SaaS and different types of Cloud for Media & Entertainment

In our latest Technology article, Toni Vilalta, VSN’s Product Manager, talks about the newest technologies and the different options that Broadcasters have at their disposal for organizing their internal structures regarding Cloud for Media & Entertainment.

Migrating infrastructures and workflows to the Cloud opens up a huge range of offerings and service possibilities, with important savings in resources and low costs deployments and maintenances.

The three models of deployment are widely used nowadays, from the Private mode, in which all the structure is generated by the user, to the Public one, in which third companies take care of the Cloud network (for example, Microsoft, Google or Amazon), not to forget the Hybrid mode, that offer more customised options for each concrete case.

In the same way, and independently of the type of deployment, there are three services to develop on Cloud:

• IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service): A provider hosts all the hardware, software, servers, storage and other components of the infrastructure, and also takes care of the maintenance.
• PaaS (Platform as a Service): This category of cloud computing services allows for a platform that enables users to develop and launch Web Apps without the complexity of creating and keeping an owned infrastructure.
• SaaS (Software as a Service): This distribution model allows to offer software under licence with the payment of a fee. The software is stored in the cloud and users access it after paying with their browsers or through the Internet.

For companies operating in the Broadcast and M&E the third option, SaaS, is the most interesting to make their content reach audiences. This way, using Cloud technology, an audiovisual company could offer through the Internet a platform to enable access on demand to its content.

In this way, with a simple app or directly through a browser, audiences can connect to a Cloud platform to visualize its favourite content. All of that, with the advantages offered by the cloud: easy distribution, low deployment and maintenance costs, monetization by access, light structure and direct connection with users.

However, the other models, Iaas and PaaS, also offer attractive opportunities to broadcasters used to have a great IT team taking care of each one of the complex details that a technical installation poses. That way, being able to “rent” servers, virtualization, etc., allows broadcasters to focus on what they do best: create quality content.