Media Dojo

Archive for the ‘Cloudinomics’ Category

What day is it?

Summer is quickly drawing to Labor Day and I’ve hardly looked up from the screen, either at home or on a plane, in which I’ve spent a fair chunk of the summer. I’ve not been posting because I’m in the midst of helping one of the top three media companies put together a big-assed proposal for a media services cloud (soup, nuts, everything). We’re racing to a mid-September deadline. Then, like all things corporate, we wait.

I’ll pass the time by writing a report on the media business in the cloud for GigaOm and get back to more regular posting and interviews.

Also, I’m going back to Monaco this November for the Monaco Media Forum in order to do a main stage panel on Media and the Cloud. It will be almost evenly divided between media players and cloud players…will provide more detail as we get closer.

In the meantime, I appreciate the patience and will be serving up a lot more tidbits once kids get back in school.

Last week, I went to San Francisco to be a part of GigaOm’s Structure conference. One of the best cloud events by far, Structure gave me an opportunity to sit down with Michael Crandell, the CEO of RightScale. For media players trying to wrap their head around cloud computing, the cloud management space RightScale leads is destined to become one of their first ports of call. It’s not simply a case that a media company needs a control panel for spinning up or shutting down servers. The bigger play hands down involves how to use a cloud management offer as the vehicle that carries a project from sketched on a napkin to hard-core deployment and operations without needing to change a lot of the fundamental plumbing. Bob highlighted some of the work RightScale does with media properties like ESPN and Zynga. As always, you can check the Media Dojo Tear Sheet–RightScale

Media Dojo : Please describe RightScale and the problem it solves

Michael Crandell: RightScale is a cloud management platform that lives on top of an infrastructure as a service cloud. The big problem we solve is allowing companies to get quick access to cloud infrastructure, namely fast provisioning, pay-as-you-go and dynamic workloads. It’s an entire cradle-to-grave environment for delivering cloud-based IT resources. RightScale itself is a SaaS platform that’s a web-based management system. From there, you get a portal if you will into all of your data center resources regardless of where they are, whether they are in the same public cloud, different public clouds and regions, private clouds or hybrids.

MD: How does that play out in practice?

MC: It’s everything from an operational dashboard that gives you real time information around lower level things like monitoring and alerts to a whole tracking and auditing function, which is critical in a cloud environment. In a world where resources come and go, people need to know “what happened on that server that was running last Monday and it’s gone now—and everything about it is gone.” The server may have been part of a cluster of 700 servers that launched to complete a huge batch job or a grid job. It may have been running in a transient, scalable app front end. Now it’s gone. So you need to be able to go back and look at log data. We also track cost data along with the operational stuff. We can cut it any number of ways depending on the goals of the customer. There’s a metering function within RightScale. Related to operations and cost functions, there is a whole set of tools to establish user roles and privileges. You don’t want everybody to be able to push the Big Red Switch that literally stops all servers. There needs to have a high level of admin access.

MD: That’s fine for the cost side of the ledger. What about the revenue side?

MC: There’s also the area of design and architecture. We have IP around a concept we call server templates. These are innovations on the idea of machine images that allow dynamic configuration of boot time servers so they can adopt their role effectively, whether you’re adding another app front end, load balancer, database slave etc. As that server is booting up, it can find out via the server template and RightScale that it’s part of a given load balanced array of web front ends, for example. The server knows where the other front ends are. It knows where the load balancer to register with is located. It knows where is the database that it’s talking to. All of that is set in a template. The configuration is predictable with the variable information being fed in at launch time.

MD: Let’s switch gears to talk about how you work with the media industry..

MC: We work with a variety of media clients like ESPN with their fan profile site during March Madness as well as Sony Music, which uses RightScale to power their artists fan sites all the way to e-commerce. We also work with Sling Media, which uses RightScale to do a lot of back end transcoding so that a slingbox can handle most anything you throw at it. Sling Media’s problem is that they have all this content coming in from publishing partners that needs to be prepped on-the-fly for a variety of devices ranging from a phone to a big screen TV with different resolutions and codings. That’s a big back-end grid transcoding operation. In the music space, we do a similar kind of job with Tunecore. Then there are the social apps and games, Facebook type stuff.

MD: What do you see really pushing the cloud in the media space?

MC: We see a couple of things. In the gaming space, the console games are now heavily networked, which means there’s a big cloud component anyway. Aside from enabling MMORGS, another important aspect is that games are increasingly being played on lightweight front-ends (browsers and phones). Asia is leading this push not only because of high end phones and networks but also because on average, the discretionary spend once you get out of Japan, Korea, urban China is often lower than what you find in North America and Western Europe. So you might end up spending $3-4 hard currency to go to an Internet café and purchase some Zynga bucks to play whatever game. Those are almost entirely cloud based, resource intensive and are driving a lot of adoption and innovation as the demand scales. Last time I checked, RightScale powers the top ten Facebook apps that aren’t published by Facebook itself.

MD: Last question, looking out 12 months, what are you seeing driving the bus for cloud computing and media?

MC: What’s becoming a reality are hybrid clouds. We started day one with running solely on AWS. More public clouds then came on line as well as low level cloud management software like Eucalyptus, Cloud.com, VMware,etc. It’s now possible to organize your own internal data center resources under the cloud model. From our POV, that’s about more choice for the customer. We’ve been doing a lot of work on the private cloud side. Doesn’t mean you repeal the laws of physics. You’re not going to have your database in Philly and your web tier in Austin or Seattle. But you might want to have a disaster recovery footprint on a separate power grid in another part of the country. In the media industry, I think there will be a lot more streaming simply because the competitive thrust will be about getting media to the customer however, whenever they want it. People will also own copies of their content. Bandwidth has become fast enough to make that a reality. The cloud will be more important for powering that. Never forget, the lighter weight the device you’re using, the more that power needs to be somewhere like the cloud.

I’ve been submerged the past few weeks for both personal and professional reasons. On the personal side, we’re selling my 89 year old mother’s house, which has 45 years worth of stuff crammed into it. For those of you who’ve walked in those shoes, you feel the pain.

Professionally, I’ve started a consulting project with the senior operations people at one of the top five global media companies. You love their music, movies and plug in their consumer electronics—get the drift? I can’t give a lot of specific detail for NDA reasons. But it’s no great secret that the physical supply chains for media (eg. from a master file to a CD/DVD sitting on the shelf at Wal-Mart) are undergoing profound change.  I don’t think there’s a clean flip from all physical to all digital production and distribution of media. People still like to own *stuff* at the end of the day.

That said, the transition to a new media supply model has cloud computing written all over it. Go ahead and Google “Digital Supply Chain” to see why. The number of linkages between finished and semi-finished media goods, co-mingled professional and user-generated content, commerce and community functions suggests that the cloud just might be the only institution capable of taming that kind of complexity. There’s definitely no lack of challenge here.

I’ll document some lessons learned in a couple of months.

Mike Dano, Managing Editor of FierceMarkets Wireless Group, interviewed me and others about mobile cloud computing. It’s a good overview of the current state of play.

http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/cloud-computing-quiet-requirement-mobile/2010-05-04

I’ve been sketching an outline for my next report for GigaOm Pro on cloud computing and consumer media. I’ll give a head’s up on the final version when it’s done late this month or early this month. So this thinking is still raw.

My nose tells me that the recent tiffs between Apple/FLASH, Google TV/CATV, Facebook/everyone else is indicative of a larger trend. It seems like the professional media industry is starting to say, “we’ve given this information wants to be free stuff a good 15 year run on the web. To show for it, we’ve been gutted. Going forward, we’d rather cut a deal with a Cupertino/Mountain View/Redmond devil and get a slice of a real pie.” I know this doesn’t sit well with the John Perry Barlow crowd. But then again, he had made his money being chef to the Grateful Dead before he got all cyber libertarian.

Being a media snob, I’ve been looking hard to find the multi-billion $ media content company that launched on the web. I’m still waiting. The market cap went to technology and aggregation plays, not a new media experience. To a large degree, it’s the incumbent media industry’s fault. Jeff Jarvis is tedious with his standard schtick about old media’s problems. But it doesn’t make him any less wrong. The fact is that the revolution came and instead of devouring its young, it feasted on print publishing and music. It’s licking its chops over video. That’s been the steady cycle for 15 years.

But going forward, there’s not a hell of a lot of analog transmutation left. Either the media industry (however owned) needs to start working the revenue side of the ledger with truly new experiences in storytelling, or it can continue feeding off the corpse of the old world and cede the ground to the Googles of the world entirely.

Enter cloud computing. Sure, the initial advantage rests with the technologists and device guys. But the difference this time is that the same technology DOES allow a media content start-up to scale linearly should it manage to capture lightning in a bottle. The first green shoots are being found in transmedia properties, especially the next generation ones like we’re seeing with my friend Brent Friedman’s Valemont franchise. Brent doesn’t base his business anymore just on selling copies of the story or restricting access to it. The story has become a world in which the audience can dwell and participate; a world that provides multiple avenues for monetization; and a world in which competitive advantage involves how fast and how well Brent or his users can customize the experience at the margin. Mass customization trumps mass distribution in this scenario.

This tells me that control over the *context* of a media experience is becoming more important than control over the media itself. The range of devices, situations (e.g. location awareness), and business models has bumped complexity to a level to where a cloud-based platform would be the only one flexible and scalable enough to handle it. Fundamentally, the cloud makes media itself more intelligent. In a hard media (e.g. CD/DVD) or standard web (non-mobile, non-social) world, the media player and UI was all you needed because the media was stupid. All it needed to do was PLAY. Now, media must integrate with social identity, physical location, a preferred device, a specific service plan and a configurable bundle of rights for the consumer.

It’s a switch from a ROM-based media world to a RAM-based media world. That makes RUN the most important command.

That’s today’s take. As I dig deeper and start interviewing people to create this research, I’ll no doubt do some ADD/DROP to the meme. Naturally, comments/suggestions/pointers are most appreciated.

Flying out tomorrow for Osaka and Kyoto. Kids are old enough now to where they need to see cousins and get in touch with their other culture.

In the meantime, I’ve started the next piece of research, which will look at how we build APIs into branded content franchises and where the cloud might fit in. I spent the morning with Brent Friedman, founder of Electric Farm Entertainment. His latest transmedia series Valemont has been running live on MTV for some months now. It’s pulled in serious backing through Verizon and others. I can’t go into a lot of the data stats just yet but the upshot is that the Internet and, by extension, the cloud have become the ultimate IP incubators for storytelling.

We did a 2hr brain dump for notes for my flight. Should get a shorter piece out during the May/June timeframe. Contact me if you’ve got any pointers related to transmedia and the cloud.

I know you’ve read ad nauseum about the upcoming Guide to Cloud Computing for Media People. Well, scratch the “upcoming” part.  It’s done and dusted. Time to let loose an excerpt of the demon child that’s ruled my free time (what little there is) since November.

Media Dojo Cloud Computing Guide Excerpt

This excerpt is about 1/4 of a 60+ page whitepaper. The Preface, Foreward and Table of Contents should give you a decent map of the work.

I’m releasing this under Creative Commons to spark a conversation in the technology, media and marketing industries about cloud computing—the good, the bad and the ugly. That said, I’m not just throwing this thing out in the wild. If you’re interested in the full version, you need to send me an email to get a conversation started.

john.gauntt <AT> media-dojo.com

My goal with this work is to launch a new think tank focusing on the intersection of media, technology and marketing. I need all the help I can get.

This year’s U.S. Open Tennis men’s final saw Juan Martin del Potro stun number 1 ranked Roger Federer in a four hour, five set drama. Potro’s first victory in a major tournament denied Federer a sixth consecutive U.S. Open title and provided tennis fans one of the most riveting finishes in recent memory. Aside from the buzz courtside and on television, the 2009 U.S. Open also broke new ground for live video streaming. Here are a few stats from the 2009 tournament which went from August 31 until September 13:

Live Match Streaming on USOpen.org:

• There were nearly 14 million (13,891,115) activated streams on USOpen.org.
• More than 2.5 million hours of live streaming were viewed (2,531,236 hours).
• 157 matches were streamed live.
• The interactive media console to access live streaming was launched 3.8 million times over the course of the tournament.
• The average length of stay on the media console was two hours and forty-five minutes.

While the 300 hours total video content of the 2009 U.S. Open tournament doesn’t match the 2200 hours of online video content connected with the 2008 Beijing Games, the U.S. Open tournament is among the single sport leaders in online video streaming. Behind the scenes, there was a clutch of online video companies that brought everything together. I spoke recently with Darcy Lorincz, CEO of Origin Digital about the U.S. Open as well as how they’re using Microsoft Azure to support their video encoding/transcoding efforts. For more info on Origin Digital, check out the Media Dojo Tear Sheet.

Media Dojo: First, let’s start off with the DNA of the company

Darcy Lorincz: We’ve been in the business of media processing for over a decade. The original company was started in 97 and called Live On Line. We spun out Origin Digital in October 2006 and were acquired by Accenture in May 2008. Where we concentrate is in encoding and transcoding, heavy lifting of video, audio and image assets. We started out like most video companies by racking and stacking boxes against customer workflows. Historically in the encoding and transcoding business, you put a box against a job and when the job is over you wonder where it’s going to be used next.

MD: Is that how you got into cloud computing?

DL: Well, it was a little more complicated. The whole game here is efficiency—in the hardware, in the workflow, in the delivery, in the people. At the first level of efficiency, you’re mainly talking about automating how you ingest video content and assign resources against it. So we built an automation layer that helped us get away from a lot of the bespoke operating systems for all the devices we needed to support. After you automate how you take in video content as a file or as physical media, the next level up is virtualizing the resources. This gave us the ability to load more customer jobs onto the same machines to boost utilization from the typical 10-20% level all the way to nearly 60% before we brought in more resources. Cloud computing is the third layer up in which we’re now bringing elastic resources into our data centers. When the automation layer detects that we’re running close to our internal capacity, it starts pulling compute resources directly from Azure depending on the specs of a given customer job. It might be that if a customer service level agreement (SLA) states that we’ve got to encode a job for X number of formats within a hour, we might spin up 200-300 Azure instances to crunch it in parallel. If the SLA says we’ve got 10 hours to do the same job, we’ll spin up 20-30 to run longer. But the beauty of cloud computing in general is that ability to dimension resources against a business relationship more than a technology constraint.

MD: What about the U.S. Open tournament?

DL: Two years ago, most broadcasters only cared about linear programming of video to your television. They still care about that but now want to guarantee what happens on your second and third screens because there are viable options for them to monetize their media in all of those mediums now. It’s real dollars now not funny money. So they need to figure how to scale that, how to maintain quality. Live events like the U.S. Open are a massive issue because you have these huge spikes in interest and activity. With typical professional sporting events, you might get 1-2m online and mobile viewers showing up. We had 13 million digital viewers over the course of two weeks with this tournament.

MD: You mentioned mobile video a couple of times. How big is that getting? Where do you see it going?

DL: 2009 has definitely been a huge growth year for mobile video. I don’t have exact stats but it’s been at least 10 fold growth from 2008 for sure. From a pure bit traffic POV, mobile growth doesn’t compare to online video. But it’s arguably more significant because mobile video is growing so fast from a base where we never saw that kind of consumption before. Mobile growth isn’t simply smarter devices. It’s also smarter consumers. Additionally, content owners are a lot more savvy about the mobile medium perhaps because of some lessons learned in online video beforehand. So they’re presenting you with content that’s optimized for mobile as opposed to content that’s been shrinkwrapped for mobile. It’s becoming a one click experience rather than the consumer needing to hack through various carrier decks to find something.

MD: Last question. Where is the opportunity going forward in online video in terms of new customers and new money?

DL: It’s true that we started mainly in the media & entertainment vertical. However, M&E isn’t where the majority of opportunity is today. The real opportunity is in enterprises using video as a storytelling medium for their internal and external corporate communications. Our customer base are the Fortune 500 companies. Video evolution is a big issue in that market. How does the marketing department, HR and other corporate arms use the new medium to create a more interactive experience for their constituents whether they are employees, partners in the value chain or even consumers? While enterprise customers need to be sophisticated in creating and positioning their messages, they shouldn’t need to worry about distribution. So we see our position and advantage with cloud computing as being able to put resources against that massive need. Enterprise clients can dump their video into our automation system and it just gets published and distributed where it needs to go in all the formats and bit rates that the people on the other end need to have. In that sense, we’re like a head end for enterprise video.

Chances are the next killing in media and marketing will be hosted on a computing cloud.

This sudden, explosive value creation in media probably won’t advance the state of cloud technology one jot. More likely, successful media innovators will identify some powerful yet unarticulated human hunger for a new type of entertainment, learning, communication and community. They will use cloud computing to serve that need.

All this talk about unarticulated needs sounds theoretical, right?

Climb into your time machine and go back to 1995 to ask people about their online search habits. You might find 10 people at a UNIX conference who could give you a decent answer. Good luck finding anyone who cared about search in the studios or advertising agencies in Hollywood, London or Madison Avenue.

Fast forward five years to 2000. Internet hype is deafening. The money is gushing. New companies bloom like algae. Search has become important. But the search market is largely locked up by Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite and especially Yahoo!  And besides, everyone knows that push technology is the next big thing.

Fire up your time machine again and travel to 2005. What a rocky ride you took through stock market implosions, terrorism, war, and the meteor strike of Google’s IPO. The 1990s are a sepia toned memory. But the search market is well established. We have a currency. We know digital is the future. And we know that bidding on keywords will get us to that future.

It must be time for social networks, mobile Internet and the real-time web to emerge to scramble our assumptions yet again.

Make no mistake. The future has NEVER been a smooth march to the upper right corner of the graph.

Futures lurch.

When the future lurches in a different direction, market analysts and executives quickly gravitate to either the utopian or curmudgeon schools of thought. Both camps try to connect the dots to the future based on an extension of today’s features and functions. Worse, both schools assume that future businesses will be based on meeting today’s needs faster, better, and cheaper. Sure, you can make money doing that. You might even get rich.

But you won’t make a killing.

To do that, you’ve got to radically upset the prevailing balance of productivity and investment in a given industry. Before electricity came into the workplace, 19^th century manufacturing productivity largely tracked investment in steam power and machinery. But a 20^th century capitalist using new ways to organize work around electricity and electric machinery could realize huge efficiency gains without making a near equal corresponding investment.

Henry Ford didn’t make a single contribution to understanding electricity. Instead, he used electricity to transform manufacturing with the assembly line. And once customers understood that they really “needed” electric irons, refrigerators, automobiles and power tools, it didn’t matter that your water wheel, steam engine and belts were fully amortized. It didn’t matter that there were still plenty of applications for traditional power sources and methods.

Try as you might, you could no longer make a killing by using steam. Competition had lurched in a different direction.

I believe cloud computing will be a catalyst for radically upsetting the balance of media productivity and investment over the next few years. The new organizational models and investment profiles enabled by OPEX-based, on-demand, as-needed access to computing resources will rip most media and marketing production out of the piece-work orientation that dominates today. For the media and marketing industries, computing clouds will become a medium for mass customization on the supply side and direct-to-consumer on the demand side. The barriers to entry will never be lower. The barriers to success will never be higher.

Please don’t think I’m being a Vulcan with all this talk of industrializing media production and distribution. Before designing or embarking on a campaign, marketers will still need to answer who buys, why they buy and how they buy. No intelligent media creator will try to substitute software for a compelling story, vivid characters, and unique takes on age-old human dramas.

Cloud computing won’t change those imperatives and thank goodness for that.

However, I strongly believe that cloud computing will change the environment in which the media and marketing industries approach these challenges. If you tilt the environment and iterate like hell, a tornado of extinction and the birth of new species is virtually guaranteed. That’s evolution in biology and in business.

Therefore, when you’re on the cusp of a lurch into a future, the crucial test isn’t engineering.

It’s imagination.

I can -repost from the GigaOm Pro site.

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SUMMARY: What happens when you promise end-users a persistent connection to data, applications and services regardless of the device they’re using? Mobile cloud computing aims to deliver just such a promise. Mobile access to popular web-based services such as Facebook and Gmail, combined with next-generation smartphones like the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android devices, is driving broad adoption of mobile data. However, the center of economic gravity is shifting. Historically, access to the mobile network was the service. But as users have expanded the uses for those bits, what the user does in a given session becomes fundamental to how much the service provider can charge the user or a third party (e.g. an advertiser). Thus, it’s likely that the mobile, IT and MCC sectors will continue their current marriage of convenience to attack a rare convergence of both short-term and longer term opportunity. However, in the process of adapting to an Internet that’s becoming more global, mobile and web-based by the day, the mobile and IT industries will be forced into new ways of doing business.
Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2009/09/report-how-mobile-cloud-computing-will-change-tech/#ixzz0TBqT54Ws

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My next gig for them is going to look at Augmented Reality. That’s a fancy term for overlaying computer generated information on real world images. Kind of like when they paint the yellow first down marker on the field during the football game. Of course, things are heating up in the marketing world as well as training.  If you’re connected to AR, feel free to drop a note (john.gauntt AT media-dojo.com)