People are consuming massive amounts of content digitally, which has given the media industry an unprecedented boost in the last two years. OTT platforms grew in popularity during the pandemic, as home entertainment became the only source of relief during the nationwide lockdown. Media and entertainment have become an inseparable part of our lives, and there is no turning back, regardless of the ever-changing external environment.
M&E Data Generation
Big Data has played an important role in the evolution and success of various media streams by providing relevant insights into customer behavior via analysis of consumer data available across and as a product of various platforms. However, because, according to Newton’s third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, these media generate a large amount of data. Films, television, advertisements, games, live concerts, music, news, and so on are some of the digital content sources captured by the media industry.
In India, approximately 1800 movies are produced each year, creating a demand for large amounts of petabyte storage and archival of movie content. That is not all; filmmaking is a lengthy and laborious process that leaves imprints along the way until the final cut. In filmmaking and television production, for example, the shooting ratio is the ratio between the total duration of the footage created for possible use in a project and that which appears in the final cut. Shooting ratios have skyrocketed in recent years due to the relatively low cost of digital filmmaking, adding to the massive amounts of data.
Data transfer in filmmaking
For the final product, filmmaking or video production requires collaboration across multiple functions. Large amounts of raw video and multimedia content are recorded with high-end processing cameras and transferred for editing and post-production purposes such as video editing, ADR, visual effects, CGI, color rectification, sound effects, musical composition, and others.
Every week, approximately 200TB of pre-processed data is captured on set or on-field using cameras. Weekly, pre-production data is transferred to studios for post-production via a dedicated business network. Media is ingested into the studio’s storage infrastructure for post-processing. This action is replicated until the film is completed.
It is sometimes necessary to transfer raw video footage in the middle of production. If you are shooting a high-budget film remotely, your producers and studio executives must be kept up to date on your progress regularly. You may need to send them daily updates at the end of the day to keep them up to date. Finally, if you want to distribute your content to foreign markets, you will need to transfer extremely large amounts of data to other continents.
As a result, the data transfer phenomenon is critical for things to move. Unfortunately, today’s file transfer technologies are incapable of efficiently delivering large media files.
Most businesses use an antiquated method of data transfer that is fraught with difficulties, poses a security risk, and provides low-cost efficiency. Some of the major issues we face are as follows:
- Long data transfer time:
Due to limited network bandwidth, transporting data from the start to the post-production facility takes a long time.
- Data transfer lag:
Several days of lag in data synchronization with the movie production flow pushes back the estimated movie timeline by days, increasing project costs.
- Security risk:
Data loss in the event of a disaster due to significant lags during transport.
- Inefficient data storage/migration method:
Copying data to tape media for exchanging and archiving, which is slow and expensive to refresh every three years.
Resolve data transfer problems
Digital content, combined with a plethora of external data, such as customer-generated content, market data, mobile app data, images/videos, and social media data, adds to media and entertainment organizations’ data collection woes. As we learn that capturing and transferring this data is becoming increasingly difficult, it is time for M&E organizations to abandon age-old data transfer methods in favor of more agile solutions.
An on-premises cloud or data center movement and management platform can address this issue significantly by enabling massive amounts of data transfer in a timely and secure manner. Capturing raw footage at the edge and transferring them for immediate use will solve this problem.
As data generation advances, organizations must advance their methods and technology in order to streamline data capture, storage, and processing. Because security is paramount during data transfer, organizations must implement a solution that is resistant to security breaches associated with network transfers. It is now critical for M&E organizations to investigate efficient Big Data transfer solutions and their application in order to reap numerous benefits and gain access to real-time insights.
