[Final part of this year's NAB preview for Harris]
Every year in the broadcast industry has its buzzwords, but few have been as persistent, potentially transformative and also frustratingly nebulous as the cloud. It doesn't make sense for every sector of the industry, and indeed is facing a certain amount of resistance from within it, but 2013 is the year where it finally looks to be becoming relevant in a real world context.
Cloud-based services have always promised to cut costs via the holy triumvirate of increased scalability, flexibility and collaboration, and increasingly there are areas within the broadcast industry where it makes sense. Given the definition of cloud computing as services that are delivered over a network - typically over the internet and typically via a browser - there are even areas of the industry where it is already firmly established, with news production at the vanguard.
Web-based, distributed production, editing, archive mining and the like has already enabled field-based teams and bureaux to collaborate across continents and time-zones, and this trend is only going to continue as cloud-services become culturally embedded in news organisations. Their sport colleagues are already ahead of the game, mining remote archives when on location - especially at the big events with established broadcast centres such as the major tennis championships - to create quick-turnaround packages based on topical events within a competition.
It's not hard to see this being replicated in other areas of the industry - promos and graphics departments would possibly equally benefit from cloud-based workflows - but it is post which has seen the main mushrooming of services to date to the extent that you could even set up a facility with no specific geographical location if you wanted to. Editing, VFX, compositing, client approvals, rendering, production notes and planning, even invoicing and expense tracking...all this can be achieved to a greater or lesser degree in the here and now with cloud-based services.
Currently, there are a few instances where there is currently only one service or manufacturer fulfilling these various niches, and so NAB will probably see a significant expansion of both the players in the market and also that market itself expand into other areas, with live and near live in particular fecund target areas for the cloud and all it brings with it.
Those providing cloud-based services reason that the the winds of technological progress are behind them and that the ascendancy of the cloud is almost assured. There is perhaps a certain amount of hubris to this, especially given broadcasters' intransigence in particular on some very valid issues such as reliability and security. That said though, the only real technological missteps in the industry recently have occurred largely as a result of either consumer indifference (stereo 3D) or misapplication within an overall trend. Add in the general progress to more reliable and faster communications technologies (4G networks being a prime example) and it's difficult not to see the cloud as part of the general convergence between the broadcast industry and IT. And that is not going to ease up at any time soon.
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