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According to Time Magazine, more than half the world’s population will go to the polls in 2024. The fact that the UK’s election also coincides with Independence Day presented an irresistible opportunity for Blue Lucy’s chief strategy officer, Jonathan Lunness, to share some thoughts around change, independence and choosing the technology you entrust with your media workflows:

Over the last few months, I’ve attended a series of industry events – from MPTS to Amagi’s AI conference, the DPP media supply chain festival and Henry Stewart’s DAM Europe 2024 conference – and sat through more than my fair share of product and customer presentations.  It’s been interesting to hear a broad range of customers talking about all the changes their organisations are undergoing: migrating to the cloud, launching FAST channels, growing audience share and those other important shares – the ones that relate to their stock price.  If there’s one thing COVID taught us, it’s that we don’t know what’s around the corner –what’s right for today’s situation isn’t necessarily going to be best option for the future. As an example, we collect metrics on how many times our customers change or tweak a workflow in BLAM. Over the course of delivering millions of assets, they also make hundreds of iterative changes to their workflows. And these changes aren’t to correct errors in the system – they’re in response to constantly changing requirements as they deliver new formats to new platforms. Fortunately, BLAM is a low-code/no-code orchestration engine, so it’s easy to make these changes. But imagine if each change meant filling in a change request, coding or scripting the new workflow and testing each iteration before deploying it…oh, and maintaining that code, at your cost, for the lifetime of the platform. Long deployment cycles, inflexible solutions, and changing customer requirements are not a recipe for success.

Another observation from attending these events is just how diverse the various customer approaches can be. Some are looking to support hybrid operation, others for variations in cloud provider, but everyone is looking for a mix of integrations with a diverse range of technology vendors that meet their unique business needs. Clearly there’s no point adopting a new MAM or Content Supply Chain solution if it means giving up your independence of choice – it’s not flexible if you’re locked into certain vendors because of walled garden ecosystems. That off-the-peg MAM with simple functions and $100 dollar per month seat pricing might meet your base requirements on day one, but what happens if the project is a success, and you want the whole company on the platform? Equally, is that vendor really going to be interested in building the 3rd party integrations and custom workflows you will inevitably need?

Walled gardens, it seems, are not just on the ground and some solutions are also tied to specific cloud vendors. An interesting aspect of attending such a range of events was to listen to international customers, and how the engagement and economics of cloud vendor choice differed between geographic regions. Clearly, in not following the herd, these customers are seeing different benefits to others. Ensuring your choice of MAM is independent i.e. not dependent on a single cloud vendor seems like sound advice.

As we head to the polls this year, it’s important to remember that all candidates are telling us what we want to hear. We need to do our own research, read those manifestos, and choose the right party for our own specific needs. In choosing a MAM or Content Supply Chain solution you should take similar precautions. Unlike a government however, with the right platform you can easily change direction mid-term and cope with unexpected global events – without running up the national debt. Choose wisely.

Want to find out more about BLAM?  Get in touch with our team to book a demo.

I was quite pleased to be asked recently by a Canadian colleague what our “theme” would be for the upcoming IBC. For me, theme reflects the ethos of the Blue Lucy approach to trade shows, we don’t tend to talk about product features or the specific capabilities in our roadmap.

Development of features and connectors is just something we do in pursuit of delivering customer value. If an operator needs a connector to a system or service, we will build it into a microservice BLidget – which we’ve been producing at a rate of two a week for five-years.  Listing 450+ BLidgets or detailing our CORE or UI functions in a tradeshow press-release doesn’t convey the value of our BLAM platform or approach.  We prefer to showcase business-focused solutions, which tend to follow a theme that relates to industry business needs at that time.

Forecasting Cloud

Some will remember our cloud stand at IBC 2018 – it was very popular with the crowd, particularly after the show closed.  At that time, we were about 18-months into the development of BLAM-3 and around a year out from the completion of the first customer implementations with PLAZA Media and Off the Fence.  Our 2018 IBC cloud stand was a little tongue-in-cheek, highlighting the paradox of demonstrating a cloud-based platform from a dark hall in the Rai. Then (three years on from AWS’s acquisition of Elemental) the media and broadcast industry was finally beginning to appreciate the functional power and flexibility of cloud services.  The trend – and our IBC 2018 theme – was very much about “cloud migration” which we thought was inexorable, hence the stand design – the cloud is now, and Blue Lucy is there, ready.

But the BLAM platform was actually designed to be completely infrastructure agnostic – so it can be deployed in any cloud, or on-prem, infrastructure.  This is a core tenet of the architecture, although we forecast that the vast majority of deployments would run in cloud infrastructure.  Five years on, we are surprised as to how deployments have manifested.

A Mixed Reality

Eighty percent of our customer base is operating cloud-ground “hybrid” BLAMs.  These systems tend to have the core services of the databases and the application interface together with one or more workflow runners (the microservice orchestrators) running in cloud infrastructure, typically provisioned by Blue Lucy as a managed service.  In addition, workflow runners are deployed on-prem’ at the operator facility.  These manage on-prem storage, LTO libraries and other resources such as rights management systems, transcoders, file-based QC tools, edit systems (Avid and Adobe) as well as baseband recording and playout systems.

In hindsight, it was unwise for the industry to assume that the entire production and distribution capability would move to the cloud over a few short years. In many cases, it just doesn’t make sense: operators do not wish to move away from on-prem tools that are providing business value, and that are still being amortised.  For distributors, the concept of forklifting their inventory, which may extend to many petabytes, to cloud storage doesn’t make economic sense. Using the cloud for distribution, particularly to FAST or OTT platforms is very common and workflows that utilise cloud services are extremely efficient. BLAM operators are using these pipelines for content distribution to fulfil content sales – this model of ‘leaving material where it is until it’s needed or can be monetised’ – is common.  Equally, we have a number of customers who operate with all browse material in cloud storage, but delivery is fulfilled from cloud or ground – based on which is the most cost-effective overall. Naturally that logic is built into the BLAM workflows.

IBC Theme

There are many and varied reasons why media operators cannot, or do not want to go all in for the cloud or why they wish to control the migration. So, it is ground-cloud, hybrid workflows which will form the basis of our theme for IBC2023 where we’ll showcase how Blue Lucy customers are harmonising on-prem systems and cloud services and applications to create highly efficient and cost-effective media workflows with BLAM. In short, we’ll be bringing the cloud to earth at IBC2023.

I plan to revisit this topic in more detail in the run up to the event but in the meantime do make an appointment to meet with us at the show. We are keen to talk on the basis of operational outcomes, we can work out the most cost-effective place to run the workload later, and even change our mind.  We are at stand 6.C29.