Nigeria's Broadcast Media Can Leapfrog into the Future with Cloud Technology

The Nigerian broadcast media industry is being hit by expensive operations, low scalability, and performance improvement to meet the growing audience demand. On the bright side, cloud technology is one sure bet that can help the industry scale the challenges and leap into the future.

Traditional infrastructures are mostly expensive to maintain and quite inflexible to sustain fast-changing technological developments. Cloud technology provides cost efficiency, scalability, and strong performance capabilities.

For this reason, cloud computing remains one of the most innovative and topical shifts witnessed in business across the world; the Nigerian broadcast media cannot be exempted. Cloud computing is simply the on-demand delivery of computing services: this includes servers, storage, and databases, networking, software, analytics, and even artificial intelligence. Everything will be at your fingertips on the internet. This model provides numerous benefits for broadcasters by way of speeding up innovation cycles, resource allocation flexibility, and reduction in costs through economies of scale.

The history of cloud computing is really long and can be dated back to the 1960s, when firms would commonly rent processing time on huge mainframe computers rather than owning and maintaining the hardware. It was this early concept of cloud computing that laid the foundation for the modern computing model dominated by leading public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.

These giants in the industry hold enormous pools of computing resources literally at one's fingertips. But broadcasters have access only to what they need, when they need it, and without an upfront spend on expensive on-premises infrastructure, these greatly reduce costs and free up precious capital for reinvestment in creating more great content and other audience reach activities.

The broadcast media industry in Nigeria is in the midst of a digital revolution, driven by the potentials of Information and Communications Technology. It is a revolution spurred by digital media convergence, which blurs distinctions between various media: television, radio, the internet, amongst others. At the heart of this convergence is cloud technology, a magic wand that enables broadcasters to acquire, manage, and deliver content on all multiple platforms seamlessly.