The Weather Company takes to Sony's Cloud

Weather Picks Sony's Cloud

The Weather Company embraces Sony's Cloud production platform to share media throughout its global organization

"The Cloud" is a big and current topic in the broadcast industry. The term covers a wide range of products  and when you look closer at the multitude of cloud offerings, you start to see that they do differ in fundamental ways. Some are designed to "outsource" your media production infrastructure, while others are more concerned with sharing and distribution.  And some aren't really Cloud technologies at all, but merely offer downloads of their products which are run in the traditional way as applications on a local computer.

Ambitious

Sony's Ci platform is ambitious and credible. It emphasizes collaborative working across the globe, and it's starting to gain traction with some big clients.

The Weather Company (known as "Weather") were looking for s secure, reliable cloud platform that could help them with their constantly changing content and schedules. Their production teams are spread across the world making long and short-form content for the web and traditional broadcast media.

Collaboration

Weather will be using Ci to collaborate on time-sensitive weather footage, make production decisions, and then upload their content, from anywhere, to make it available for distribution across the world.

Sony is obviously delighted with this latest high-profile adoption of Ci. Here's what Naomi Climer, President of Sony Media Cloud Services says about the Weather deal:

"Millions of people depend on The Weather Company every day to provide the world's best weather forecasts, content and data through television, online and mobile formats. With time constraints a critical factor, Weather wanted to streamline production workflows and increase efficiency for its global production teams and reporters"

"Ci enables Weather to stand up teams instantaneously wherever events happen and gives them a platform to upload, review and access content fast – so they can get broadcasts to the public even faster. That’s critical when you’re in the weather business".

100 different things

Weather is pleased with their choice too. Philip Grossman, Senior Director of Content Acquisition and Management at The Weather Company said:

“We have 100 different things come up at once. We needed one streamlined solution that could handle anything we threw at it. As an early partner to work with Sony on the Ci platform, we helped incorporate new capabilities that worked for us.”

“With Ci, I can orchestrate who has access to content and easily organize all of the teams. Our webisodic team sends content globally, and all they have to do is log in to Ci, upload their content, and in 20 minutes or less they all have access. It’s simply a great singular answer to a lot of challenges.”

Weather is the latest customer for Sony's Ci Platform, which is packaged for all budgets, starting with a free five-gigabyte self-service account available here.

The default way to produce and distribute media

We think that cloud services and products will become the default way to produce and distribute media. It started happening the day the first image was sent over a network. We know that technology is accelerating, but there is more to it than being able to pack more processing power into a smaller space. What we're seeing now is the convergence and consolidation of already available technologies into specific and tailored services for end users. As the technology gets faster, these services will rapidly improve. Almost every day, another milestone is passed where people say: "how did we ever manage without being able to do that!".