The pressure is on for today’s media companies and production studios.
The proliferation of streaming platforms, each of which seeks to create captivating productions that can grab the attention of potential subscribers, has created a relentless demand for more content that can be difficult for even the largest organizations to keep up with.
“So much content is in demand,” says Andy Beach, industry chief technology officer for media and entertainment at Microsoft. “Studios are greenlighting more content than ever before as they look to attract customers with differentiated offerings. There’s also the fact that a lot more work is being done remotely than ever before. With so many things going on and with teams spread across far-flung locations, you have to rethink production to help you keep up.
Jean-Paul Bonjour, head of studio UI engineering at Netflix, describes today’s media landscape as a highly competitive environment that demands content providers have the ability to scale quickly while maintaining quality.
“Those who are able to scale quickly and profitably while producing compelling content will win,” he says. “To do that, you have to focus on creativity and rebuilding the infrastructure.”
The trade-off between fast production time and engaging content is hard to find in the face of these demands, and Bonjour suggests that the balance may have shifted too much in recent years.
“I’m a big fan of Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar, and he talks about the tension between ‘feeding the beast’ – creating more productions to get more eyeballs on your platform – and the ‘ugly baby’. “, which is the need to take initially immature ideas and refine them for an audience,” he explains. transparent, I feel like some of the bigger streaming services have gotten a bit watered down due to the amount of content coming out, if we streamline and focus more tightly on the pre-production phase, that will translate with fantastic content.
Technologies that can streamline production and allow more time for creativity could therefore prove invaluable to media organizations in ensuring their overall success. Beach suggests there are two main areas they should focus on to achieve this.
“First, they should use artificial intelligence processes to help streamline work in progress,” he says. “With so much content being produced, machine learning helps you understand the context of the content, make it more searchable, facilitate early cuts, and identify items that need to be stored and retained. Secondly, there is the notion of being able to better organize production. By having a single collection of assets in the cloud that can be created or deleted, studios can more easily manage the load of managing so many productions at the same time. »
Microsoft helps deliver these capabilities to the media industry through Microsoft Azure, leveraging the platform’s power and scalability as well as its extensive library of third-party solutions.
“Our whole approach is ecosystem-driven,” Beach says. “This means we contribute to the success of our partners on Azure, and in turn they contribute to the success of the various industries in which they work, including media and communications. Major partners like Avid, for example, help with content creation and move writing into a remote process. It’s a mix of first-party solutions that we bring to all industries and an ecosystem of independent service providers that are essential for the media industry.
Beach points to other partners such as MediaKind, Evertz and Blackbird as examples of the value Microsoft’s ecosystem can provide. Another is Datazoom, whose video data platform collects data from endpoints, such as a content delivery network or video player, and sends it to data lakes and platforms. analysis.
“Datazoom has the ability to gather all the data needed to deliver content to the end user, aggregate it faster than real time, and align it by timestamps, so you have a very accurate snapshot of what’s happening with content as it’s delivered,” says Beach. “It’s exactly the kind of solution that network operations and media operations teams need.
Beach also points to a collaboration with Cinnafilm, a company that provides video and image processing solutions for the media and communications industry, as an important development in Microsoft’s involvement in the field.
“We’re working with Cinnafilm to bring world-class image processing capabilities to Azure,” he says. “Cinnafilm takes video and upscales it from 50fps to 60fps, for example, or provides upscaling to 4K that keeps video incredibly sharp. It’s solutions like Cinnafilm’s that will help us keep content quality high as we move production directly to the cloud, so the company is a very important and critical player in the market.
Azure has already powered some of the biggest media events in the world, with Microsoft working in partnership with the NBA to develop new ways to produce and deliver content. Microsoft and the NBA are innovating the sports fan experience with the launch of a new over-the-top (OTT) platform to deliver personalized and localized content to international markets.
“We’ve worked very closely with the NBA over the past two years,” Beach said. “The platform will be transformational, as it will give the league the tools to deliver its content to an international audience. But this is only the beginning of the relationship. We’re continually collaborating to bring to life the next big ideas for how sports fans engage with their content.
Beach sees live content such as the Olympics and the NBA as one of Microsoft’s main areas of development for the future, alongside its data offering.
“Live content is starting to move into the cloud in a major way,” he says. “We spend a lot of time focusing on tooling around live productions in remote and hybrid scenarios. But we’re also focused on connecting all the different data domains our media partners have in their pipelines and operationalizing their production more efficiently, helping them reuse the content they already have. Those are the two big areas that I always come back to as vital for us to be successful in this space.
Various Microsoft partners have also contributed to this feature: Netflix, MediaKind, Evertz, Datazoom, Avid, SMPTE, Cinnafilm, NBA and Blackbird. Find out how they work with Microsoft technologies to help produce and deliver content.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2022 issue of Technology Record. To receive future issues straight to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.
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