Cisco : Red or Blue Pill, Which One Gets us to the Media Cloud?

Some amongst us, may still view the move of the media production industry to the cloud as something down the road. Far off in the future. An infinite amount of work to go. Something we'll see after 2020.

I disagree. The traces are already visible. Transition SDI to IP? Deployed. Appliance to virtual appliance to cloud? Also already happening, across the eco-system. You can see these traces in the growing fabric of ecosystem partnerships focused on how to best virtualize and orchestrate the stuff that was previously hard-wired together in traditional appliances.

The next big shift, is cloud-enabled workflows. It's the hardest of the bunch, because it goes beyond 'lift and shift,' to cloud native and server-less. Scale transcoding jobs in the cloud, by spinning up instances faster, and turning up virtual farms of IP data centers to execute large jobs. Taking scalable cloudified workflow to the next level is about simultaneously automating diverse data centers, to get after any idle CPU capacity, and to process workloads in parallel.

A prime example is collaborative remote production and the use of all available local and cloud resources to get tribal viewing from glass to glass. How could future live broadcast events be experienced if production and engineering teams could dynamically reconfigure the system, and not get bogged down with pulling cables and constantly opening tickets to reroute a workflow?

The bottom line is this - cloud is not just a cost-savings play, or a simplification play. It's also a move that seeds innovation throughout the broadcast ecosystem, and especially in media production. Let's see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

If you want the overview of the vision and details of the ongoing work to make this happen; please take the red pill and join me on Tuesday at 11:30, in room S222-223. I'll be there with some friends: Jim Blakley, GM of Intel's Visual Cloud Division, and Andrew Lippman, Associate Director at MIT Media, in a keynote session titled 'The Naked Truth About Media Production In An IT Stack.'