Business Applications

Media companies, and especially gaming, social and streaming media players have built global platforms that bring together content and users.

Aggregators and Lifestyle Platforms will seek to unify the experience through APIs and data-sharing agreements,
which create seamless access across streaming services (including other forms of entertainment, such as music
and podcast services and video games).

The platforms increasingly embed commerce, for instance social game worlds built on blockchain and NFTs are attracting users and monetising the new digital scarcity. 

 Compute & Cloud

By their very nature digital platforms leverage hyperscale infrastructure from cloud providers in computing, data storage and security to deliver scale, reliability and customer experience. Companies such as Netflix have built their business on the cloud.

Media companies will leverage the cloud and cloud-native technology to provide a new level of  scalability (both up and down) and a flexible, low-leverage cost model (based on pay-for-use). It will require media companies to develop partnerships with one or more of the hyperscale cloud providers that can contribute proven scalable cloud technology with access to a wide range of digital technologies (such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data processing) that media companies need to build the platform solutions that are critical to their transformation.

Cloud providers have built industry specific solutions, for instance AWS Media Services make it easy to build reliable, broadcast-quality video workflows in the cloud, creating media suitable for streaming, both live and on-demand, and optimized for viewers’ playback devices. 

As the metaverse grows then edge computing will become important. 

Digital Workplace

Organisations must now provide a digitally enabled, flexible and collaborative working experience to attract and retain staff. They must also move beyond the fast reactions required to achieve a lockdown, where staff worked from home. Media companies are ideally suited to hybrid ways of working. 

A modern collaborative digital workplace is critical to a remotely located workforce. It ranges from access to HR applications and core business applications to e-mail, instant messaging and enterprise social media tools and virtual meeting tools. 

Media companies that had invested in remote production capabilities prior to the onset of the COVID-19 crisis were able to easily make the shift to fully remote operations, thus keeping their production activities afloat. Such
capabilities will continue to be important to enable remote working for production crews (audio mixing, video editing, and finishing) and broadcast operations personnel (scheduling, production, and master control room
activities).

Security, Compliance & Data Privacy

Copyrighted content and large scale customer data mean the media industry is a prime target for hackers.  The number of cyberattacks per week on corporate networks increased 50% in 2021 compared to 2020. This has been underlined by high profile attacks and data breaches.

The 2014 Sony Pictures hack was a wake-up call, followed by the Netflix and HBO breaches that hit the headlines in 2017. In 2021, a major German newspaper and magazine publisher Funke Media Group fell victim to a ransomware attack on more 6,000 enterprise computers. 

The financial and reputational impact of on media firms is significant. Costs arise from the attack itself, the remediation and repairing reputational damage by regaining public trust.  The average loss for “extreme” cyber incidents is £35 million, but 28% of incidents cost more than £75 million. Fines for data breaches are also rising. Since GDPR was enacted in May 2018, EU data privacy watchdogs have issued over $332 million in fines. 

Privacy continues to be top of mind for customers. “Keeping my payment information private” ranks as the number one issue, with “keeping my personal information private” coming in as a close second. This includes identity management, data security, privacy management and cybersecurity. Delivering this across a platform is challenging given the ever-increasing number of attack surfaces.