The Cloud Keeps Getting Better for Media and Entertainment

Earlier this year at NAB 2019, Wasabi announced the formation of the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance, a coalition of best-of-breed, cloud-enabled media processing companies that together offer an alternative to the siloed media offerings of providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google. The reaction to this alliance has been overwhelmingly positive.

This Alliance enables media producers to affordably leverage independent, next-generation cloud services as an alternative to monolithic first-generation cloud stacks. Services offered by the Alliance span the media lifecycle from content transfer and ingest, to editing and transformation, to playback and delivery, to archiving and library management.

MovieLabs, the non-profit technology research lab run by the major Hollywood studios, recently published a milestone white paper presenting a vision for the future of media creation. In the paper, MovieLabs paints a clear picture that cloud services will serve as the home for future media production. MovieLab’s vision of cloud-based production workflows leveraging best-of-breed technology solutions aligns with the mission of the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance.

A key tenet of the alliance is the elimination, or reduction, of data transfer or egress fees to move media assets from one partner cloud to another. These egress fees, which are charged by all the hyperscale cloud providers, serve as an onerous tax when pulling media from any of their clouds and to date have limited multi-cloud workflows. Wasabi pioneered the concept of  “no charge for data egress”, allowing producers to easily move their media in and out of Wasabi hot cloud storage without penalty to take advantage of the best cloud media processing services for any given project. 

Now the alliance continues to grow and we are pleased to announce the following new members who have joined the alliance.

• Dalet (Media Asset Management, Production Orchestration and Content Supply Chain solutions))
• eMAM (Media Asset Management, Production Orchestration) 
• Facilis (Shared Storage Systems for Video Editing)
• GrayMeta (Metadata Solutions)
• LucidLink (High Performance File System for Object Storage) 
• Ortana (Media Asset Management, Production Orchestration) 
• Scalar (Managed Production Services)

Here is what our new Media Innovation Cloud Alliance members are saying:

Dalet

“Dalet is a recognized leader in orchestrating complex media workflows for multiple verticals including news, sports, programs, post-production, radio, enterprise and more. Our platforms are agile and modular to leverage the best tools for the project at hand. The recently acquired Ooyala Flex Media Platform utilizes open APIs to integrate with services such as those offered by the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance.” – Bea Alonso, Director of Product Marketing, Dalet

eMAM

“Our vision for providing choice and outstanding value for customers fits with the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance. Wasabi brings the power and flexibility of the cloud to customers with transparent pricing, so organizations can understand their total cost of ownership. Increasing file sizes and volumes make the cloud compelling but organizations need predictable pricing.” – David Miller, Founder, eMAM

LucidLink

“At LucidLink, we created a high-performance cloud-native file system on top of object storage optimized to perform over distance like a local disk. Combined with Wasabi, LucidLink enables distributed production teams to collaborate on data, editing projects in the cloud.  We are committed to the vision of MICA where production workloads can be stored securely and cost-effectively in the cloud and rapidly accessed without friction or added expense.”  – Peter Thompson, CEO, LucidLink

Ortana

“Ortana believes that technology should always wrap around you, not the other way round. The ability to choose technology that fits exactly your needs today, and that can adapt and scale as your needs change tomorrow is an absolute. This is the ethos behind Cubix – both as a platform and as a service – and our ability to offer every step in-between. Working with partners who understand this need to be disruptive to the traditional methods is why we fully support the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance. A collective of likeminded vendors with a clear mission to give clients access the best tools and processes available to maximise their efficiency and creativity.” – James Gibson, CEO & Founder, Ortana

Scalar

“The clients for Scalar’s StudioCloud animation & VFX rendering services face the ongoing challenge of staggering data growth and need unencumbered access to high-performance cloud storage, like Wasabi. We look forward to working with the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance and being a part of the collaboration over vast geographical areas and enabling an expanded production pipeline.” – Paul Kerr, President & CEO, Scalar, A CDW Company

Founding Media Innovation Cloud Alliance partners include:

• Archiware (backup and archive)
• Cinnafilm (transcoding and image processing),
• Cloudfirst.io (archive migration and storage orchestration)
• FileCatalyst (file acceleration)
• Integrated Media Technologies – IMT (systems integration)
• Levels Beyond (media production orchestration)
• Masstech (content archive & storage management)
• Marquis (disaster recovery, backup, archive, in-cloud project versioning),
• Packet (compute)
• Primestream (media asset management)
• Sohonet (media network) 
• Versity (large archive data management)
• Wasabi (storage)
• XenData (active archive)

Service providers with a commitment to flexibility, efficiency and transparency are welcome to join the Media Innovation Cloud Alliance.