By Ian Blaine 

Many professional media companies and content owners have their heads in the clouds these days - and for good reason. They are grappling with the best ways to build, operate or expand their broadband video businesses. 

More of them are now talking about the notion of "cloud computing," and how it can be applied to support the various elements required to run a broadband video site. The concept isn't a new one, of course, but there are many important details that they need to explore. Before diving into this topic; however, let's start with a common definition of cloud computing from Wikipedia [1], which defines it as "a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the ‘cloud' that supports them."

 In the context of video, those who operate a consumer portal or video service not only need to evaluate what goes into the cloud and what doesn't, but they need to determine the implications of cloud-based implementations across a wide range of areas including: storage and delivery, transcoding, video management, advertising and reporting. 

Here are some tips and recommendations of things to consider: 

Storage and Delivery:

The original cloud computing applications, content delivery networks (CDN) have been employed for video storage and delivery for 10-plus years. Letting a CDN handle your spikes in traffic is far more economical than building out your own media servers. CDNs and others leverage their own infrastructure and augment it via peering agreements. 

Transcoding:

This is a more difficult decision, as there are three options for transcoding video. So, let's look at each. First, if you have the capacity, hosting your own transcoding servers may make the most sense. This saves you from external hosting costs and extraneous bandwidth costs as you move large files around the Internet. 

Next, if you anticipate the need to syndicate your content to many outlets, each with its own transcoding profile, a hosted transcoding farm from your video management vendor reduces the processing time. This also works well if you do not want to host your own transcoding servers. 

Finally, several new vendors are offering "cloud-based transcoding" with the ability to use a service like Amazon Web Services (AWS) to dynamically add capacity. The optimal use-case for these services includes an unpredictable content production schedule where you may have occasional spikes in the number of files you need to transcode. The downsides to this approach are the variable pricing models based on file size and transfer bandwidth, as well as the additional processing time from the file transfer.

This article is continued here... [2]