Signiant looks at what 2020 has in store for media and entertainment organisations
By Margaret Craig, CEO, Ian Hamilton, CTO, and Rick Clarkson, CSO at Signiant
As the New Year approaches there are a number of exciting media and entertainment trends on the horizon. New competition, emerging formats and platforms, and technology advancements promise to make 2020 a dynamic and fertile year for the industry.
Margaret Craig, CEO, on a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world
“My prediction for 2020 is that media companies will increasingly drive their technical infrastructure toward a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud future. The industry is moving beyond a simplistic view of the cloud as a single public cloud platform.
“Technical leaders now envision agile, distributed global storage and compute environments, with multiple commercial infrastructure providers and large scale private clouds. They want to be able to choose the optimal resource configuration for each workflow or asset class, based on cost, performance, and adjacency to other services.”
Ian Hamilton, CTO, on the evolution of machine learning
“I think we’ll see an increase in the practical application of unsupervised machine learning and in particular generative adversarial networks.
“While applying supervised machine learning to train computers to perform tasks that humans are good at (and machines haven’t traditionally been good at), like natural language processing and image recognition, is interesting and useful, strategies for enabling machines to do things that the majority of humans aren’t good at, like creating photorealistic images or devising strategies for maintaining privacy in aggregate data, takes machine learning to the next level.”
Rick Clarkson, CSO, on a paradigm shift in media technology
“As we head in to 2020 I can’t help but think of the need for business agility driven by changes in consumer behaviour. The industry is moving away from expensive, bespoke solutions in favour of lighter weight, off-the-shelf, multi-tenant software as a service (SaaS) and using a loosely coupled, event driven paradigm for integrating distinct services. I can envision some market consolidation in media technology where companies building solutions using a combination of cloud technologies, micro services, opensource software and commercial applications will be in an enviable position.”
These predictions reflect the diversity of change and demand for innovation that might define 2020 and the years to follow. Each one of these factors is likely to have a visible impact on how organisations create and distribute content across an ever more complex supply chain.