Modernizing Data Management in the Media & Entertainment Industry
Colocation is a much more effective way of sharing huge data files by uploading them over faster connections. (Photo: RIch Miller;The CoreSite SV7 data center is a four-story data center in Santa Clara, Calif.)
In this edition of Voices of the Industry, Maile Kaiser, Vice President of Sales & Business Development for CoreSite in Los Angeles, explores the modernization of data management in the media and entertainment industry.
The average American adult now watches 36 hours of television per week and more video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major US TV networks have created in 30 years.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Between smartphone use, social media, and the proliferation of streaming services, the demand for digital content is multiplying exponentially. According to estimates, the mobile and online entertainment industry will top $300 billion by 2019 resulting in nearly five times the digital storage capacity needed by 2020. This means that in less than two short years the fruits of all this digital growth will somehow have to be contained—and maintained—or else.
But even though data storage, management and content delivery may be a top priority for many media and entertainment companies who are scrambling to accommodate the digital market, there is still a hesitancy to leave behind traditional on-premises IT and infrastructure—even with its space constraints, cost concerns, and personnel requirements—in favor of adopting a more modern data solution like colocation.
Why is that?
It used to be that if you worked in media or entertainment, you handled data the old-fashioned way. Got a huge audio or video file to transfer? Just burn it to a disc, FedEx it to the production team in another location, and get on with your day. Except that whoever was on the receiving end of the file would then have to download the footage, upload it to their editing tools, and compile it manually. Workplace nostalgia aside, the process on either end was usually arduous and unwieldy and wasted more time than many production teams could afford to.
And there were more challenges.
As the velocity of digital content began to increase, so did the amount of space and resources needed to handle the extra computing power, including for capabilities like CGI and special effects. At the same time, data analytics was becoming so ubiquitous, so granular, and so crucial to business intelligence that to capture and analyze every keystroke required more servers, greater security measures, and even more resources just to properly lock down, store, and parse the information.
Shipping a disc—or a whole hard drive for that matter—may have been standard operating procedure, but it no longer met the standards of cost-effectiveness and efficiency that companies had to reach in order to stay innovative and competitive. And in today’s entertainment landscape of on-demand, any-screen high-def content, waiting for a physical data package to arrive is no longer a viable option.
As times changed, however, the ability to transfer data digitally with more ease and flexibility became possible. Cloud computing increased both speed and network bandwidth and could be scaled up or down to meet changing needs.
The only problem is, digitally transforming a business overnight isn’t that easy. With massive file sizes to grapple with, data silos to navigate, and equipment investments to justify, the expense of moving to digital can be prohibitive and the process itself overwhelming. While going fully digital is the future goal for many companies, others have to worry about today.
