HITS

NEW YORK — The cloud is bringing significant changes to the way entertainment is produced at every level, and we’re only just getting started, according to Scott Bounds, U.S. Media & Cable Industry lead at Microsoft.

“What we’re really seeing now,” when looking at the entire media workspace, are several key areas: content creation, content management, monetization and distribution, he said July 24 during an opening session called “The Cloud Creative Process: from Concept to Device to Screen” at the Entertainment Production in the Cloud (EPIC) conference, part of the Media & Entertainment (M&E) Day at the Microsoft Conference Center.

The 2018 M&E Day also included Content Protection Summit East and Smart Content Summit East, providing M&E technology teams valuable insights into the creation, production, distribution, security and analysis of content.

Noting how much everything in the industry is moving to the cloud, Bounds said: “We really believe” that in this industry — “especially around production and pre-production — [companies] are just dipping their toes into some of the aspects of what’s going to be” increasingly “worldwide production.”

Key issues that entertainment companies are increasingly facing are “how to enable the public cloud and hybrid scenarios,” he said.

Other key topics touched on during the summit were editing in the cloud via offerings from companies including Adobe and Avid, postproduction, smart storage, archiving storage and metadata, he noted.

“We’re really in early days [as] an industry about how we can actually enable” all these things “with our partners at Microsoft,” he said. Although he conceded some folks might not like the fact that he’s saying it, he told attendees: “At the end of the day, [at] Microsoft, we’re a bunch of plumbers. This is really a partnership” between Microsoft and its partners. Microsoft provides an infrastructure for all this and it’s “building a foundation to build these things on,” he said, adding: “We know what we’re good at Microsoft at and we know what we’re not good at. So, we are not a video editing company. That’s where you go to Avid and Adobe.” Similarly, “we are not a workflow company” either, he said.

Pointing to “two topics that are intersecting” today, he said artificial intelligence (AI) is heavily impacting video workflows in the cloud, “especially around metadata.” That was the subject of a separate panel at the summit, called “Enabling Cloud workflows with AI,” he pointed out.

The 2018 Media & Entertainment Day is presented by Microsoft, with sponsorship from IBM Watson Media, Amazon Web Services, IBM, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, NAGRA, NeuLion, Ooyala, EIDR, GrayMeta, MarkLogic, Qumulo, Avid, Cloudian, SoftServe and TiVo. The event was produced by MESA, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council.

Click here for audio of Bounds’ presentation, or click here for the presentation slide deck.