“I’m sorry. We are no longer picking up at that location…”
What would happen if you awoke one morning and went to work only to be told that there would no longer be any parcel pickups? No more FedEx, no DHL, no U.S. Postal Service? No more bicycle couriers hurtling in and out of traffic with your precious content on 300 GB firewire drives strapped to their backpacks?
What if all you had was the network? Only THE NETWORK to send and receive, to move content between and among your organizations? If you only had THE NETWORK to share and move content and to communicate with your vendor partners what functionality would you need?
You’d have scheduling needs, scheduling conflicts; you’d have to prioritize what packages were more important than others. Heck, you’d have to place a value on those transmissions and you’d need a way to respond to demands of how fast content had to arrive at a destination. You’d be concerned about security and you’d benefit from certified delivery– being able to prove that IT was sent and IT was received.
You’d want to determine and dictate how much of THE NETWORK you’d assign to move a specific digital package to its various destinations. And, naturally, you’d want to get it there despite high capacity but highly latent network connectivity.
Your digital media distribution network would have to operate 24/7 and as far and as wide as you do business– across border, country, continent. Across the street, across the world.
You’d want to determine how your PROCESSES– your WORKFLOWS– could be better automated because, after all, it hardly seems like we’re progressing if we’re still calling up someone and saying:
“Hey, are you finished cutting it? I have to kick-off an encode and then I have to get them out to NY, LA, New Zealand, and Singapore. And why the HELL do I have to BABYSIT this stuff? I haven’t seen my kids all week!”
Well, we can already see what new distribution requirements and increased time pressures to deliver are requiring of the media and entertainment industry. Why all the buzz about FILE-BASED WORKFLOWS in the first place? Because, clearly the displacement of video signal routing by data movement is upon us. It’s everywhere.
When reality shows shoot 50-60 hours PER DAY using multiple cameras on, say, XDCAM, all that matters is that footage can be transferred to a SAN as fast as possible so that editors can start working on it immediately. Because there are two things that are sure in this life: One: there’s no more time for real-time digitizing and the footage is just going to keep coming, and coming, and coming.
“A frame is a file,” says the industry. “And we have to be able to manage the movement of these files on THE NETWORK. We’re going to acquire digitally, we’re going to post digitally, and we’re going to distribute digitally.”
And in each of those stages, there are cyclical processes and more and more people who have to touch the content.
To remain competitive, to address the accelerated time to market, reduced post-production time, and to feed the multiple content types for multiple distribution destinations, files, data-centric workflows, and centrally managed file distribution are key initiatives for the media and entertainment industry.
Because, yes, we will wake up one day, go to work, and find that THE NETWORK is our lifeline….
