What does 2020 have in store for media and entertainment organizations?

As the new year approaches, there are a number of exciting M&E trends on the horizon. New competition, emerging formats and platforms, and technology advancements promise to make 2020 a dynamic and fertile year for the industry. The Signiant team is excited to see how organizations evolve and to continue innovation on our SaaS platform to further connect the global media supply chain.

With this in mind, we asked three members of the Signiant C-team — Margaret Craig, CEO; Ian Hamilton, CTO; and Rick Clarkson, Chief Strategy Officer — to weigh in on what they believe this next year will bring for our already booming industry.

Margaret Craig, CEO, on a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud world

“My prediction for 2020 is that media companies will increasingly drive their technical infrastructure toward a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud future. The industry is moving beyond a simplistic view of ‘the cloud’ as a single public cloud platform. Technical leaders now envision agile, distributed global storage and compute environments, with multiple commercial infrastructure providers and large-scale private clouds. They want to be able to choose the optimal resource configuration for each workflow or asset class, based on cost, performance, and adjacency to other services.”

Ian Hamilton, CTO, on the evolution of machine learning

“I think we’ll see an increase in the practical application of unsupervised machine learning and in particular generative adversarial networks. While applying supervised machine learning to train computers to perform tasks that humans are good at (and machines haven’t traditionally been good at), like natural language processing and image recognition, is interesting and useful, strategies for enabling machines to do things that the majority of humans aren’t good at, like creating photorealistic images or devising strategies for maintaining privacy in aggregate data, takes machine learning to the next level.”

Rick Clarkson, Chief Strategy Officer, on a paradigm shift in media technology

“As we head in to 2020 I can’t help but think of the need for business agility driven by changes in consumer behavior. The industry is moving away from expensive, bespoke solutions in favor of lighter weight, off-the-shelf, multi-tenant SaaS and using a loosely coupled, event driven paradigm for integrating distinct services. I can envision some market consolidation in media technology where companies building solutions using a combination of cloud technologies, microservices, open source software and commercial applications will be in an enviable position.”

These predictions reflect the diversity of change and demand for innovation that might define 2020 and the years to follow. Each one of these factors is likely to have a visible impact on how organizations create and distribute content across an ever more complex supply chain.

Happy New Year from all of us at Signiant! We look forward to navigating 2020 together.