For years, the media and entertainment (M&E) industry has resisted adoption of cloud-based broadcast infrastructure. But spurred by disruption in the M&E industry, digital technology advances, and changing consumer preferences, the resistance has reached a tipping point, and the journey to the cloud has begun in earnest.
Prior to COVID-19, the M&E industry made progress addressing many of its long-held criticisms of cloud platforms by advancing the cloud-capable migration of core broadcast, post-production, media management, and distribution technologies. However, when the pandemic required M&E companies to produce and distribute programming remotely, it also increased industry incentives to set aside lingering objections around cost, control, and security and embrace cloud broadcast workflow and operations as a business necessity.
Almost overnight, broadcasters’ successes with remote production and cloud-based video distribution tipped the industry off the indecision fence, making a return to precloud “business as usual” highly unlikely, and firmly establishing this latest technology trend in the M&E industry.