Of course this convention would have to have a few buzz words to be normal. And like most recent events, “Cloud Computing” and “Work Flow” were the two biggies. Regarding Cloud Computing for Broadcasters, Michael Madden of Avid gave his “101” version.
By now most everyone knows what Cloud Computing is, but not everyone is sure they want to be in the clouds. The process has been around much longer than the new name. It basically is a server, with all your computer applications, that you access remotely. When I do my banking, that cloud is in West Point, Georgia. When playing around with any of my blogs, that cloud is in Arizona and I suspect that even St. Cloud, MN has a few clouds there too.
In one of Michael’s examples, several television stations could access a common production library, complete with stock or real time video, for fast news room editing with an almost unlimited library video or special effects. Now the cost savings for a group of television stations using a system like this makes sense. Not big equipment purchases for each location, just internet access and a web browser.
What I didn’t know was that Amazon Web Services can provide a cloud at reasonable charges. Here’s the example, you buy a server for your station and unless it’s the automation, it’s probably getting real use only 8 hours per day. Do you feel cheated that it’s sitting doing nothing the rest of the time? Well, with the Amazon model, you pay for what you use. And that’s basically time on line and size of your data. You need more space, it just grows automatically with you, less, and then it gets smaller.
You may however remember the news from several months ago about their server farm going down. However, due to redundancy in many locations, Amazon customers didn’t really know about it other than what they read or heard in the news media. They guarantee a reliability of 99.99999% and that’s a lot of 9’s.
So, the cloud can be a money saver based on your operation, or reduce some of the work load of your already overburdened IT Staff. But for many, the decision is to keep that cloud inside your operation where you have control of everything. So for now, the forecast, Continued Partly Cloudy!
