The Infinite Capacity Media Machine

Abstract

The fast-paced developments of cloud computing are evolving new kinds of machines that will be applied to professional media production. Serverless, distributed, clustered, and graphics-processing-unit (GPU)-accelerated, the nature of cloud-fit architectures is changing the patterns and design of software and services. Is it even possible to shift the highly sequential, line-timed infrastructure of the existing media facilities into the stochastic, message-driven, and asynchronous cloud? What new creative possibilities emerge from a platform that scales to enable personalized production? This paper visualizes the kind of machine you would build if you had an infinite amount of capacity in terms of networks, storage, and compute. The design for such a machine and a plan for how to build it are introduced in the form of the Agile Media Blueprint (AMB). In the context of video data, the measurements and analysis are provided for as is the capability of current systems in relation to the idealistic notion of infinite capacity.