Navigating the Future: Our 5 Trends Shaping Media & Entertainment in 2024

Hey there, Yocto followers! Jimmy here 🚀 You're going to love diving into the future with us. 2024 is shaping up to be another rapid dev year for the M&E industry, and we're here to explore the tech trends that are not just transforming the scene but revolutionizing it, but most importantly for how it impacts YOUR business. From empowering indie creators via open-source tools to ensuring the security of digital masterpieces, the speed and adoption is accelerating - here’s my pick for 2024!

🌟 Open Source Tools: Unleashing Creative Freedom

In media and entertainment, open source tools are nothing short of a revolution. They're tearing down the walls that once made high-quality production an exclusive club. Picture Blender transforming your 3D animation dreams into reality, Audacity making audio editing a breeze, and OBS Studio bringing live streaming to your fingertips…at little to no cost in comparison to the heavy iron appliances and packages. It's all about democratizing creativity, giving everyone from bedroom producers to indie filmmakers the power to bring their visions to life. As we stride into 2024, expect these tools to get even cooler, with AI-powered enhancements and cloud collaborations that'll make your creative process as seamless as your morning coffee - and not just in creative tools, in backend and infrastructure tools as well.

🔒 Securing the Vault: The Art of Content Securitization

With the digital age in full swing, protecting your creative works has never been more vital. Enter the era of content securitization – think of it as the superhero tech safeguarding your digital rights and revenue. Blockchain is leading the charge, providing a tamper-proof ledger for rights management that's as transparent as it is secure. Meanwhile, DRM solutions are evolving to be more user-friendly while keeping your content safe under lock and key. It's all about building trust with your audience, ensuring they know the content they love comes from a place of integrity. Even further getting smart about securing your key infrastructure and facilities to be able to tackle those tier 1 productions and ensure our industry keeps those premium viewings safe

🤖 AI: The Creative Co-pilot

Imagine having a co-pilot that's on a 24/7 creativity binge – that's AI for you in the M&E industry. From conjuring up scripts to fine-tuning the final cut, AI's influence on content creation is nothing short of magical, but be careful, it wont be the ONLY tool, it will be a supporting tool. With AI taking care of the grunt work, creators can spend more time on what they do best – being creative. As we look to 2024, the role of AI in creative processes is only set to deepen, making it a trend you don't want to sleep on. It will not be AI replacing jobs, it will be the person who is leveraging AI who will take the jobs.

🕶️ VR & AR: Stepping Into New Worlds

VR and AR are doing more than just changing the game; they're creating entirely new playing fields. Whether it's VR transporting you to unexplored universes or AR bringing digital wonders into your living room, these technologies are expanding the horizons of storytelling and entertainment. Imagine attending a virtual concert where the action happens all around you or learning history through interactive AR experiences that bring the past to life. As these technologies become more accessible, expect 2024 to be the year where VR and AR start becoming part of our everyday entertainment diet. This will be a platform to further that viewing experience - another channel to be not the second screen viewing but the third, fourth and meta experience.

🚀 5G & Edge Computing: The Speed of Imagination

Picture this: streaming 4K, heck, even 8K content on your device without the dreaded buffering symbol. Thanks to the dynamic duo of 5G and edge computing, this dream is swiftly becoming a reality. With 5G's lightning-fast speeds and edge computing's ability to process data closer to you, the possibilities for real-time, interactive content are endless. Think cloud gaming without the lag, live events in crystal-clear definition, and experiences so seamless they feel like magic. 2024 is gearing up to be a watershed year for how we experience content, all thanks to these tech marvels.

So, there you have it – a sneak peek into the future of the Media and Entertainment industry, courtesy of 2024's most thrilling tech trends. Here at Yocto, we're all about embracing these innovations, whether it's by empowering creators with open source tools, securing the digital landscape, diving deep into AI's creative potential, immersing ourselves in VR and AR, or pushing the limits with 5G and edge computing. The future is bright, and it's filled with endless possibilities for creativity and connection. Let's explore it together, shall we? 🌈✨

AI is less for technologists - its loads of marketing

Ok - I could be 'old man shaking his fist at Cloud' but i’m really struggling with the AI thing

I have 3 main points to make about AI and all three of them vary on their strength per industry, but realistically the whole buzz is bullshit generally.

I have yet to find a broad appeal use case that has the following traits:

• Its is a relevant use case now, that is also sustainable into the future

• it cannot be replicated by another dev with access to the same toolsets that everyone else has (chat gpt etc)

• ai startups have structured IP that allows them to uniquely commercialise

• have a commercial model that makes ANY sense

Now, in 2017 I was at the Salesforce Conference called 'Dreamforce' and it was a cacophony of people running around talking about tech and I'm convinced there would have been only 20% of them that had actually built anything, coded anything or had been in the trenches making tech work. Now having said that Dreamforce put on an amazing set of panels over the 4 days and the type of customer/tech innovator that we got to hear speak was outstanding.

What stayed with me was the panel discussing the future of AI and what it meant for us all. Amazingly the Head of AI for Google (i think it was Hinton at the time) was there and was answering some pretty amazing questions, and on the same panel Will.I.Am and he was absolutely as you would expect as a contributor to an AI panel...like a post turtle...noone knew why he was there, including him, but he was there and the panel began.

Dr Google spoke about the formula for AI which I use to this day which is:

• AI = Data + Machine Learning + Human in the Loop

• See below

To this day I argue till im black and blue in the face that this is a crucial piece when discussing how 'AI IS THE BIG DISRUPTOR' or 'CHAT GPT IS GOING TO REPLACE EVERYONE' or 'WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE ALL GET REPLACE.....ALSO WHY DO I HAVE THIS RASH?'....humans are still a massive component to the operation, curation and the deployment of AI. But then I think about Will.I.AM

Superflous punctuation in his name aside, Will.I.AM (is that right?) is the current model for AI and the current buzz. We arent sure why its big, but we know its a something. The old versions are way truer and much better than the current versions and less flashy industry 'WHOO HOO' and certainly a lot less hot air buzz. It has been commercialised in a way that is unsustainable, is more brochure than substance, EVERYONE is talking about it (recent BEP is terrible but marketed hard) and then theres addons, like his headphones that just are stupid and he wouldnt take off on the stage.

Diatribe yes, intolerance maybe, but the worst part about this buzz is the following:

• The same toolsets are being used by everyone - not much innovation is being done in a unique commercially sustainable way

• Everything has a 'me too' (not the same) feature set that crops up in weeks to do similar

• Noone is really sure how to commercialise it properly

• Content archives cant monetise selling AI tools and scanning for metadata insights

• Nothing says 'i the possibilities are endless' like someone that has a speaking tour deal instead of shareholders

• The one caveat here is that I have heard of 1 commercial use case which is 'you'll have 50c a month AI which helps you find ingredients at the shops. $1 a month AI which will help you draft responses to emails. $10 a month AI which will help you negotiate better rates on your software and $10,000 a month AI which will help you creat a genius investment scheme in shares'

The fact of the matter is that a few things needs to happen and one thing we have to remember - we recognise that we need a human in the loop for AI to be useful to curate data, define our outcomes and what we are looking for AND anyone that is getting ABSOLUTELY RAZZED ABOUT AI doesnt need to prove anything to shareholders but absolutely needs to book time on a speaking tour

Hey there shaky shaky…

It always comes in cycles with this industry, it expands and contracts and shifts and goes into a renaissance and then again. Dot Com, Crypto bubble, whatever. Sufficed to say, people losing roles in the tech sector is nothing new, it's just we are at the start of it. Shaky ground.

Amazon culling, Salesforce culling, I'm sure there will be the requisite FAANG purge and then reporting stellar profits the following 2 quarters because it looks great for shareholders…but thats fine for a trillion dollar opex elastic business, but not for the smaller businesses, in particular within the media and entertainment industry tech sector.

Most recently we've heard of VFX/Post/broadcast facilities chopping the already lean teams they have and leveraging assets to a sweaty sweaty end, and in the process losing people…some of the clever ones have seen the light with this whole shift and have asked for help. Our industry is so HEAVILY reliant on the technology industry and tech stacks that the ripples of this are constantly felt and are quite bumpy for creative houses…who arent billion dollar enterprises, but require similar levels of infrastructure and support.

In times like this we at YO.CTO have stressed the themes we always stress to our content creation houses, many of them more flush previously, to get the fundamentals right particularly now. The building blocks of tech in media. So our recommendation to everyone doing things a bit tougher than usual:

• Sweat your assets yes sure — but get your warranty extended and your support updated…cause when you need it you will.

• That expensive firewall that you got quoted? You can do the same thing with open source PFsense, and yes it passes TPN & MPAA

• Learn how VLAN’s work — and stop buying network hardware cause you don't understand how to use the ones you have

• Use your time to drill-in sensible security policy now! Set yourself up for acceleration OUT of the sponginess.

• What is your 3 year technology roadmap? How does it align with your business objectives? If they are divergent, maybe spend some time taking stock.

• Schedule vendor briefings about how to do more with less — that is the theme for 2023/4

Ask for help — there's a million people who can help, contractors or allies it doesn't matter — now is the time to be efficient and agile, learn from the best.

Give us a call/email/message — here to help — it takes a village/community/renderfarm/agileteam etc etc….you get it.

Vendor vs Open Source - A mixture for a facility

The strife I’ll get for this will be fantastic but it needs to be said….open source software is amazing and vendor commercial software is outstanding, it just depends on the view.

Planning and rolling out facilities we engage with a number of vendors and a number of their deployment teams who are flummoxed by our suggestion of Open Source, and Open Source gurus who are horrified that we would PAY for certain things. You just can’t make everyone happy at the same time.

You really do need to get the mixture right and you bet your ass it needs to have context to your business but more importantly where you need to be in 5 years time. I would posit that anyone that in our industry needs to take a look at their engineering teams, their IT teams and their ops teams, and arm them with the tools they need not the tools they are dictated to….a few questions to ask yourself before cutting that purchase order or credit card number….some specific some broad:

• Windows Hyper V vs VMWARE - Windows Hyper V allows you to spin up a boatload of virtual machines and you don’t need to pay per VM….just your OS cost (even less if you use Centos for your VM’s which is freeeeeee)

• File Systems - there is a bunch of file systems out there that are proprietary and cost a bomb, some that are reasonably priced and some that are open source….and performance is NOT the differentiator as you would expect. CEPH is a fascinating project https://ceph.io/ceph-storage/file-system/ as is Open ZFS https://github.com/openzfs/zfs . One that definitely is of interest is MinIO which is free and paid depending on your support https://min.io/ - Whack your these on your storage and robert is your father’s brother

• PFsense - I was schooled by someone a while ago about firewalls….and now I can’t even look at Palo Alto Networks etc in the same light. PFsense costs you NOTHING https://www.pfsense.org/ and meets the very stringent security requirements of our industry…you have a sub 10k firewall that is community supported with a boatload of options that meet the criticality of security. Dell 1 RU server with these components easy. One of our clients CEO’s i’m pretty sure was close to tears when we said ‘please don’t spend 200k on a firewall, here’s the alternate’

• Open VPN - adding the open-source VPN https://openvpn.net/ stack for your remote editors with RDP. Badass. Free. None of this 20-30-60k bollocks from the vendors….same frameworks, same industry recognition, less of the pricetag.

Any of these topics are contextual - if you have no in house support or need mission-critical services uptime etc, vendors provide this crucial component. You can have Linux for free always…unless you want a bunch of support in which case you have loads of paid options.

But I would ask you if you don’t have in house technical services, a junior who is interested in building cool things, or a great technology leader with a modest RnD budget…save yourself hundreds of thousands in the long run whilst putting technology in the prime position to drive the business forward.

Written by a recovering vendor sales guy :D

Pick your team properly, don't let the team be picked for you

Radio silence for a little while I know….we’ve been on a few amazing projects and working hard to close out some great deliverables. Lots of activity and lots of fun…and certainly a number of opportunities to flex and bend the old ‘vendor/reseller/enduser’ muscles when needed. Which is what prompted this post.

I have watched, not just on these projects, the proclivity of organisations whether end user or system integrator or vendor to punt problems over the wall and mentally, and physically, click the ‘resolved’ or ‘done’ button….and by god it gives me the s#@ts!

Choose your vendor well, choose your reseller well and choose your vendors well. I have seen the behaviours range from “I will own this problem and work through it with you as a team” to "Not my problem and you deal with them…until then I wont help” - bloody hell its infuriating. Better yet, collecting purchase orders, or credit card details or asking for more money when things are broken…the hide on them!!

My challenge to you is when selecting who you are working on with a project as some really simple questions to get their motivation:

• Who owns the project?

• Does the commercial lead walk away when the deal is signed?

• When will I be seeing your crew onsite?

• What denotes success in this project

• Who can I call about your project performance on your last project? (and find one they don’t give you)

• When do we get the keys?

• What support will you give us, and what are our processes for engagement?

Don’t be the industries discussion point, or a litmus test for others. Don’t be the one this guy is talking about…

Content Security - or when the IT guy just won’t let me create how I need to create…

Having gone through MPAA, TPN and watching people who have been crypto lockered, whenever users turn to myself and the team and say “ergh this is slowing down production” or “at my last place we didn’t have this complexity of passwords” or any variant of the above I just simply grin and bear it, because that means it’s painful, but it’s working.

Quoting a legend in the industry who I’m lucky to work with, “TPN/MPAA is a human security framework not a technology framework”

In simple terms the Trusted Partner Network is the big studios coming together to take security seriously and create a solid framework for how to secure your facility and your content create suites…oh and for everyone that complains TO KEEP YOUR JOB!

the majority of the process is looking at how your facility/business puts in place policies and procedures to handle content, screen content, send content etc. it is not because the IT guy wants a power trip or enjoys ripping out his/her switch fabric and start again, it’s about how the industry can actually do to secure our facilities and take security seriously - something that M&E has been a decade behind on.

so if your company is taking on TPN and securitisation, call us first so we can explain how to not get the same battlescars as everyone else, but more importantly look at it as a positive step that the organisation is taking to keep you in a job and take the industry seriously.

80% policy and procedure 20% technology - it’s easy. The reason you might find it difficult is that someone is trying to corral the ‘magnificent auteur that is telling a story that must be told’,..nah mate, we are trying to get you three movies worth of work not let us get hacked and we are all on the street.

comments/disagreements/hecklers welcome

End of Quarter is BS

One of the biggest misnomers about negotiating with your vendors is that you should wait until end of quarter for ‘the best price’ - having been on all sides of the fence it doesn’t work for anyone. A few points:

• As a customer waiting until the end of quarter places risk on your ability to be commercially agile - you drive a persona of only being driven by dollars and therefore are predictable. This is an old tactic, and it doesn’t work on anyone under the age of 50 and who didn’t get their start selling photocopiers.

• End of quarter as a sales lead as a reseller or vendor sales lead is shit….doesn’t matter how good you are, the pressure from the next level up is big….so when you can sense a customer drilling you as a tactic you are less likely to help longer term.

• End users, resellers and vendors have all trained each other on a cycle that is driven around ONLY price, but all three moan about it ‘only being a money thing now’ or ‘its not about relationship anymore’

A current client we are working with asked us to scope a new platform for their storage, switching and long term support structure. Here’s how we engaged with the vendor:

• Spoke to the vendor, found out what their fiscal quarter dates were. We then told them we would be closing any deal with them at the START of their quarter. Sales people and Pre Sales staff getting to retire their quota at the start of a quarter and kick back for 2.5 months….the value of that is very high.

• We compared and contrasted their storage $ per GB against 3 public cloud vendors, their compute clusters against another vendor and delved into their support structures. Wrote up a concise list of our expectations and sent it across before our commercial discussions.

• Had a frank discussion and kept to our dates, times and resources and the vendor did as well.

Our client paid far less for the overall project because the vendor closed early in the quarter, our support inclusions increased for no monetary increase, our clients education on the technology is greater as we pushed for client technical education as well as over the shoulder implementation skills.

Easy - because people weren’t playing the EOQ BS game. Everyone won. The project has been a success. We’d love to hear from you if you need help with this or even a few minor pointers. Its second nature to us, but we’ve been playing the game for a long time…we just changed the game to be a very flat playing field :)

Whats been your experience? we’d love to hear from you.

Kickoff!

Over the coming months we’ll be releasing some short and succinct posts designed to help inform you and your organisation on a few things. We want to get some notable discussion points out about new technology trends and some recent key learnings.

We also want to get you and your company’s team some useful materials and resources we have created and generated to help you plan your technology changes.

Lastly, I’ll be putting some useful advice about discussion with vendors. Vendor interaction and negotiation is a misunderstood area. We want to pull back the covers on some key points as well as dispel some of the old and crusty tactics that don’t work anymore.

Enjoy and feel free to kick off discussion, all about working smarter :)