Blackbird plc, the technology licensor, developer and seller of the market-leading cloud native video editing platform, Blackbird, and leading research consultancy, Caretta Research, announce the launch of a new video industry study – ‘Going native: production in the cloud’.

The rapid adoption of cloud-based media production workflows for remote working and collaboration during the Covid-19 pandemic has led to the proliferation of higher costs and inefficient workflows. That is one of the headline findings of a new study by Caretta Research, in partnership with Blackbird, which also identifies how a more transformational approach to cloud-native workflows can unlock a new era of cost effective multi-platform operations.

The study, Going native: production in the cloud, also finds that the rush to cloud and remote working has too often been tactical, involving the lift-and-shift of legacy tools and workflows.

While this is enabling short-term operational benefits, and kept the industry working during the pandemic it has frequently led to media operations missing out on the true potential of cloud-enabled live and post-production.

Key areas of increased cost and inefficiencies from lift-and-shift cloud identified in the report include:

• Higher infrastructure costs where static cloud compute instances are used rather than elastic cloud-native services
• Inflated cloud storage costs where storage tiers are used inefficiently or content is duplicated across workflows
• Excessive cloud egress bandwidth charges where content is repeatedly transferred in and out of the cloud.

However, in the next step of transformation, a new generation of flexible and collaborative cloud-native technology is being deployed. Camera-to-cloud workflows are bringing tools and creative users to the content rather than requiring the content to be moved around to the users. Live and post-production for TV, streaming and multiple digital endpoints are delivered by internal and external users able to access a single source of content and shared tools.

The new report builds on industry research conducted by Caretta Research with Blackbird, which found that, despite 90% of video users adopting cloud production and remote editing, most of this is still being carried out using old-school inefficient and insecure workflows — with 65% of users moving original high-res media files around the internet to support remote editing workflows, and only 27% of remote editors making use of a cloud-native browser-based production platform like Blackbird.

Download the full findings here: https://www.carettaresearch.com/downloads/cloud-native