Cloud Storage for Media and Entertainment

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 Few industries pose as many storage challenges as media and entertainment. Not only is there more content being produced and consumed than at any other time in history, technological advances, from 8K to stereoscopic VR, are pushing files sizes and storage costs sky high.

Fortunately, there’s cloud storage.

Imagine being able to affordably store ALL of your content in the cloud, from raw footage to finished product– everything securely archived yet immediately accessible at a moment’s notice. Cloud Storage makes that dream a reality. Our breakthrough storage technology enables us to offer one simple, single tier of service that’s optimized for media files yet 1/5th the cost of AWS S3, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.

 Broadcasters and studios maintain extensive archives of their finished work for historical record. In addition, content owners also archive raw footage, out-takes, VFX models, renderings and sound work that might be needed for a future project, for an anniversary re-issue or for perusing old footage for new ideas.

More recently, content owners have turned to the cloud for long-term archiving using “cold storage” services like Amazon Glacier. While the per-TB charge for the storage itself may look compelling at first, it’s the additional, hidden charges for “API calls” “data retrieval requests” and “data egress” that balloon these service costs, making them more expensive. Furthermore, it can take several hours or more to retrieve content from these cold storage services. That’s not particularly helpful when a director needs an immediate reference to a prior project or the latest social trend suddenly finds you needing a TV episode clip from the 90s.

Cloud storage changes the game in archiving. All content stored is immediately accessible, whenever you need it, from a single tier of high-performance storage.

Finally, you can afford to store it all—unused cuts, CGI, animations, 3D renderings and any other content you might one day want to dust off for another look. Plus, by taking advantage of our “eleven-nines” of data durability and selectable immutability features, you have peace of mind knowing that files will not be lost, deleted, altered or hacked in any way, no matter how long you store them.

In today’s high-stakes digital world, video producers can’t afford to lose any raw footage, rough cuts or finished material before the final product is in the can. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but hardware failures, mishaps, misplaced drives, theft and natural disasters are common occurrences. M&E firms need a fail-safe backup strategy that ensures they can rapidly retrieve media work when things go wrong. Of course, this protection needs to be affordable as well.

Cloud Storage is a critical component of a complete media backup strategy. By continuously updating copies of your work to us, artists are protected from localized events and disasters that can affect any backups that are stored near the original material. At a price that is 80% less expensive and faster than the competition, We makes it possible for media producers to limit or even bypass on-premise backup storage and replicate straight to the cloud. Cloud Storage helps media companies reduce risk, save money and maintain the fast pace of their business.

 Today, it is commonplace for virtual teams to work together on projects wherever they happen to be. In post-production environments, cloud storage enables creative teams to share files, collaborate, even “edit in the cloud.” This modern cloud-based production model eliminates the considerable duplication and physical transfer of files that traditionally would take place between editors, artists, and vendors – all of which is time consuming, costly, difficult to track, and prone to loss by human error or malicious intent. Storing works-in-progress and archived assets in the cloud not only streamlines and protects production workflows, but opens you up to a world of new and affordable talent. This type of “work-anywhere” flexibility is only possible due to Cloud Storage’s high-speed performance and no-charge-for-egress pricing. 

 Tier 1 shared storage gives busy production teams the extreme processing power and high-bandwidth interfaces they need to retrieve, edit, and save media assets without slowdowns or impeding one another’s work. It is also extremely expensive. You can preserve this precious resource by offloading work awaiting review/approval or versioning to Cloud Storage. Cloud Storage’s ultra-low cost and lack of egress fees make your content immediately accessible to anyone that needs it. It’s far less expensive than traditional NAS/SAN systems and eliminates the headache of managing and maintaining additional on-premises hardware. 

 When your project is completed, the final step is to send it to your distribution partners for ultimate delivery to consumers. By moving production to the cloud where all mezzanine files get assembled on secure cloud storage, the publishing of those finished assets to distributors becomes as simple as notifying each distributor that finished content is ready. Access rights are exchanged and “delivery” occurs instantly.

Cloud Storage can even serve as the origin storage for final content delivery to consumers via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) such as Akamai, Fastly, or Stackpath. These CDNs are massive, globally distributed networks designed to improve the end-user experience by moving content to the edge of the network and closer to the consumer for immediate playback and overall better quality viewing. Because Cloud Storage does not charge for data egress, distributors will not face recurring fees every time a new file needs to be pulled out onto the network caches.