M+E Daily
M&E Journal: The Media Warehouse Concept for Electronic Media Content Distribution
Story Highlights
By Steven Chester
Purchase of consumer media content is rapidly migrating from ownership of physical media (DVD/Blu-ray) to virtual media (files on disk/cloud storage, streaming media). This migration creates the opportunity for new business models which leverage technology innovations for centralized, cloud-based content packaging, storage, and distribution to provide significant benefits to content owners, distributors, retailers, and consumers. These benefits include lower distribution and production costs, simplified content workflows, enhanced security, faster title availability, and richer content management. This article will further describe the concept, and demonstrate how the Akamai Intelligent Platform is uniquely positioned to support it.
The media content distribution chain is in the midst of a strong market shift from physical media to online media consumption. IHS Screen Digest, a media focused research and consulting company, projects that U.S. online video views and transactions will exceed views and transactions of DVDs and Blu-ray Discs in 2012. 2012 unit growth of US online movie consumption is predicted to increase 143 percent over 2011, to 3.4B units, while sales and rentals of physical media (VHS, DVD, and Blu-ray) will fall over 7 percent, to 2.4B units. This trend will only continue, as Gartner research predicts that there will be more than 1 billion network-connected devices capable of consuming media by 2015.
The migration from physical to electronic consumer media (eMedia) promises many benefits to the entire distribution chain, from content producer to consumer. Overall costs can be reduced, content can be accelerated to market and consumers can realize the vision of anywhere/anytime viewing. However, there are a number of technical and business challenges to overcome in order to fully realize these benefits. In this article, we introduce the cloud-based “media warehouse” concept, walk through the various challenges that eMedia distribution presents, and show how the media warehouse can be used to address each of them.
