We want to make it easier for people in media to leverage the cloud for their work, says AWS’ Shweta Jain

How is AWS helping the media and entertainment companies in India and what services are you providing in this space?
We have 200 plus services, and out of that, nine are specifically built for M&E, including services like AWS Elemental.

We also are investing hugely to build solutions for the media industry, targeting some very common use cases like live streaming, building an on-demand video platform, or running artificial intelligence workloads in the cloud to do automated meta tagging and subtitling. What we’ve done is work closely with our hundreds of media customers to identify most common use cases and build solutions for them. Today, we have 11 AWS Solutions, dedicated AWS appliances, and more than 400 AWS Partners. All these services and partner solutions are really targeted at five different industry workload areas, starting from content production to media supply chain and archiving, broadcasting, which includes linear broadcast, direct to consumer and streaming platforms, and data science and analytics, which includes the use of AI and ML services, to not only enhance the efficiencies in the system but also do a lot of real time analytics for OTT platforms.

The idea is to simplify how content creators, rights holders, producers, broadcasters, distributors, and all the stakeholders in the media ecosystem can leverage the cloud today to build, deploy, and reinvent the workloads across areas. We are trying to make it extremely easy for them to be able to select the right tools and partner solutions for their workloads and achieve faster time to market for their products.

If a traditional broadcast company starts using the cloud, what kind of synergies can they draw or what kind of savings can they have using AWS?

If you look at how companies in general end up moving to the cloud, it is almost always due to cost. What we, at AWS, do is really allow our customers trade the capital expense for variable expense and pay for only the IT that they are consuming. Paying for only the resources that they are using is really the beauty of the pay as you use model of the cloud. Even then, the variable expense is much lower than what customers can do for themselves, because of the economies of scale that AWS has.

Discovery, for instance, delivers over 8000 hours of original programming in 50 plus languages, globally to 220 current countries and territories. That’s the scale they operate at. Previously, they used to manage several full-scale data centers for their global channel playout, and in 2016, they started their journey with AWS, because they realised that maintaining and building these data centers was very expensive. They had to make huge capital investment upfront in servers, and of course, make a lot more investments whenever they needed to scale up or add a new service. In 2016, they started moving out of on-premises data centers to AWS Cloud. Today, they have more than 400 channel feeds, including 48 channels here in APAC, which are originating on AWS. This has led to over 61% savings in their linear playout infrastructure and has also cut their time to launch new services by 50%. So, like I said, it starts with cost, but the benefits are much more than that.

Another example, from closer home in India is Qube Cinema, a global theatrical distribution platform. They distribute a lot of movies like Bahubali, for example. Qube Cinema has built a global theatrical distribution on AWS called Qube Wire and now they send movie files digitally using the AWS Cloud, from distributors to theaters in 133 countries. They have seen a substantial decrease in the cost, as high as 80%, in storing and archiving movies on AWS because these movies have very huge file sizes of around 150 GB. This industry has such huge storage requirements, considering that most movies are archived for dozens of years, if not forever. I can give you a specific number as well here that for each movie file that they transfer, using AWS, they save about $125 as compared to physical hard drive or other packaging that they were using, in addition to the shipping cost. So, for every single file, they’re saving $125, which is huge implication for a large distributor.

When it comes to data security, what all checks and balances do you have in place?

Security is job zero for us. We are committed to providing security for our customers, across all our services and infrastructure. We also work along with the customer because it’s a joint responsibility to some extent. We are very vigilant about customers’ privacy and security and in fact, we work with so many government organisations who trust us with very sensitive content, and they expect nothing but the best or the most extensive set of securities and services from us.

AWS is also compliant to content security best practices established by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and works with third-party auditors (such as Independent Security Evaluators ISE) to assess AWS content security controls and build reference templates of AWS security controls for content production workloads including rendering workloads for content creation and media asset management and archive in the cloud.

Coming to video streaming platforms, what kind of partnerships do you have in India?

There is so much data and so many reports that talk about how digital media consumption has really picked up in the last few years. Media companies have the option of choosing any cloud provider and we believe that they are choosing AWS as their preferred cloud provider. I say that because today in India, you talk about the top OTT platforms, like Disney+Hotstar, SonyLIV, AltBalaji, Zee 5, Dish TV’s Watcho platform – most of these platforms run on AWS.

We believe that they are choosing us as their preferred cloud provider because of four factors. First is the comprehensive selection of these purpose-built media services and solutions, including our AWS Elemental services. The second factor is the pace of innovation. Third, is a broad community of hundreds of media customers and partners that we have. And finally, the fourth one, which matters a lot while companies go about choosing their cloud partner, is the proven experience that we have in supporting some of the world’s largest media companies be it Disney or Discovery, or even born in the cloud media companies like Netflix or Hulu.

Specifically in India, Zee5, Zee’s OTT platform is built on AWS. They have been working very closely with us in the last few years to enhance their video monetisation by inserting millions of ads in there live and video on demand (VOD) content without sacrificing the broadcast level quality of service. They use our server-side ad insertion service called AWS Elemental MediaTailor to deliver millions of ads every month, on their live and on demand content which can also be personalized to viewers. They deliver 80 plus channels to their viewers and hundreds of hours of videos on demand using AWS Elemental.

We have seen that not all the OTT players are using a single tech partner. Any particular reason?

Most of the OTT platforms today have a multi CDN strategy and we work backwards from what the customer’s need is. They have to ensure that they are able to scale up to provide their service in the times when there are huge influxes of audience like for example, during IPL matches. Hence almost every OTT provider we work with has a multi CDN strategy.

How do you see the demand and the consumption growing now that things are coming back to normal for the next, say 12 to 18 months?

We are here to support our customers as they launch their new products and scale up. We have been investing hugely into our infrastructure and we have been doing all the investments needed to support our customers. Specifically, there are lots of reports out there from different providers that talk about that how OTT is going to grow a lot in India, as well as globally.