Need to transcode a large movie, something that used to cost thousands of dollars a pop? AWS does that for a buck and change. Ensure that Netflix delivers flawless imagery of “The Gray Man” to Joe and Anthony Russo’s exacting standards? Yup. Deliver DCPs via the cloud to theaters across the country, or 1,600 TV channels to homes everywhere? Sure. Put Peacock on its feet from concept to launch in the space of one year, or rebuild what remained of Fox from scratch after the 2019 Disney takeover? Yes to all, as well as many more workflows that are as invisible as they are essential.
AWS has a “clear lead in lots of important areas,” Blair Harrison, the CEO and founder of FAST (free, ad-supported streaming television) software company Frequency, told IndieWire. “If you’re in the media space and you’re above a certain size — and that’s not even that big — you’re using AWS for something.”
Evan Statton, principal architect of the AWS Media & Entertainment division, told IndieWire that his client base tallies “more than 60 partners just in the direct-to-consumer space,” including Netflix, Disney, and Peacock. Statton also said Disney+ utilized AWS to scale its then-nascent streaming business across 59 countries. Today, Netflix and Disney are relying on AWS as they sprint toward the launch of ad-supported streaming and the promise of first-mover advantage. AWS maintains multiple regions, with four primary zones in the U.S. alone. That means end users like you get higher-quality images and less delay between image delivery and reception. “The customers can come and bring their workloads and feel good about having a resilient architecture,” Statton said. “They trust us with their architecture, and that’s why they’re here.” “In a world where the money is all about advertising and advertising is all about context and metadata, the better those services are, the better I’m able to monetize my increasingly diverse inventory,” he said. In a 128-page report on Cloud Computing, Redburn researcher Alex Haissl noted that “Separating AWS may not be on the table for now, but if the performance gap versus the non-AWS parts continues to widen, it could be on the table further down the road.” He did not venture a guess as to when this could possibly be realized, but when we brought that crazy-sounding $3 trillion spinoff valuation to Statton, he didn’t blink. After all, there are still a lot of workflows to exploit, like those surrounding uncompressed video (typically, video is compressed a few times from origin through the cloud to your house). “We believe the journey to the cloud for customers is still in its infancy,” Statton said. “We’ve come a long way, but believe that there’s even more to go.” Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
