Media giant MGM signs multi-year deal with AWS to revamp its supply chain processes

US-based media company Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) has signed a multi-year deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that will see it revamp its distribution operations and migrate its entire content library to the public cloud.

The company claims to have one of the largest libraries of premium film and television content in the world, which it plans to migrate to the cloud as part of a wider overhaul of its media supply chain and distribution processes.

“Traditional media supply chains are highly decentralised, expensive to maintain, and rely on manual processes and third parties to distribute content to new and existing platforms,” said AWS and MGM in a joint statement, announcing the deal.

“MGM’s new cloud-based media supply chain will leverage AWS compute, serverless, storage, machine learning and media services to modernise its infrastructure.”

As part of this process, MGM has committed to using the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) to build a data lake that will be used to store information pertaining to the material’s content and ownership rights, which in turn will link to a microservices architecture that will assist with automating large portions of its media supply chain.

MGM also plans to make use of the AWS Lambda serverless computing offering and the cloud giant’s container technologies within its new-look supply chain so that it can transfer and process video for use by on-demand streaming services without having manually take care of the underlying infrastructure.

From a machine learning perspective, MGM will deploy Amazon Rekognition facial recognition technology to analyse, categorise and tag specific video frames with metadata to make it easier for its partners to find and license film and TV shows in the MGM portfolio.

Machine learning model creator, Amazon Sagemaker, will also be deployed by MGM to help the company predict content viewing and sales trends so they can more accurately predict how demand for the films and TV shows within its library will change over time.

Doug Rousso, executive vice-president and chief technology officer of MGM, said the over-arching aim of its technology tie-up with AWS is to streamline the processes involved in distributing its content worldwide.

“MGM has one of the world’s deepest libraries of premium film and television content, and we’re innovating in the cloud to improve how we get this extensive, rich content out to distributors around the world using scalable, microservices-based architectures,” he said.

“Our new cloud-based media supply chain will give us increased visibility into owned content, the ability to better inform our sales teams, and faster processing of licensing deal that will help us deliver more content experiences to viewers and grow new revenue opportunities.”

Greg Pearson, vice-president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS, added: “AWS’s proven performance and comprehensive set of cloud and professional services will help MGM succeed in its cloud transformation and create a complete, modern media supply chain for video.

“We look forward to expanding our work together to continue to drive innovation across this supply chain and deliver improved customer experiences to audiences around the world.”