Rising competition, costs and viewer demands were being cited as driving respondents in a mini survey to rethink their cloud strategy.

In a June 2023 global survey of 225 global IT decision-makers in the media and entertainment industry (MEI) about their views on managing their cloud strategies, a trend in “moving away from using large cloud providers in favor of smaller cloud-native setups” was observed in the Asia Pacific and Japan region (APJ) responses.

Among this group, 77% were considering moving away from traditional cloud providers due to cost pressures, while 67% reported the costs were difficult for their in the long-term and required consolidating of cloud providers.

Respondents also cited the increasing volume of incoming data as a complication in their firms’ abilities to further adopt cloud infrastructures: 40% anticipate a more-than-50% growth in data volumes over the next three years, and 67% indicated that data volume increases complicated data center adoption for them.

Other findings

The data showed that APJ MEI respondents were early cloud adopters, with more than 93% reporting they were successful with cloud-based technology, 21% reporting their cloud journeys were progressing quicker than expected, and 54% stating that this progression was much faster than anticipated. Also:

    • 75% of APJ respondents reported their end users expect zero downtime, buffering, or playback errors.
    • 46% of APJ respondents “strongly agreed” that their industry was more pressured to digitally transform than most — the highest among all regions surveyed.
    • 60% of respondents cited storage as the most common streaming use case for cloud services, followed by performance analysis (49%). In APJ distribution was the most-cited figure (44%) among all the regions surveyed. Other use cases were: using the cloud for other key functions such as content protection (DRM/watermarking), and for billing and subscription management.
    • 61% of APJ respondents indicated they had seen or would expect to see customer experience improvements due to cloud investments, and 60% cited realizing or expecting increased agility to generate and access real-time insights. Also, 54% of respondents expected their cloud strategy to improve their ability to scale operations.

According to Jay Jenkins, Chief Technology Officer, Akamai Cloud Computing, while commissioned the mini global survey, APJ’s MEI landscape has become extremely crowded as local streaming platforms go global, international giants double down on expansion, and as “live streaming” and “live selling” take center stage: “While these challenges are especially pronounced in APJ, they’re also shared by businesses in other industries,” suggesting that traditional centralized clouds were being less favored in the current geopolitical climate compared to “more modern, distributed designs unlocking new flexibility and cost savings in the process.”