Big Data and the Storage Challenges in Media Companies

The digital age is providing unparalleled opportunities for media and entertainment (M&E) companies. Whether it’s generating fantastically realistic visual effects in movies and videos, or analyzing consumer data in order to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time, the new capabilities digital technology is unleashing are remaking the industry.

In order to participate in this new business model, M&E organizations are generating, storing, and analyzing huge amounts of data. They have, in effect, become participants in the “big data” revolution.

A simple way to describe big data is to characterize it as datasets that are too big to fit on a single computer or server. Whereas modern computer users may work with gigabytes or even terabytes of data, bigdata is typically measured in petabytes, exabytes, or zettabytes (a zettabyte is a billion terabytes). Actually, the term encompasses not just the amount of data, but also the ecosystem of tools and strategies used to manage, store, and analyze that data.

M&E companies are both producers and consumers of big data. Most of the content produced by media enterprises is now in digital form, and requires massive amounts of data to represent it. For example, a single seven-minute segment of a high definition video translates to a gigabyte of data.

Having content in digital format provides capabilities for creating, manipulating, and transmitting that content that never existed before. From initial production to collaborative editing to post production, media company users are involved with handling big data in every phase of content generation and distribution.

On the other side of the ledger, media companies are using big data analytics to decide what to produce, how to distribute it, and the best ways to monetize it. For example, as a major online destination, Netflix has accumulated massive amounts of user information. They decided to analyze that data to gain insight into what people are looking for in their entertainment. The result was “House of Cards,” their hit streaming video show starring Kevin Spacey. Because of their confidence in big data analytics, Netflix was willing to invest $100 million to produce a show based on what big data told them people wanted to see.