Broadcast Tech Festival: Talking All Things Cloud and Data ☁️

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining Broadcast Tech Festival to talk about one of my favourite topics: Cloud and Data.

I’ve spent much of my career helping organisations move from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, designing and scaling platforms that drive real business value. So being part of this conversation was both energising and deeply relevant to the challenges and opportunities our industry is facing.

It was fantastic to share the stage with Jake Bickerton (Broadcast Tech Fest), Adam Downey (Sky), and Sam Ross (BBC), as we explored how cloud technology continues to revolutionise the way media is created, stored, and delivered.

💡 A Few Key Takeaways

💾 Many organisations are still sweating their on-premises assets before making the move to cloud. The reasons vary cost, complexity, or simply a lack of confidence in the migration process but this hesitation often slows innovation.

🎬 Cloud is already transforming virtual production, improving collaboration and unlocking new efficiencies. Productions that once required vast physical infrastructure can now be run remotely with flexible, scalable compute power.

⚠️ When cloud programmes fail, it’s often not due to the technology itself but to poor data quality, governance gaps, or missing skills. Success depends on more than tools; it relies on people and processes that are ready to adapt.

🎥 How Cloud Is Powering Modern Media

The shift to cloud is no longer theoretical. The global media and entertainment cloud market is projected to grow to over $21 billion by 2030, driven by streaming, content automation, and AI-enabled workflows.

Across the industry, cloud is enabling new possibilities that simply weren’t feasible on traditional infrastructure.

Here are just a few examples of where it’s making a difference:

📦 Archive Storage: At the BBC, we recently archived 100 years of content over 25 petabytes of data to the cloud. This move has made decades of creative history both accessible and secure for future generations.

🎥 Virtual Cloud Production: Entire production environments can now run in the cloud, connecting teams across continents. This approach reduces travel, lowers costs, and dramatically increases production agility.

⚙️ Compute and Platforms: Cloud-based compute is powering data-intensive tasks such as rendering, media analytics, and high-performance simulations. Scalability means capacity can grow or shrink on demand, reducing waste and cost.

🤖 AI Services: Artificial intelligence is becoming an essential part of content operations. From automated metadata tagging and transcription to content recommendation and rights management, AI is enabling smarter, faster, and more personalised media experiences.

A recent Deloitte report found that 80% of media executives see cloud and AI as critical to future competitiveness. The question is no longer if cloud will transform media, but how quickly organisations can adapt to capture its benefits.

🚀 Top Tips for Moving to the Cloud

If you’re starting or scaling your cloud journey, here are some practical lessons that consistently make the difference between success and frustration:

1. Get executive sponsorship. Cloud transformation must be part of the wider business strategy, not just an IT initiative. Without top-level commitment, progress will stall.

2. Fix your data first. As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Clean, well-governed data is the foundation for reliable analytics and future AI innovation.

3. Stabilise before you innovate. Generative AI and advanced analytics cannot succeed without solid infrastructure and data pipelines. Focus on getting the basics right before scaling experiments.

4. Bring people on the journey. Upskilling, cross-skilling, and change management are essential. Cloud transformation succeeds when teams understand and embrace the new way of working.

5. Build in security, governance, and cost control from day one. The cloud provides flexibility, but that flexibility needs strong guardrails.

6. Start small, prove value, then scale. Early wins build confidence and momentum. Demonstrating measurable success helps win both hearts and minds across the organisation.

According to Gartner, over 60% of cloud initiatives fail to meet their goals due to people and process challenges rather than technology. That statistic reinforces the need to focus as much on cultural readiness as on technical capability.

Cloud and data are more than technologies; they are enablers of creativity, innovation, and resilience. When combined with the right strategy, skills, and culture, they unlock new possibilities for storytelling, collaboration, and connection across the industry.

The future of media is already in the cloud and it’s only getting brighter.