PLAYING OUT OF THE CLOUD Jenny Priestley talks to Discovery Inc about their move to the cloud
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n May Discovery announced plans to shut their London playout hub and move to the cloud. The move is part of a global initiative which has been underway for a while. The European change follows on from the US move which was completed in October 2017, and will include 300 channels by the end of the summer, making Discovery the first broadcaster to implement this innovative move at scale. According to Simon Farnsworth, EVP technology and operations EMEA & APAC at Discovery Inc, there were a number of factors behind the decision to move to the cloud: “First of all the way that the vendor supply chain is going in terms of IP, it felt like we were at a junction in time where it just makes sense to move to the cloud because a lot of the IP-grade equipment that suppliers are now producing enabled us to do that,” he explains. “Secondly, it just makes our business so much more flexible in terms of being able to launch channels, shut down channels or launch new pop-up channels at much shorter notice. And it makes our infrastructure strategy so
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much more flexible because we’re not housing huge data centres in our buildings moving forward which has always been a bug bear of the broadcast industry. If you had to move building it was an expensive exercise.” The third reason behind the decision says Farnsworth, was to make Discovery much more efficient: “Having all our content in one place or in one environment in the cloud allows us to do so much more with our content so much faster,” he says. “For example, we’re supplying a lot more content to telcos in Asia and having it all in one place allows us to manipulate that content so much faster and makes our whole supply chain more efficient because we’re all uploading it to the cloud in one file format. Given the amount of content that we reversion around the world in different languages, with different subtitles, with different compliance elements to it, having all of that in a single environment just makes us so much more efficient.” All of the channels moving to the cloud for playout are non-live. According to Farnsworth the decision to move only those kinds of channels is down to latency issues