A panel discussion co-produced by ETC@USC and Google and moderated by ETC director of adaptive production Seth Levenson examined the latest innovations and solutions in the cloud for M&E companies. Google Cloud technical director Jeff Kember opened the discussion by stressing the importance of collaborating with content creation and audiences. “We have products and services to connect the two,” he said. “We run Tier 1 content on our cloud from the studios. Think of Google as a partner in the ecosystem.”

Levenson opened by addressing “the elephant in the room.” “Entertainment companies are sensitive to vendor lock-in,” he said. “How does Google help?” Kember reported that the company spells out ingress and egress opportunities. “We can give you a schedule in advance of what it costs to pull petabytes out,” he said. “There’s a way to get out of all our systems, and we have a cloud transfer tool for moving information back and forth as well. The open source initiative is very important to us.”

According to Globant solutions architect/product leader Marlon Montgomery, people need to put together an exit plan before moving to the cloud. “It’s almost like a pre-nuptial agreement,” he said. “Besides, the micro-services approach — coupling your services and apps via APIs — goes a long way towards extraction.”

Teradici co-founder/chief executive Dan Cordingley reported that, “two or three customers out of 10 are all-in on the public cloud. “Others are still on that path to virtualization with some cloud component,” he said. “Some are definite about which cloud they want to go to, but others haven’t made the firm commitment.”

Veritone Media senior vice president/general manager of M&E Drew Hilles said he’s been seeing “a big shift of media and entertainment companies moving into the cloud.” “We have an open ecosystem to host any engine,” he added. “We put energy into our host/conductor so it picks the best platform at the right time.”

Levenson brought up the issue of the financial benefits of moving to the cloud. SDVI president/chief executive Lawrence Kaplan had the statistics to back this up. “We’ve been working with customers for three years to move to virtualized supply chains and only recently have they let us talk about the financial gains from doing this,” he said.

Customers have provided him with these stats: 70 percent improvement in time to market with 85 percent cost savings; 72 hours versus two weeks for archiving content; 83 percent faster content processing at 10 percent of the cost. “This is huge,” said Kaplan. “I’ve never seen anyone publish hard data like this before.”

Hilles said his company is “bullish on artificial intelligence reaching the edge,” which, he said, will “boost the cloud.” In three to five years, predicted Kember, we’ll be seeing “complete end-to-end production in the cloud.”