Some of the most inspiring projects we see gaining momentum with our customers and our partners are being driven by creativity, media and entertainment. Creative professionals are looking to Google’s global infrastructure to power graphics rendering, media archival, disaster recovery, and video processing workloads ranging from transcoding to content distribution around the world. At SIGGRAPH we launched Media Solutions by Google Cloud Platform to showcase ways in which creative companies have harnessed Cloud Platform, and to provide technical reference content for companies to bridge their existing operations to the cloud -- from large studios all the way to the individual artist.

The immense scale of compute and storage demanded by media workloads make Google’s global infrastructure an excellent fit. Studios doing graphics rendering like Rodeo FX, Framestore, and Atomic Fiction are getting great traction on Cloud Platform, benefiting especially from Compute Engine’s flexible pricing including per-minute billing. Graphics rendering is a tremendous process computationally and has traditionally been done on-prem in local render farms. Using cloud-based rendering on Google Cloud Platform, startup-sized teams get the scale and global reach comparable to even the largest studios. Media Solutions on Cloud Platform offers both turnkey tools tailored to individual artists like Zync, as well as custom architectures to bridge large on-prem render farms to the cloud seamlessly. To celebrate artists’ creativity, we’re inviting users to sign up and be among the first to use Zync for cloud-based graphics rendering powered by Google Cloud Platform. In addition to earning additional free-trial credit, Google will curate the best work rendered on Zync to showcase the artists or their studios on Google’s media website.
In addition to rendering, other critical media processes are finding significant success in the cloud. Archival and disaster recovery remain top of mind for many customers, especially for sensitive data common in media and entertainment. Google’s category-leading product Google Cloud Storage Nearline provides all the benefits of cold storage, yet delivers ~3-second data retrieval times. Combined with our Cloud Networking products, customers’ data can travel a private route from your network to Google’s, avoiding the open Internet, saving bandwidth, increasing both security and reliability.
With video forecast to make up more than 80% of all Internet traffic by 2020, video ingestion into the cloud along with video processing and transcoding are fast becoming key workloads for media companies. Content owners looking for an end-to-end service from content acquisition, ingestion, processing, all the way to distribution and cross-device playback, iStreamPlanet is an excellent managed solution. For companies looking to do custom transcoding workloads in the cloud, many customers are finding success with industry-leading video transcoding software powered by Cloud Platform, including Wowza Streaming Engine, Zencoder, and PandaStream. Wowza Streaming Engine is available as a click-to-deploy solution on Compute Engine.
The Cloud Platform team would love to learn about the custom processes powering your company’s creativity today. In many cases, managed or click-to-deploy media solutions can free you from costly maintenance, configuration, and complexity. Contact us and together we can look at proven reference architectures and determine the best fit for your unique environment.
- Posted by Andy Tzou, Product Marketing Manager, Google Cloud Platform