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This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I’ll address some of the most common misconceptions about cloud computing specifically related to media. This week’s post focuses on a question that we hear frequently, particularly when we are dealing with professional media workflows with high resolution master files: “What about the bandwidth?”.
Any time you host services outside of the media enterprise firewall, it’s natural for people to become concerned about the bandwidth implications of delivering large files across public or private networks to third party service providers. Companies are afraid that the costs of delivering the media will outweigh the savings provided by the cloud approach. Security concerns come into play as well, of course, but that’s a separate issue which I will address in a future post. For now, however, I’d like to address the bandwidth issue.
As I explained in my previous post, the only form of “cloud computing” that can truly be considered to be a paradigm-busting innovation is one which guarantees instant access to a scalable pool of virtual servers as a service.
Enterprise video processing provides a perfect use case for true cloud computing since it requires significant computing resources and is naturally unpredictable in nature. But what about the bandwidth necessary to transfer large video sources into the cloud? Won’t the time and cost required to deliver these files negate the benefits of on-demand processing?
The answer, in the vast majority of cases, is no. The following example shows why:
Company A is a content owner that needs to deliver 30 different versions of a single program to multiple distribution partners: 1 broadcast quality version for cable VoD, 24 broadband quality versions for various online channels, and 5 low res versions for its mobile partners. Company A believes that a cloud-based service will save time and money, and will allow them to take advantage of on-demand post production operations such as bug overlays, closed captioning and muxing, which they are usually forced to outsource to costly, manual video editors. But, they’re worried about the cost of sending a large source file over public or leased networks. A quick analysis reveals this fear to be unwarranted.
Since these encoded derivative files for TV, web and online are all compressed to some degree, they are each theoretically smaller in size than the source file. When you add them all together, however, you can end up with an aggregate file size that is considerably larger than the original master.
So, why is this a problem? Because if Company A is not using a cloud service like Panvidea, they will have to rely on in-house resources to deliver all of the derivatives, using their own bandwidth. And, since all of the derivatives add up to a larger size than the original master, the bandwidth costs can be significant. Since Panvidea delivers the results itself using its own network resources, most companies will use less bandwidth using us than doing it themselves.
TThere are a few exceptions to this rule which I’ll explain in a future post, but fear not – Panvidea has the solutions for them.
So, in summary, not only will Panvidea save you time and money when processing large volumes of video but, in most cases, we’ll also save you bandwidth.
