Posted by Those who have attended IBC in Amsterdam at some point in their career know that participating in the show is like briefly transplanting oneself into an alternate universe for 5 days. What the rest of the world knows as Friday, Saturday, Sunday becomes IBC Day 1, IBC Day 2, IBC Day 3, etc. Maneuvering between the massive halls of the RAI and trying to find obscure meeting rooms can be like navigating a small city (and without the help of GPS)! And the amount of sleep one gets due to the post-exhibition activity is probably most akin to a weekend in Las Vegas.
All of that, however, is a small price to pay for the wealth of benefits and opportunity that can be had while attending the media industry’s biggest conference outside America. From an efficiency standpoint, it’s fairly impossible to outmatch the density of meetings one can have with customers and partners in such a short timeframe. This year this that was especially true as our Quantum team had our meeting rooms constantly full, not to mention a packed partner event on the opening day.
Latest Trends Taking Shape
The other primary benefit is that being at the show is an outstanding opportunity to learn about where the industry is going, as well as how these trends are taking shape in the challenges the vendor community will need to solve next. Given their importance, I think these are certainly worth sharing – so in no particular order, here are the trends that seemed to be most topical at the show:
Democratization of Video
As video has become the dominant communications platform across the world, and is on track to make up more than 80% of the world’s data, both traditional media and non-traditional media organizations are finding themselves in the middle of the evolution to constantly be producing video content. One effect of this transformation means production timelines are shortening and distribution channels are broadening. All meaning that organizations need more sophisticated and flexible storage solutions to support the creation of an immense amount of compelling content.
Cloud-based Workflows
Just the day before the show began, Disney had announced an agreement with Microsoft to do post-production in Microsoft Azure. This move could certainly be a sign of things to come and is exciting with the flexibility it could offer those organizations creating content, as well as efficiencies it could offer by doing more work closer to where the data resides. At Quantum we are keenly aware of this trend, which is why we are investing in StorNext to facilitate all stages of the media workflow whether it’s on-premise, off-premise, or any combination of the two.
Transition to IP
What was a hot topic at NAB continued to be a hot topic at IBC – and it’s easy to see why. From lower capital costs to more rapid deployment and streamlined operations, placing massive importance on transitioning to an all-IP based infrastructure.” This is why all the products that Quantum has launched over the past year are optimized to provide maximum performance across Ethernet networking.
Remote Production
The fact that this was discussed so broadly was somewhat surprising. However, as customers shared the benefits of doing more production onsite, the fact that it’s becoming a bigger trend became more apparent. Quantum actually has solid experience here working with companies like The Rebel Fleet – an innovative post-production team doing onsite production in the mountains of New Zealand. We also recently launched our R-Series ruggedized storage system to further facilitate these types of use cases. Could this become more mainstream in the months to come? I wouldn’t be surprised….
So that’s a wrap on the top trends from IBC 2019. In closing, I’d like to give one final kudos to the entire Quantum product and engineering team that had anything to do with designing and building our F-Series. The product picked up two more awards at the show and is on track to become the media industry’s de facto standard for ultra-performance NVMe-based storage. And stay tuned for some exciting developments in this space over the coming months, as their work is just getting started!