Connections

The Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA) has already come a long way in its first six months but still has much more to accomplish, according to MEDCA executives who spoke March 10, during “What is MEDCA and Why it Matters to M&E’s Future,” one of a series of MEDCA presentations that were held during the Smart Content Summit in Los Angeles.

As “IP everything” continues to proliferate across small and large installs around the world, data centers (large and small) are the heart of the transformation.

The “homegrown” approach is showing signs of weakness as more companies are building at an exponential pace. Smart, connected stages and remote connectivity require “industry standard” build outs for interoperability and the long-term evolution of the production process.

However, what industry standard we should reference and aspire to is unclear when 90% of today’s M&E workflows are based on data-centric processes while most stages are built on legacy platforms that were integrated out of necessity, rather than a structured engineered approach.

Where can we learn from the experts to make the application of these products within the M+E sector successful?

MEDCA’s mission is to provide continuing education, information, and best practices to develop a good foundation for the explosive growth in M&E data centers that we are seeing around the world.

During the Smart Content Summit session, MEDCA executives discussed how this initiative was formed and has taken hold over the past six months since its introduction.

“I cannot believe the amount of work that goes into opening an alliance – just to get started to spread the word,” Sean Tajkowski, MEDCA technical director, said at the start of the session. “But a lot of this came from lessons learned and road bumps everywhere, going to stages and having these issues.”

He quoted somebody who had complained: “We need to light this up.”

But he said: “It doesn’t really get lit up in a couple of days. It takes two months and then to add the supply chain issue in the middle of everything too has just compounded everything.”

He went on: “I brought in great people around me and some great companies that see the same vision on really education. We need to explain mission-critical facilities. We need to understand what is connectivity. It’s not just an Internet connection. It’s also the whole, entire plant…. The 50,000-foot view. It’s power, it’s grounding, it’s appropriate connectivity on the set. It’s outbound connectivity. And also a little bit of the future. I don’t have the golden egg. But I’m definitely planning, looking at predictions and such and watching where the world is going right now, especially with remote collaboration, and a lot of this VFX and real-time VFX. Those are going to require on-prem solutions. And if you actually look at the rest of the data industry, it’s all edge data right now. That is a huge aspect – that hybrid of the cloud and on-prem.”

Pointing to autonomous cars by way of comparison, he said: “We can’t run be running autonomous vehicles in the cloud because it would take too long for the sensor from the vehicle to get out to the hyperscale datacenter. So they put little datacenters – edge datacenters – that talk to the hyperscale datacenters.”

He explained: “That’s the same thing that we’re doing on our sets. We’re dealing with low-latency, high processing locally on our sets and then speaking to the hybrid model – to the hyperscale cloud providers that we work with.”

And, “as a matter of fact, a lot of those hyperscale people are heavily getting involved with on-prem and hybrid solutions right now,” he said, predicting: “You’re going to see AWS and others roll out a lot of features in the next few months, in regard to edge data.”

MEDCA, meanwhile, “really is advocating for good standards and practices,” he said. “We wouldn’t build a facility anywhere in the world or especially in the United States to no SMPTE standards or no AES standards…. We have to have interoperability with these big data centers and we also want things to be streamlined,” he explained, adding, “we don’t get to reinvent the wheel.”

“Our data is so big” now and “we’re trying to push a lot of things down the pipe,” he said, predicting, “we’re going to see a lot more failure.”

Building awareness continues to be important, Eric Rigney, MEDCA VP, chimed in. He stressed how important it is to get this right, noting it costs the same amount of money to do it right vs. improperly.

Explaining MEDCA’s main goals, Lisa Griffin, MEDCA executive director, said: “We want to educate” and create committees that get involved and look at issues it needs to address and talk about.

She added: “We want a certification program so we can educate the engineers to that next level. This journey is just beginning and it already has so much to accomplish.”

Guy Finley, MESA president and CEO, moderated the panel.

To listen to the presentation, click here.

The 2022 Smart Content Summit event was held in conjunction with the EIDR Annual Participant Meeting (EIDR APM), and was presented by Whip Media. The event was produced by MESA, in association with the Smart Content Council and EIDR, with sponsorship by BeBanjo, Signiant, Qumulo, Adio, Alteon, Digital Nirvana, Slalom and Rightsline.