Digital Media On The Edge of Transformation

In January 1926, the engineer and inventor John Logie Baird first demonstrated a working television to an audience of scientists from the Royal Institution. Almost a century later, 27 million UK households own a TV and enjoy the choice of hundreds of available channels and streaming services. Film and TV production expenditure has never been so high, nor has the quality of film produced. Viewer experience is more immersive than ever before and the possibilities for today’s film and TV producers seem limitless.

The entire digital media industry has shifted forward technologically - the production facilities and platforms that used to be inaccessible to the average person have become widely affordable and utilised, whilst high-end filmmakers work with the most advanced HPC technology to realise imaginative concepts. Watching the closing credits of a film, you may notice various new roles listed that wouldn’t exist without HPC. ‘Render wranglers’, for example, are based in render farms, where supercomputers use parallel computing to produce large quantities of CGI animation in the shortest possible time. The quality of CGI is taken to new levels by HPC-supported AI software. Simulations that mirror the natural systems of physics and chemistry deliver unbelievable scenes believably, and advanced applications that capture human expression manifest emotion through half-animated characters like Josh Brolin as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, resulting in a captivating fusion of fantasy and reality. 

Nowadays, viewers are afforded a rich choice of high-quality film and TV, which creates competition amongst providers to keep up with current trends. To consumers, accessing the content they want when they want, wherever it’s available is more important than loyalty to a given brand. Those that optimally provision the most popular content, win. That is, until content available elsewhere becomes the next best thing… 

The underlying digital infrastructure that facilitates broadcasting is adapting accordingly to cater to ever-changing consumer demand. In the first instance, this is achieved by understanding what viewers want to see on their screens. The tools to harness that information grow more advanced and intuitive every day. IoT data collectors and sensors identify patterns from large pools of data in real-time, forecasting future trends from current ones and developing better consumer-provider relationships. 

Data mining technology is most effective when positioned close to consumers in strategically located facilities, which leads us to edge computing. Edge computing involves a transformation of the digital infrastructure behind broadcasting. Rethinking the island-like status of the data centre by distributing IT resources to local cloud and colocation branches has numerous benefits for both consumers and providers. The HPC experience is brought close to home with incredible 5G download speeds and reduced internet traffic. For context, 5G is up to 100 times faster than 4G.

Viewers also want the portability to move between providers depending on where content and products take them, which is becoming easier to do thanks to edge virtualisation software. Virtualisation software works both to facilitate consumer flexibility and to optimise the edge computing network. It expands the potential per hardware device, in that viewers can access content from multiple virtual platforms from fewer devices, and are less limited by issues of incompatibility created by brand commitments. Virtualisation software acts as a mid-point between branches and the core, reducing the need for long-range communication as virtual resources can be allocated locally. The filtering of data in strategically positioned branches further reduces latency by ensuring that only the most valuable insights are being fed back through the network. The result is an overall more efficient and sustainable model.

Other benefits of edge computing include the specialisation of branches. As developers of similar media industries store their resources in the same place, colocation providers can adapt their infrastructure to best support in-house technology. The balance between edge computing resources and a core HPC hub, otherwise known as hybrid IT, is just as important. On-site facilities are needed for added security to protect the most sensitive data, and to act as a mothership for the entire network. 

Obtaining end-to-end, own-brand digital infrastructure is not the goal for today’s vendors. It’s those that understand the value of flexibility in an age of growing choice, and cater to that through collaboration, that will be most popular with consumers. The creativity that drives the digital media industry is empowered by the high capability levels of production technology available, and new digital infrastructure will enable us to optimally broadcast this creativity to the world.

In January 1926, the engineer and inventor John Logie Baird first demonstrated a working television to an audience of scientists from the Royal Institution. Almost a century later, 27 million UK households own a TV and enjoy the choice of hundreds of available channels and streaming services. Film and TV production expenditure has never been so high, nor has the quality of film produced. Viewer experience is more immersive than ever before and the possibilities for today’s film and TV producers seem limitless. 

The entire digital media industry has shifted forward technologically - the production facilities and platforms that used to be inaccessible to the average person have become widely affordable and utilised, whilst high-end filmmakers work with the most advanced HPC technology to realise imaginative concepts. Watching the closing credits of a film, you may notice various new roles listed that wouldn’t exist without HPC. ‘Render wranglers’, for example, are based in render farms, where supercomputers use parallel computing to produce large quantities of CGI animation in the shortest possible time. The quality of CGI is taken to new levels by HPC-supported AI software. Simulations that mirror the natural systems of physics and chemistry deliver unbelievable scenes believably, and advanced applications that capture human expression manifest emotion through half-animated characters like Josh Brolin as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, resulting in a captivating fusion of fantasy and reality. 

Nowadays, viewers are afforded a rich choice of high-quality film and TV, which creates competition amongst providers to keep up with current trends. To consumers, accessing the content they want when they want, wherever it’s available is more important than loyalty to a given brand. Those that optimally provision the most popular content, win. That is, until content available elsewhere becomes the next best thing… 

The underlying digital infrastructure that facilitates broadcasting is adapting accordingly to cater to ever-changing consumer demand. In the first instance, this is achieved by understanding what viewers want to see on their screens. The tools to harness that information grow more advanced and intuitive every day. IoT data collectors and sensors identify patterns from large pools of data in real-time, forecasting future trends from current ones and developing better consumer-provider relationships. 

Data mining technology is most effective when positioned close to consumers in strategically located facilities, which leads us to edge computing. Edge computing involves a transformation of the digital infrastructure behind broadcasting. Rethinking the island-like status of the data centre by distributing IT resources to local cloud and colocation branches has numerous benefits for both consumers and providers. The HPC experience is brought close to home with incredible 5G download speeds and reduced internet traffic. For context, 5G is up to 100 times faster than 4G.

Viewers also want the portability to move between providers depending on where content and products take them, which is becoming easier to do thanks to edge virtualisation software. Virtualisation software works both to facilitate consumer flexibility and to optimise the edge computing network. It expands the potential per hardware device, in that viewers can access content from multiple virtual platforms from fewer devices, and are less limited by issues of incompatibility created by brand commitments. Virtualisation software acts as a mid-point between branches and the core, reducing the need for long-range communication as virtual resources can be allocated locally. The filtering of data in strategically positioned branches further reduces latency by ensuring that only the most valuable insights are being fed back through the network. The result is an overall more efficient and sustainable model.

Other benefits of edge computing include the specialisation of branches. As developers of similar media industries store their resources in the same place, colocation providers can adapt their infrastructure to best support in-house technology. The balance between edge computing resources and a core HPC hub, otherwise known as hybrid IT, is just as important. On-site facilities are needed for added security to protect the most sensitive data, and to act as a mothership for the entire network. 

Obtaining end-to-end, own-brand digital infrastructure is not the goal for today’s vendors. It’s those that understand the value of flexibility in an age of growing choice, and cater to that through collaboration, that will be most popular with consumers. The creativity that drives the digital media industry is empowered by the high capability levels of production technology available, and new digital infrastructure will enable us to optimally broadcast this creativity to the world.