Hard times clear way for cloud

At the Amsterdam-based event, Deluxe revealed that its cloud-based broadcast platform would launch before the end of the year, and Cinegy was its software partner.

Deluxe said the system had been designed to help content owners deploy digital strategies “at a dramatically lower cost of ownership”.

Prime Focus Technologies (PFT) used the Amsterdam show to announce plans for an international rollout of its Domain Centric Cloud (DCC) service, which is already in use in India.

PFT said it would help broadcasters with “costly, capitaln capital expenditure heavy, design and implementation projects” by providing services such as QC, transcoding and mastering.

“Last year, people were not ready in their mind for the cloud, because they can find it hard to accept that content will be away from their facility,” said Front Porch senior vice-president and international managing director Rino Petricola.

“The main difference this year is that they don’t want to invest large sums of money so they are more open to cloud-based services.”

Front Porch launched Lynx, a cloud-based disaster recovery service that provides a dashboard view of stored assets and allows content owners to download missing programmes or have duplicate tapes dispatched overnight.

“Disaster recovery is a good starting point, but the final step is for customers to place their content off site,” he said.

“The economic reasons are now so compelling that the media industry has to consider it,” added Francois Quereuil, director of marketing at file-transfer technology firm Aspera.