Business

PALM DESERT, Calif. — For all the relatively recent tech innovations the media and entertainment industry has embraced, the ability to migrate content workflows to the cloud is near the top in terms of transformative importance.

That’s according to several vendor executives who presented Feb. 12 at the Hollywood Professional Association’s (HPA) annual Tech Retreat. And they backed up their words with action, with live, on-stage demonstrations showing how much is being accomplish in the cloud today by the content community.

“The amount of experimentation we’re capable of [with] the cloud … it gives us the ability to think about what we do differently,” said David Benson, CTO and co-founder of cloud software firm BeBop Technology. “What we’ve realized is we could throw any amount of infrastructure — for cloud, storage — at the challenge of moving things from here to there, If our users can’t collaborate in the way they’re used to, it’s all for nothing.”

Benson’s demo — which showed how creatives can leverage the cloud while still using the tools they’re already comfortable with — came shortly after Ian Main, technical marketing principal for Teradici, showed off his company’s PCoIP (PC-over-IP) tech, offering live collaboration look-ins from locations in Texas and Los Angeles, “running on a frame rate as if the computer was sitting under your desk.” His company’s PCoIP technology overcomes cloud latency issues with a virtual workspace architecture that compresses, encrypts and transmits pixels to software and mobile clients.

“You can co-locate, you no longer have to worry working on everything in-studio,” Main said. “Everything is secured in the cloud.”

Benson, speaking to solutions like Teradici’s, added: “What we’ve found over the many years we’ve been doing this, is if the aggregate amount of bandwidth is important, the quality of that bandwidth is just as, if not more, important.”

Additionally, Avid Technology’s Craig Dwyer, senior director of global strategic solutions and presales, and Richard Duke, cloud solutions architect, showed off how the cloud has better-enabled customers to use its media platform, tools and workflow solutions to both create and distribute content.

“Studios are working hard managing all their assets, looking at all the different pieces from end to end,” Duke said. With modern collaboration tools, everything can run using the cloud, and content creators can “trust the content is there and secure.”

For Dwyer, what’s become most clear with cloud technologies in media and entertainment is that content creators have been enabled with the ability to pick and choose which solutions work best for them.

“We’ve got a number of enabling technologies coming together now,” he said. “You can build sophisticated, custom pipelines.”

Eliot Sakhartov, business and technology strategist for media and entertainment for Microsoft, moderated the discussion, and had one message he especially wanted HPA Tech Retreat attendees to hear: “This isn’t the future, this is now.”