If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine how many words a video must be worth! Modern society has recognized the value of video. Witness the meteoric rise of YouTube, iTunes, Netflix, Facebook videos, Hulu, and other video viewing platforms.
As a content developer or distributor, to be successful in reaching all these viewers, you need to be able to transcode your media in a cost effective way for as many possible viewing situations as possible. The plethora of viewing platforms demands that your video be available in multiple file formats to fit each platform. Your media also needs to be optimized for bandwidth, be jitter free, have the right captions embedded and, in some locations, adhere to strict screen brightness restrictions. You also need to ensure it has the right audio, that it supports multiple languages…. and the list goes on. This essentially means you need to transform your source video into hundreds (sometimes thousands) of highly customized versions for each required format.
This type of video transcoding is a highly complex, computer intensive operation that requires a high degree of customization, options, and in many cases special hardware. How do you know when it makes sense to do invest in the hardware to do this work in house or to move it to a cloud-based transcoding solution?
Let’s outline a few cases where it makes sense to move to the cloud:
When in the Cloud, stay in the Cloud
More and more major corporations are migrating their enterprise applications to the cloud — applications like SalesForce, Expense Management, Travel Management, Inventory Control, and even some Financial Applications.
Additionally, many videos captured using these smart devices are typically stored in the cloud – for example, Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
When video is already being stored in the cloud, or when video content will ultimately be distributed via cloud and Internet services—such as Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), Over-the-Top (OTT) networks, social media platforms and Websites—it makes sense to migrate your video workflows to the cloud in order to streamline your workflow for maximum efficiency.
Having these essential tools in one place—in the cloud—makes it much more streamlined and efficient to generate the many on-the-fly renditions of video files needed for every cloud-based platform or venue.
CAPEX Model vs. OPEX Model
Cloud computing is nothing new to many industries, but for the video industry, it’s still a relatively new technology platform.
One advantage of setting up video transcoding in the cloud is that it offers highly scalable models so you can pay only for what you need. The other advantage is that you can almost instantaneously scale up your workflows according to your needs without investing upfront in capital required to build or expand on-premise video facilities.
Cloud-based video transcoding is an operating expense (OPEX) you incur when you need it. So, if your workload suddenly increases, you can easily burst to the cloud to handle the surge in demand and then stop paying when the volume subsides.
On the flip side, if you were to expand your on-premise facilities when you have a surge in demand, your payments would continue even when that costly capital equipment (CAPEX) just sits idle.
This makes for a compelling value proposition to implement an OPEX model for burst needs, and a CAPEX model on-premise for long term, predictable video processing demands.
Video cloud’s silver lining
While there’s been an on-going industry debate over whether it’s better to store and process video in the cloud versus keeping it on-premise, it doesn’t have to be an either-or proposition.
Combining an on-premise facility with a cloud transcoding solution—lets you move and manage large data files between the two locations seamlessly and flexibly. And by backing up premise-based video files—to cost-effectively store and process them—in the cloud, content owners have the security of knowing their valuable media archives are protected in the event that a natural disaster, like a fire or flood, strikes their facilities.
This is the vision behind Telestream and Telestream Cloud – to provide the options that make sense for our customers. To make it easy for you, you can automate your workflows & integrate your own applications with Telestream Cloud through our APIs. Or you can initiate your video processing via our Self-Service Web Portal.
Telestream Cloud at its core is a highly powerful encoding engine with all the bells and whistles needed to satisfy all the formats needed for consumption. It is easy and simple to use and can also be extended to handle highly complex video transformation workflows. The beauty of it is that it is priced by the output minute and is available as a SaaS offering, so there is no hardware or software to buy and manage!
For more information about Telestream Cloud or to try it free – visit our website.