disruption? On the contrary, our credo: continuity and fluidity!

21 march 2017

Muriel Le Bellac, President and founder of Videomenthe, shares her views on disruption... 

We live in a world of constant change, that's a fact. Technological advances in both the IT and telecom fields are dramatically changing traditional patterns. Our professional audiovisual world has to face up to the dematerialization of content, and it's up to us to review our working methods in order to take advantage of these technical advances. 

Is this cause for alarm? After all, we're talking about a translation from tape to file, from cassette to hard disk, from video converter to file transcoder, from oscilloscope to software probe, from terrestrial broadcast to IP stream, from linear content consumption to replay or video-on-demand, or from TV screen to laptop, tablet or mobile screen... 

But the content itself still has to go through the same stages of capturing, editing and conforming, before being broadcast live, deferred or on demand. 

Why talk about disruption? 
Isn't it simply a fantastic evolution that allows us a freedom of consumption of audiovisual content that was unimaginable just twenty years ago? After all, VOD has only been around since the early 2000s...

From this point of view, dedicated hardware platforms handling analog, then digital 'baseband' sources had to be gradually replaced by servers hosting software solutions handling live IP streams and media files. 

Then come the formidable resources made available by the arrival of the Cloud and very high-speed Internet... What happiness for our developers, but what stress for our technical teams, fearing the dispossession of their own local infrastructure. One approach is to initially consider the cloud as simply an extension of the onsite installation, so as to be able to handle overflows and peaks in activity, without over-dimensioning the local infrastructures, which would then be running under capacity most of the year. 

What about continuity? 
The idea is to use a portal dedicated to our business, exploiting the same tools as those used internally: the cloud is showing its face in continuity and fluidity. 

In the same vein, if we take this to its logical conclusion, we use the same workflow creation portal to manage our own in-house data farms. From the user's point of view, only the interface and overall resources are important, and he doesn't have to worry about load balancing between his own infrastructure and that made available to him in the cloud. 

Continuity and fluidity are our credo and the foundation of Eolementhe©. We're living in exciting times, when we're pushing back the boundaries of how we process and deliver content across multiple devices, so let's take advantage of every solution, every proven and revolutionary method, in a progressive and flexible way, to get the most out of them. The hybrid on-premise/cloud approach is undoubtedly the foundation of tomorrow's new audiovisual exchanges. The file-based world allows us to use far greater technical resources than ever before, and to foresee bridges that can become seamless between our on-premise ecosystem and the cloud.

Adapt or Die', the slogan of the company I worked for at the start of my career, which was aimed at the transition from SD to HD video in the 90s, makes perfect sense today: telecom networks and the cloud are holding out their arms to us, enabling us to broadcast on a massive scale across multiple media, and represent a formidable toolbox for developing our creativity, and proposing new offers in our attractive media environment. 

So let's put an end to disruption and move towards fluid exchanges and rich content!