to deduplicate content and drill down into it to get much more out of it. They can now repurpose content and get so much more benefit out of it, that now they are looking into migrating all their older content to the cloud to achieve the same benefits,” he says.

Simon Herold notes: “People are realising that they have a lot of legacy media – and their archived content can be mined and monetised again at a time when the cost of producing new shows can be prohibitive. It starts with a strategic approach to storage – and here it is best to partner with experts who see cloud storage as a strategy, rather than a means to an end. The cloud positions them to start applying technology such as analytics and AI to search through it all and uncover forgotten clips and content they can reuse in new ways.”

According to RelianceCloud, production
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companies might redistribute old shows, monetise their stock footage libraries, share clips for marketing, or find a forgotten scene to avoid the cost of filming it again, for example. They can also use the cloud to collaborate with teams distributed around the world – from actors to editors and special effects teams.

"You’re already seeing this, with actors shot in virtualised environments, then all the material is put into the cloud, manipulated and incorporated into the scene digitally. The cloud is the enabler of advances like that, and we will see more of these kinds of innovations. It has broadened creativity – there is so much more people can do, and the amount of collaboration has increased because of the ability to share content globally,” says Dennis Herold.

RelianceCloud and First Distribution, in partnership with ITWeb, will host a webinar on cloud-based content management for media – the second in a two-part series on the cloud for broadcasting and entertainment.

This event will outline how to achieve better, more cost effective storage and content distribution, and will outline the tools and capabilities of AWS cloud.

For more information, and to register for this event, to be held on 14 July, go to:-

https://www.itweb.co.za/webinar/cloud-based-content-management-for-media/