Into the Cloud: Exploring the Next Generation of Video Services

Grazed from StreamingMedia. Author: Claudia Kienzle.

The media marketplace is changing rapidly, with many content creators streaming media to a growing spectrum of online, social media, and mobile outlets. There’s a wide variance in video quality, file sizes, and compression codecs; the sheer volume of media assets are simply exploding, leaving media professionals struggling to maintain a competitive edge. As these pressures collide with other technology trends — such as widespread internet connectivity, ever-increasing bandwidth, and powerful data centers — the thunderclap has given way to the cooling rains of video cloud computing services.

By moving their video workload to the cloud, media entrepreneurs can hit the ground running and pay as they go for processing-intensive services such as encoding, transcoding, asset management, and storage. End users might pay per transaction, monthly subscription, or an annual fee. With a solid internet connection and web browser, the workplace can be the nearest cafe or virtually anywhere in the world with colleagues collaborating via the cloud…

The value proposition is that rather than having to make huge up-front capital investments in on-site hardware, such as servers, storage arrays, networks, and expensive, specialized software — or constantly expanding or upgrading on-premises infrastructures — end users can now just reach for the clouds…

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