Entertainment in the Cloud!

Entertainment industry is one of the hottest industries where millions are made & lost...Why should it not adopt to the latest & the greatest technologies? So there you go! This industry is rapidly adopting the Cloud Services in many many ways...When you are in a movie theater, you may not realize that so much of IT is needed to produce a single movie. Or for that matter, the computer / phone games that you play..have you ever stopped to think what is involved in creating a game? Oh yes, you guessed it right. A lot of hard work coupled with some serious piece of IT components including machines, software, hosted platforms and yes, Cloud Services!

So you would have a question as to how are Cloud Services related to the Entertainment Industry?

In fact, Cloud is the way to go for this industry, right from Content creation, to content processing (encoding / transcoding), to content delivery via streaming video and content management, storage for the huge media files, raw processing power provided by extensible resources on the cloud and the list goes on. 

Sony's "Music Unlimited by Qriocity" service on the Cloud, is being extended to France, Germany, Spain and Italy that is a subscription based service to enable fans to access music on their digital devices. This cloud service acts as a "locker" for a subscriber's own music collection so that they can access their music on different devices.

Apple has signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and is very near to completing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. One of the core features of a cloud music service is enabling consumers to store their songs on a company's servers. They can then access their libraries from Web-connected devices.

DreamWorks, one of the top movie studios in the world has signed up a multi-year deal with a Cloud Service provider that will allow DreamWorks to render computer animated films using elastic computing resources. Elastic cloud computing allows users to adjust computing capacity to meet their real-time needs.

You would be surprised to know that even the Adult Entertainment industry has taken a massive leap into the cloud by providing storage and playback of movies and video clips using a locker concept on their cloud servers!

Gaming on Demand, that delivers the latest high-end gaming titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macintosh® computers, is another cloud based service that is now making a ton of money. There are many players in this space and the number keeps growing everyday. OnLive is one of the biggest players in this segment competing directly with Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft's of this world! Other providers include Gaikai.com,Spoon.net and a whole bunch of others!

More and more people are getting rid of their cable service or their satellite services and moving to content on demand for their television, movies, games.  Music, movies and eBooks are all being delivered over the web to any number of platforms.  The Cloud makes this possible and should be an integral part of the Entertainment industry's strategy! 
Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more