The media and entertainment (M&E) industry needs to embrace the latest digital strategies to remain competitive in the wake of evolving consumer expectations. The immediate challenge is to continue creating content that appeals to the audience while maintaining high responsiveness across platforms at the lowest operating costs. To meet such a demand, a resilient combination of connectivity, compute, and storage is a must, which mandates having a modernized infrastructure. The early adopters of cloud have a huge head start.
Navigating the changing technology landscape, realizing quality customer engagements, and establishing a cost-optimized business model can all run seamlessly in a cloud environment.
According to an EY-NASSCOM Cloud Survey, 4 in 5 enterprises will go bullish on their cloud investment in the upcoming years, which is true for the M&E industry as well. Changing consumer preferences vis-à-vis advances in technology continue to transform the way media & entertainment companies deliver content to attract consumer attention. This sector demands service providers to be on top of technology trends, and the cloud becomes a great enabler.
Media & Entertainment Industry Facts
- Over 50% of M&E companies believe relying on traditional business models will not enable future growth, states an EY research.
- Streaming video content among home-bound consumers during and after COVID increased by 60%, according to a Nielsen study.
- McKinsey states that subscriptions to online streaming services have grown by 46%, and 15% have adopted an eCommerce service.
- For nearly 50% of media & entertainment companies, investing in digital transformation is critical to accelerating value creation, as per EY.
Most Influential Technology Trends in Media & Entertainment Industry
The media and entertainment companies are always on par with technology trends. Let’s look at some of the popular ones.
A New Wave of Technologies
Technologies like blockchain, ML/AI, and 5G are disrupting the media ecosystem. However, the gaps in security, automation, and bandwidth pipelines severely impact the M&E business
landscape. On the other hand, the metaverse provides an opportunity for the industry to identify and maximize new revenue streams while evolving into a contemporary and consistently collaborative environment with in-depth interactivity.
Automation
The combination of ML/AI and data science enables M&E companies to automate presenting personalized content to consumers. Online OTT platforms leveraged ML in the recent past to automate the display of viewing options by predicting consumer preferences. With the foray of AI in traditional streaming platforms, elementary recommendation systems are transforming to provide automated and personalized experiences. For example, publishers can automatically produce closed video captions on YouTube, ensuring fast and easy access to media for consumers.
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The media and entertainment companies understand the importance of ML and AI. These technologies spurred automated content creation for game developers, film developers, and entertainment studios. ML/AI witnessed further integration into M&E business operations and models as they aim to develop robust business intelligence (BI) platforms. A good example of this is Disney’s move from traditional machine learning implementation to deep learning using AWS for powering implicit personalization based on data behavior and relationships.
Evolving Consumer Behavior
The Millennials and Generation Z shifted away from cable operators to OTT platforms. On the other hand, Baby Boomers continue to use Facebook and YouTube heavily. These differences in content consumption led media companies to attract and maintain consumer attention by localizing their coverage. It eventually impacts how organizations develop, give out, and monetize their services. Next-generation technologies like ML/AI and IoT make it easy to identify and attract the right audience for any media organization. Interestingly, the target has already shifted from just homes to individuals, thus multiplying the potential revenue.
Cybersecurity
As the number of cyberattacks increases in severity and frequency, cybersecurity is a top priority of every organization. The shift to remote work has further exacerbated the situation, as attackers permeate into security controls and exploit vulnerabilities with sophistication. For instance, the Netflix hack in 2017 led to the leaking of several episodes of the series ‘Orange is the New
Black.’ The imminent times will see media and entertainment companies augmenting their infrastructure defenses to support emerging computing patterns and facilitate their digital transformation journey. Gartner emphasizes the implementation of security monitoring, detection, and response to security leaders for managing a broader spectrum of risks effectively. A shared SOC model adoption could be an interesting facet for these companies without overburdening their spending on security tools.
Disruptions in Media Platforms
Content creators see the democratization of media as a boon. In contrast, the M&E industry faces the challenge of maintaining media platforms. Nowadays, content creation is on an aggressive spiral, and its impacts are enormous. An example is the ceaseless efforts of influencers to drive change across society, particularly in politics, commerce, religion, and business. Although technology adoption remains the key, developing resilient governance policies is imperative to oversee the media ecosystem.
Cloud is the Transformation Catalyst for the M&E Industry
Unprecedented data growth is a common sight in the media and entertainment industry. However, managing the data remains intricate. As the features like high-definition, visual effects in animation, and high-resolution audio continue to see advancements, the infrastructure needs to evolve to manage such high volumes of data.
Whether public or private, cloud environments outperform legacy systems, promising flexibility that caters to the dynamic demand shifts in the industry. Popular streaming entertainment service companies are already adopting the cloud, as it helps improve consumer satisfaction and experience. For example, Netflix uses AWS for almost all of its storage and computing requirements. Here is the link to detailed success stories of Netflix with AWS. Online gaming and video streaming continue to grow in popularity, compelling M&E companies to churn out immersive content and distribute it worldwide.
Customer satisfaction directly depends on the media platform’s availability, a primary driver of cloud adoption in the M&E industry. To support this driver, modernizing the infrastructure is a top priority for the industry to augment customer experience and save costs. Modernized infrastructure blended with cloud functionalities enables real-time collaborative workflows, allowing organizations to aim beyond high production outputs.
The Role of Hybrid Cloud
The hybrid cloud meets the M&E industry’s need for scalable storage, dynamic accessibility, and high availability by leveraging the best of both private cloud and public cloud. With the hybrid cloud, the organizations have agile on-premises storage combined with the public cloud’s scalability, which makes it easy to accommodate a large amount of data generated by the media teams. Media & entertainment companies should maintain lean local storage for faster, smooth operations even at peak loads. Key benefits include
- Preventing high investment and time-consuming maintenance of the local storage
- Eliminating the need to expand the physical infrastructure and controlling scalability by choosing either vertical or horizontal scaling
- Reducing downtime and improving recovery from disasters, incidents, and failures
Governing and maintaining control of the sensitive data
Conclusion
There is an exponential acceleration in the digital transformation of the M&E industry. Understanding profound shifts in the market is vital for organizations to remain at the forefront of business success and resilience. They need to shift gears alongside consumer consumption preferences and production funding paradigms. It is possible by using new tools to drive innovation, creating unique subscription-based services, and focusing on personalization through advanced analytics.
A key enabler of such transformation would be partnering with the right cloud partner who understands the organization’s digital transformation goals. After all, going cloud-native is the only feasible way forward for the M&E industry.
