Vendors Need to Do Better Job Raising Cloud Content Awareness: Basse

Cloud service providers need to better coax creators to move their content production to the cloud, Microsoft Azure Media and Entertainment Chief Technology Officer Hanno Basse told a SMPTE 2020 virtual conference keynote Tuesday. Azure embarked on a “customer listening tour” with “well-prepared survey questions,” canvassing nearly four dozen “top creators” in the film and TV industry, said Basse, CTO at 20th Century Fox Film before its sale to Disney and ex-founding president of the UHD Alliance. He joined Microsoft in April. The survey's goal was to give Azure a “good, wholesome picture” about the creative industry’s cloud “expectations,” using that feedback to better “inform” its product development process, he said. Azure heard from creators that cloud vendors “need to do a better job of actually raising awareness as to what cloud production actually means and the benefits that it brings,” said Basse. An important part of that is “total cost of ownership,” he said. Creators told Azure “security and access control” are fundamentally important cloud requirements, he said. It heard from “people in the trenches” that there’s a constant “tug of war” between personnel on the set and studio heads about “what they want to make available to the studio executives,” he said. “Not every day is perfect on set, so there needs to be a way of not exposing everything that goes on there.”