Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro might have hit the meatball on the head when he forecast in a recent blog that the future is Cloudy with a Chance of Cloud.
The company's customers have changed the conversation from moving administrative functions to the cloud to wondering how and when video delivery as a whole will move to the cloud. Munro says this switch is being driven by several factors: video content and creation workflows becoming cloud based; the scalability of adaptive bitrate (ABR) systems; and a change in long-term subscriber behavior that may put pressure on capital expenditures.
More reliance on the cloud means decreased dependence on operator-owned set-top boxes and more retail devices.
"The cloud transition has been prepped for a long time," Munro said. "A number of our operator customers have (put) all or some of the work flow in the cloud. We have seen the beginnings of the transition. What has changed is the mindset of how quickly they move and how much they move."
Hand in hand with this transition is the request for software-based renewable security and secure analytics, Munro said.
"The implementation (of analytics) gets easier in the cloud. Data doesn't have a single use," Munro said.
Operators are using data to improve or optimize physical delivery, measure quality of service, make changes to content delivery network (CDN) configurations, etc. Across platforms, data can be collected on who watched what, on what device, who stored it, who skipped ads, for example. Operators can use this information internally to make changes to the recommendation engine, make ad insertion decisions, price ads differently, and look at data comparatively across time. But the other possibility is to compare data with that of another operator in a different region.
"Being able to put data in a collective set to see comprehensively could be beneficial to content owners or advertisers," Munro said.
Verimatrix's analytics platform is cloud native and the security platform is ready to be, but the company hasn't had the requirement yet for a multitenant hosted system, Munro said. Single-tenant systems are cloud capable, but future development incorporates a common platform that will benefit from streamlined workflow in the cloud. Content owners create content and store it in the cloud.
"There is a huge benefit in terms of labor and equipment and workflow friction streamlined out of the process," Munro said.
