CloudSoda + M&E

Media Asset Management (MAM) continues its upward trend in the Media & Entertainment industry. MAM providers help with workflow orchestration by moving media assets through a media supply chain. While these processes are widely used, transparency into time and cost of these movements in and out of the cloud has been challenging. CloudSoda is unique to the industry in its ability to show metrics relating to time and cost that no other data movers can. By correlating data from the MAM, CloudSoda is able to leverage this metadata to execute automated movement of media assets based on user defined filters to backup, archive, or distribute content. The two systems are seamlessly integrated providing a single user interface allowing for both duration and cost analysis directly in the MAM.

Current visibility into time and cost based on certain SLAs from cloud providers such as standard, bulk and expedited is limited. For the most part, end users have very little knowledge as to where their assets actually reside. If an asset is archived and needs to be restored to be worked on the user’s expectations need to be managed so they understand the time and cost implications of restoring assets. Having this ability before the assets are moved by the MAM is extremely valuable. On top of this, as these metrics are refined and budgeting is in place around asset movement and projects, the MAMs utilize the user defined approval process to track asset costs across multiple projects, departments, and individuals. CloudSoda is empowering end users, producers, and editors to search and find for assets without the need for their IT department. With this seamless integration, CloudSoda allows these users to have additional knowledge and access to media assets without learning a new system.

Tiered cloud storage is nothing new but the cost of storing data in the cloud has dropped dramatically in the last few years and continues to do so in order to keep pace with the price of tape storage. Considering the costs of administrative overhead, forward migration, and total cost of ownership, cloud storage continues to be more attractive as a tertiary option for archiving. However, tools that move data have historically been proprietary and don’t speak to the cloud. CloudSoda is agnostic in that can move data between various storage platforms and also between private and multiple public clouds.

Typical data movement applications write as an “API user” to the cloud, this means all traffic sent and received is correlated to this one user. With multiple departments, projects, and users being typical for M&E companies, a better solution is needed. With CloudSoda you can correlate data movement to each end user, group, or project allowing for more granulated reporting and budgeting. CloudSoda is able to filter data by access date, project, or user and write data to every different tier of storage thus ensuring the right data is being moved to the right tier, while assigning a cost basis for these movements. Without a seamless integration, costs are less visible leading to excessive budget overages. CloudSoda helps eliminate these costs through empowerment and visualization of time and costs to the end users.

In an ever-growing virtual world, remote editorial continues to not only be more widely used, but a necessity for many M&E companies. CloudSoda is enabling a global virtual workforce to more effectively collaborate through remote editing both in hybrid MAM situations and PCoIP.

Hybrid MAMs utilize a combination of high-resolution assets residing with on premises storage solutions, while proxies are being stored in the cloud and orchestrating the workflow to stream these assets to end users. CloudSoda seamlessly integrates with the MAM to ensure the right asset is delivered to the right storage repository while notifying the user of what they can expect in terms of cost and time implications.

Utilizing PC over IP (PCoIP) to spin up or down edit bays in the cloud has helped to empower remote editing and its popularity is on the rise. This remote desktop experience streams the edit bay’s output to a thin client so a user can edit source assets stored in the cloud. Moving source media to this cloud storage, and sending the resulting exports from these Edit Bays can be coordinated with SoDA and take advantage of rules based data movement for automated policies.

When analyzing the value of cloud-based storage for your archive, it is important to take into account benefits, such as the ability to process these assets in the cloud and not just store them. CloudSoda empowers cloud-based AI machine learning by intelligently brokering the movement of pertinent data, such as a lightweight proxy instead of the source asset, to the cloud processing engines reducing time and cost. Search and discovery, automatic captioning and localization, safer content moderation, and new ways to monetize media to the cloud provides flexible and predictable cost analysis enabling M&E companies to better handle their media assets as they flow through the production pipeline. Whether moving to archive or bursting your media pipeline to the cloud, your on-premises solution may not have the capabilities to keep up with the media production workload that is required. CloudSoda allows M&E companies to augment their current resources with cloud resources seamlessly by tackling the movement of media.

CloudSoda is a certified partner with Amazon’s Media2Cloud and Media Intelligence solution.

With Agents, CloudSoda allows for multiple ingest points and end points for the automated orchestration of data movement for remote content creation and editing. CloudSoda allows for not only data ingest, but also empowers remote editing users by having direct access to their content.