Telcos and TV operators are juggling a delicate balancing act in how they transform their media services for the future while serving potentially millions of customers still using legacy hardware technology. It’s a question that media companies on both sides of the pond must face – how do they make full use of the opportunities provided by the public cloud and ascend the role of service aggregators while also undertaking a monumental and heavily complicated transition of their legacy infrastructure?
Facing the challenges of public cloud migration
With his EMEA baseball cap on, MediaKind’s Sven Bolthausen blogged earlier this week on the prospective journey to the cloud for telcos and TV operators operating in Europe and the Middle East. In truth, many of the obstacles Sven observed are much the same in Europe as they are here in North America. Over the past decade, the systems built by telcos and TV operators to deliver media in the right quality and with low latency have been outlived by the rapid pace of innovation across the rest of the industry.
One of the main challenges that operators in North America face is building a business case around creating multi-cloud offerings. It’s especially important, given the sheer number of channels they operate. Taking to the cloud is straightforward for a direct-to-consumer (D2C) service that operates just a handful of channels. But for the operator who runs 300-400 live channels, it’s a whole different ballpark. For them, it’s a case of walking before they can run full steam ahead into a cloud-based future. By starting the migration to the cloud with the top 15-20% of their channels, they can build enough validation and realism to make the initial journey before completely embracing the public cloud.
Buy or build?
Deciding between building cloud-based solutions in-house or working with key media vendors and technology experts also plays a considerable role in the overall public cloud business case. Although many larger telcos and TV operators have traditionally gone down the path of in-house development, history has shown that this often limits their ability to take advantage of rapid innovation and respond to changes and emerging technologies.
Added with the bottom-line fact that major growth opportunities are often relatively rare for telcos and TV operators and their media services, it’s no longer cost-effective for them to undertake their own developments and invest in and deploy new innovation in a timely way. Therefore, the logical choice is to partner with media technology experts fluent in public cloud technology and can run their software in all the public cloud providers.
Making use of the full media ecosystem
Telcos and TV operators can also make full use of media ecosystems, such as Android TV, to offer their end customers a broader set of applications and services quickly and cost-effectively. It removes the need for development on the operator end and avoids the consumer having to leave the operator experience at all. This includes applications such as Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Amazon Prime, Peloton, Red Bull TV – and thousands of others.
MediaKind has been investing in cloud-based technologies as early as 2014, anticipating this trend and ensuring we’re as well-equipped as possible to enable our customers to embrace live streaming without limits, at scale. We’re proud to have a complete, mature, and award-winning cloud-native portfolio serving all media segments and benefitting from all the capabilities needed to tackle public cloud migration head-on. The end-to-end MediaKind portfolio includes video contribution, distribution, and cloud ingest solutions, media processing, and consumer delivery, and consumer experience and monetization. They can be deployed by operators and MVPDs, content owners, and channel originators either for on-premises, cloud, or hybrid scenarios.
If you’re interested in learning more about the benefits of the public cloud for telcos and TV operators, feel free to drop me a DM on LinkedIn!
