Equinix Introduces the Media Cloud Ecosystem for the Entertainment Industry

Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the global interconnection and data center company, today announced the Equinix Media Cloud Ecosystem for Entertainment (EMCEE™), an ecosystem of interconnected media and content providers, along with content delivery networks (CDNs) and cloud service providers that optimizes content creation, global distribution and services across the entire media and entertainment (M&E) industry.  Today, more than 500 content and media companies such as Content Bridge, Movile, and Selevision use EMCEE to peer with the industry’s largest concentration of CDNs, multiple system operators (MSOs) and social media platforms, enabling faster content development and distribution, as well as significant cost savings.

Jason Peterson, CEO, ContentBridge:

“Ultimately, the relationship with Equinix will allow ContentBridge to bring advanced digital supply chain solutions directly to the content, wherever the content owner chooses to maintain the digital library.”

Ammar Hares, COO, Selevision:

“Colocating within Equinix creates the platform for us to grow our business worldwide which means we’re faster to market with content and it reduces our costs.”

Digital disruption is affecting the M&E industry at an ever-accelerating pace – changing the way that content is created, enhanced, transported, stored and distributed. To embrace this disruption, M&E companies need to transform their infrastructure, from fixed and siloed to integrated and dynamic with interconnection at the forefront of their IT decision making. Global businesses, including media and entertainment companies, are increasingly leveraging colocation data centers to distribute their digital infrastructure across multiple geographies, and closer to the edge, to solve these challenges while also optimizing their IT for cloud-based offerings.

Mark Harrison, managing director, Digital Production Partnership:

“More and more sectors are under pressure to offer real-time, or near-real-time services, and the media sector is no different. Speed, efficiency, flexibility and security are fast becoming essential for media businesses, and interconnected cloud services can offer all of these. The DPP believes services such as these will revolutionize the media industry in the next few years.”

 Tony Bishop, vice president, Equinix:

“Disruption is creating opportunity and risk in the media and entertainment industry. Businesses are realizing they need increased performance, agility and efficiency in their digital supply chain if they are to drive innovation. EMCEE enables a new global standard for production and distribution where these opportunities can be fully realized.”

Components of the EMCEE ecosystem that enable this transformation include Equinix interconnection offerings across Platform Equinix™, network density, access to multiple clouds utilizing the Equinix Cloud Exchange™ and access to billions of consumers leveraging CDNs in Equinix International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers. In tests conducted in Equinix’s global Solution Validation Centers™, video streaming applications that flowed through Equinix experienced 47 percent lower network latency. The test results also show that Equinix customers save, on average, more than 25 percent on network bandwidth costs by aggregating Internet traffic delivery to improve performance and scalability.

Some key facts include:

• Today’s consumers expect reliable, on-demand access to bandwidth-heavy digital content such as video, apps and online games. To meet consumer expectation, digital media and entertainment companies need an interconnected neutral ecosystem of content companies, advertising networks and content delivery services, accessible via secure, direct connections.

• As media becomes commoditized in the digital era, new business models are increasingly focused on innovation and efficiency across the production cycle – and value creation at the point of engagement, where end-users expect high quality service on every device, all the time, everywhere. To capture the opportunity, businesses are streamlining production workflows, reducing time and cost, and expanding distribution capabilities to tap into billions of smart TVs and devices around the globe.

• Built on Interconnection Oriented Architecture™ (IOA™), EMCEE efficiently improves network and application performance, security and end-user satisfaction. IOA directly and securely interconnects clouds, networks, business ecosystems and data at the edge, providing virtual control and transparency across the world’s most globally interconnected data centers, within the largest cloud and network provider-neutral marketplaces.
• Equinix global interconnection platform also provides media and entertainment companies with industry leading solutions including Equinix Cloud Exchange which provides direct access major cloud service providers including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Office 365 and IBM Softlayer in 21 markets globally, and Equinix Performance Hub™ and Equinix Data Hub™ which help develop faster, more efficient content creation workflows.