Writing a New Year blog is an interesting process of reflection. Every year the industry moves forward with highly sophisticated technology that allows media companies to produce, manage, store and distribute content to viewers so that they can watch and share it when they like, wherever they like and on any device that they choose. This is still very much the case and, in some ways, more so since many of us are still at home in some form of lockdown. We are sure we would be continuing this conversation – and in some ways we are – but 2020 really pulled the rug out from underneath the media industry as it did with so many other industries. As a result, companies have had to quickly adjust and shift their business and technology practices to remote working to enable production and distribution of content to continue. So, what are the drivers for 2021?
This remote working transition was already on the horizon but has certainly accelerated due to the pandemic. The IABM’s special report in September 2020 “Charting the uncharted – Plotting the course for the Media Technology Industry” advises to “Prepare for a Brave New Digital World” and shows remote production as the fastest growing technology when creating and producing content. To push forward with these new working methods, media companies are transitioning away from hardware to new software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology. SaaS provides a pay-per-use model, which is a major benefit for broadcasters who can scale operations up and down in relation to busy periods, this is particularly relevant for the sports market. The IABM’s report, highlights that this move to direct-to-consumer models is driving a change in mindsets. Media companies are “focusing on business and revenue models rather than on technology, which is seen as an enabler”. It’s radically changing technology investment, with media companies investing more in developing platforms in-house. It’s also driving a major generation shift with new digitally native people, who are used to doing things more quickly, virtually and ethically. All this is leading to a re-invention of the role of suppliers from vendors to providers. This is absolutely true.
2021 The Year of iPaaS
For the media and entertainment industry Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) has an important role to play. iPaaS is a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution and governance of integrations and connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications and data within individual or across multiple organizations. A media-centric iPaaS based solution is designed to support projects requiring high availability/disaster recovery (HA/DR), security, service-level agreements (SLAs) and technical support from the provider.
A Mordor Intelligence Report ‘Cloud TV Market – Growth, Trends and Forecast (2020 – 2025) shows Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) as the fastest growing segments of the broader cloud market. The report states that cloud services and IaaS, in particular, are fully embraced by domestic enterprise users. And that the local IaaS market is the first choice of small and medium enterprises to construct IT resources in the fields of gaming, video, and mobile internet.
Adding applications to an organization requires an open standardized approach. Media-centric iPaaS based solutions are ideal for comprehensively standardizing media processing and transactional metadata movements between applications. Additionally, iPaaS provides out-of-the-box critical integration functionality.
It also provides flexibility as applications are integrated with the platform, which can consistently implement media and metadata migration processes between any set of applications. Thus, when updating an application, only its integration with the platform requires updating. iPaaS products provide a much more streamlined solution by standardizing how applications are connected in an organization and how manual processes are automated across applications – even as applications are constantly swapped and added.
We can see that iPaaS is a major component for the industry going forward. A media-centric iPaaS based solution supports an OPEX model with easy-to-use integration and configurability tools that allow users to change processes and applications quickly and smoothly and be able to adapt and grow as their needs and technologies change in the future. It will be interesting to see how service models develop and how the industry moves forward as a ‘new normal’ returns. Here at Tedial we’re excited for 2021, despite the pandemic, and we can’t wait to share our business and technology transitions over the coming months. Watch this space!
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media asset management software
Tedial
