The Media & Entertainment Cloud Ecosystem

For the Entertainment industry, COVID-19 has had an unimaginable impact:

• Disney saw its profits fall 91% during the first three months of this year.
• The flat launch of HBO Max caused the WarnerMedia/AT&T stock price to drop 30% over the past 12 months.
• Peacock has now hit almost 22 million users, though it’s not clear how many of them are paying.

Projections from earlier in the year estimated that the entertainment industry was looking at a $160 billion loss over the next five years as a result of COVID-19. For big releases pushed via streaming, success has been mixed: Trolls World Tour made money, but Mulan did not.

There has been one space in Entertainment that has been booming, and that's Cloud. The reasons are simple: whether a production is ultimately super successful or not, costs should not be fixed.

The Media & Entertainment Ecosystem

As the world's only AWS Consulting Partner specialized in the entertainment industry, Metal Toad is working diligently to help our customers by:

1. mapping out what's possible
2. making strategic recommendations
3. getting projects started (and completed) right

We've shared this before but to help frame the conversation, we've created the following model:

This graphic is just the beginning. We are filling in the details of who provides services by conducting 25 interviews with AWS ISV Media & Entertainment Partners. 21 of these interview are already published starting with the following topics:

• Digital Rights Management and the Cloud (Christopher Levy, BuyDRM)
• Media Orchestration + Cloud (Art Raymond, Levels Beyond)
• Video Streaming (Joachim Bergman, 24i)
• Metadata (Rob Tucker, Meta)
• Digital Asset Management (Gary Ballabio, Cloudinary)
• Performance Monitoring (Brenton Ough, Touchstream)
• Video Monetization (George Meek, InPlayer)
• Monetization (Srinivasan KA, Amagi)
• Digital Watermarking and Security (Ken Gerstein, NAGRA)
• Video Content as a Service (Philippe Brodeur, Overcast HQ)
• Linear Television (Igor Krol, Veset)
• Metadata (Shaun McCarthy, Meta)
• Streaming Video Infrastructure (Stefan Lederer, Bitmovin)
• Unstructured File Data at Scale (Barry Russell, Qumulo)
• Data Optimization (Jerónimo Macanás Candilejo, Jump)
• Low Latency Streaming (Per Lindgren, Net Insight)
• Artificial Intelligence (Greg Loose, Veritone)
• Quality Control Solutions (Fereidoon Khosravi, Venera)
• Agile Media Workflows (Lincoln Spiteri, Dalet)
• Media & Entertainment Cloud Ecosystem (Ian McPherson, AWS)
• Media Content Distribution (Fredrik Andersson, Accedo)
• Digital Rights Management (Olga Kornienko, EZDRM)
• Media Supply Chain (Erik Åhlin, Vidispine)

A huge shoutout to all the people we've interviewed. These have been a ton of fun!

Bringing it all together was the interview we did with AWS: Head of North American Partnerships and Alliances-Media & Entertainment, Ian McPherson:

Hold onto your Hats

We are right on the cusp of another AWS re:Invent, the annual AWS conference. Last year, AWS went from 64 to 171 products they offer — a massive increase in power...and complexity. At Metal Toad in 2019, we were most impressed by Rekognition, Personalize, Forecast — and of course, the expanded Machine Learning offerings. And this doesn't even touch what AWS Technology Partners bring to the table. We are interviewing 25, but we are already tracking 139 with specializations and robust offerings for M&E.

Working in the Cloud space can feel like overwhelming. It's a lot, but it's also exciting to be at the forefront of what is coming — cloudy or not — for an entire industry.