The Challenge: A Decades-Old Burden
For tier-1 broadcasters, a major constraint is their decades-old media archive, often spanning hundreds of petabytes of digital content, alongside non-digital assets. Handling these various video file formats is a complex technical and financial undertaking, from retrieving content for current use to ensuring its availability for years to come.
Legacy media archives are costly to maintain, require specialized engineers, and occupy expensive physical space. They also rely on outdated codecs like MPEG-2 or AVC, which carry significant storage overhead and lack the capabilities of modern standards. This technical debt constrains how content can be accessed, processed, and monetized.
Consider a major broadcaster with a 300-petabyte archive that’s growing at an escalating pace. This is more than a storage and financial burden – it’s a strategic asset waiting to be unlocked. While the move to the cloud offers a powerful opportunity, you may achieve even more by modernizing the media archive while migrating. It’s a path for unlocking hidden value, such as enriching content with AI-driven capabilities or adding new monetization options.
A Strategic Transformation to the Cloud
The cloud migration opportunity becomes even more compelling when it’s viewed as a chance for operational transformation. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the infrastructure to handle massive archive transfers while providing the computational resources needed for content processing at scale. Rather than maintaining dedicated on-premises hardware, the ability of cloud infrastructure to handle massive media archives fundamentally changes the economics of content management.
This is where modernization takes shape with Beamr, member of the AWS Partner Network, that delivers a key and unique advantage. Broadcasters can implement a high-efficiency, GPU-accelerated workflow: Beamr’s patented technology, Content-Adaptive Bitrate (CABR), analyzes each frame in real-time, delivering up to a 50% file size reduction while guaranteeing video quality preservation, even during modernizing to a newer encoding technology.
This strategic process upgrades content to modern codecs like HEVC or AV1, enabling new business capabilities like 4K and Dolby Vision broadcasting for premium users. Working with Amazon EC2 G6 instances, this solution systematically processes your entire media archive, while preserving metadata and ensuring compliance with broadcast standards.
The Payoff: Unlocking New Capabilities
This strategic approach to migration unlocks operational capabilities that were previously impossible or prohibitively expensive, including:
- Upgrading to new formats that will enable playability for years to come.
- Achieve up to 50% reduced costs, including hot and cold storage and delivery.
- On-demand access to high-performance computing, enabling workflows like upgrading to 4K using AI quality enhancements.
The opportunity isn’t just to migrate to the cloud – it’s to transform video archives into an agile, cost-effective, and monetizable asset for the future.
