By Jonathan Easton

The ongoing shift to cloud technology is being driven by an “explosion of content”, according to Synamedia Video Network CTO Nick Fielibert.

Speaking at an ANGA COM panel on digital acceleration, Fielibert spoke about the benefits of the cloud and how it can solve a number of issues facing the industry.

He said: “It is no secret that more and more content is available. In order to be able to manage that properly processing of that content is shifting to software. The next step is shifting that to containers and micro-services architecture.”

The exec added that “Content is being non-linearised by time-shifting it or recording it. That adds additional complexity, hence the importance of creating a simplified way of deploying our software.”

Highlighting the key trends facing the industry, Fielibert said that the increasing shift to OTT is seeing latency re-emerge as a major issue for live broadcasts, while also noting that “Cloudification is happening… a lot of playout systems have already moved to the cloud.”

The cloud, he said, promises a number of key benefits including  time to market, flexible scaling, optimised cost and instant global reach.

He did however note that considerations must be made on business agility, CAPEX vs OPEX, and the requirement of global reach, and that there are challenges surrounding cost of compute and storage, in- and egress, and availability SLA.

Fielibert concluded that “it’s all about flexibility” and admitted that some things make more sense on-premises than on the cloud. However, the exec ultimately surmised that operator’s must find the right partners to achieve their clearly defined goals.