As the techies from the TV industry return from Amsterdam
and their annual trade show, IBC, their colleagues responsible for trying to
commercialise the programmes produced are gearing up to venture down to Cannes
and the annual MIPCOM sales fair.
Nothing has really changed very much for decades. Well,
apart from one thing: the format of the products that they produce and sell.
What used to reside in film cans, on one inch, BetaSP and
digiBeta tapes is now a digital file.
This brings with it both problems and opportunities.
The main problem is how to store this vast amount of data.
The main opportunity is in opening up new markets for
content in the form of clips, programmes, formats and channels or feeds.
These are not unrelated. However, the industry cannot see
its way past the problem since the cost of storing master content in the cloud
is significantly more expensive than that of storing tapes.
Or is it ?
The trouble is that the calculation is made based on the TV
world we used to live in, not the one that we will inhabit.
Most production and post production companies employ a lot
of people. Almost all other industries have seen a huge decrease in employees
due to the introduction of technology, with massive productivity and cost
savings. Everything from milk to car production.
Currently, most production companies are using a variety of
strategies to deal with the issue of digital file storage:
Using an online/nearline/offline strategy using networks,
NAS (network attached storage) and LTO (yes, the irony of it, the content ends
up back on tape). But the cost of buying deploying and operating an LTO is
considerable.
Buying cheap HDDs (hard disk drives) and hoping for the
best: these consumer devices are mechanical and easily break, rendering a six
figure shoot or production lost forever. The time to manage, index and duplicate
them is considerable.
Here is a table that some might find controversial, but it
levels the cost of redundancy and management alongside actual storage costs:
|
5
TB Video Storage Costs Over 2 Years
|
|||||||||
|
Base storage Cost
|
Redundant Storage Cost
|
Time Management Cost
|
Total Cost
|
||||||
|
Attached
HDDs
|
£500
|
£1,500
|
£3,000
|
£4,500
|
|||||
|
Nearline
Storage
|
£1,175
|
£2,350
|
£30,000
|
£32,350
|
|||||
|
Cloud
Storage
|
£3,600
|
£200
|
£3,800
|
||||||
But there are other factors at play. Here’s a crude analysis
of the different features of these approaches:
|
5
TB Video Storage Comparison
|
|||||||||
|
Accessibility
|
Security
|
Redundancy
|
Opportunities
|
||||||
|
Attached
HDDs
|
2
|
4
|
5
|
2
|
|||||
|
Nearline
Storage
|
5
|
8
|
8
|
2
|
|||||
|
Cloud
Storage
|
10
|
6
|
8
|
6
|
|||||
Obviously, content held on HDDs or nearline has no
accessibility to show and sell. On HDDs unless there is a very disciplined (and
expensive in terms of manpower) approach to logging the content could be
difficult to find, causing additional costs in the edit suite down the line.
You can add other benefits such as automated QA, automated
technical metadata and full metadata management to the cloud proposition.
So the industry needs to take a long, hard look at how it
operates and what it needs to do moving forward: I’m afraid that IBC and MIPCOM
may becoming echoes of the past.