The digital era has changed entertainment. The new entertainment venues based on a sophisticated technology base are currently providing immersive experiences to billions of customers across the globe. Looking at the major elements driving these systems will give us a clue to the inventions that are transforming media and entertainment.
Content Delivery Infrastructure
The most significant user experience of digital entertainment is the high-quality video streaming. The provision of this on the internet is based on content delivery networks (CDNs). CDNs are networks of distributed servers that are built to deliver media content to end-users reliably and fast.
Leader Akamai Technologies has more than 300,000 servers in 135 countries. This wide coverage enables it to convert videos to formats that viewers can easily watch and at bitrates that are near viewers. Akamai and others manage more than 50 percent of internet traffic, and this explains why entertainment giants such as Netflix incorporate their services.
Massive data centers focused on video encoding also enable on-demand streaming. Amazon Web Services credits its cloud infrastructure for empowering Netflix and others to scale flexibly to audiences. Google Cloud recently launched Media CDN for gaming and video delivery using its private fiber network and edge locations. These hyperscale facilities will become more important as 8K video streaming gains traction.
5G and edge computing further optimize by processing data closer to users. Such infrastructure will deliver more reactive experiences with the growth of gaming and virtual reality streaming.
Payment and Commerce Infrastructure
Monetizing digital experiences depends on enabling seamless value exchange. Entertainment platforms are integrating diverse purchase options and leveraging blockchain infrastructure to unlock new business models.
Mobile and digital wallet payment processing facilitated by companies like Stripe and Adyen allows for one-click purchases important for retaining users. Similarly, a payment solution provider for online casinos must deliver seamless transaction flows to maintain user engagement in fast-paced environments. Netflix and Spotify also enable in-app subscription billing on major app stores.
Cryptocurrency and NFTs are emerging as alternative payment rails thanks to blockchain infrastructure from providers. Services like Gala Games use this to create player-owned economies and digital asset ownership within games. Mainstream adoption of features like this could profoundly impact entertainment platforms.
Equally important, zero-trust cryptographic systems and confidential computing safeguard confidential user information and avoid fraud during these transaction streams. The leaders in entertainment rely on such security platforms as they increase business capacity.
Immersive Content Creation Technology
The development of content-creating tools gives more cinematic digital entertainment a chance. The Unreal Engine 5 of Epic enables creators to create 3D scenes with significant detail to compete with CGI movies using realistic digital humans such as those in The Mandalorian.
Combined with metaverse platforms, such environments also allow new forms of social entertainment. Roblox contains more than 50 million multiplayer games created by users and based on its tools and infrastructure. The popularity of interactive virtual worlds is shown in their recent alliances with entertainment brands.
Motion capture technology is also reaching new heights in replicating human movement digitally. Rokoko, whose smart suits were used in The Batman, combines sensor data with computer vision and machine learning algorithms to animate 3D models. This facilitates more lifelike characters and immersive experiences across digital entertainment, including video games and VR.
AI also shows increasing promise for automated content creation. Companies like Synthesia leverage powerful generative adversarial networks to produce completely computer-generated video based on a few images. This could expand the volume and personalization of digital entertainment content moving forward.
Automated Cloud Infrastructure
Building this technology stack at scale means turning this into an automated and secure cloud infrastructure. Contemporary entertainment systems are created as cloud-native, microservices systems.
It enables the capacity to be dynamically scaled to meet the spikes in usage, either due to new video games or bingeable series. The updating of content delivery networks is also made simpler as new edge locations are added through automation.
Leading providers like HashiCorp and Docker enable these capabilities through open source tools for provisioning infrastructure, deploying containerized microservices, and managing configuration.
Observability software is also critical for monitoring these complex environments. Companies like Datadog seamlessly integrate metrics, logs, and tracing data to provide real-time visibility into system health and performance. This helps optimize and troubleshoot issues rapidly.
The significance of cloud infrastructure management puts platforms that depend on partners such as Google Cloud and AWS. Others such as Netflix are also building large internal platforms to manage customization and costs such as its Netflix Open Connect content delivery network.
Emerging Trends Reshaping Digital Entertainment Infrastructure
Although it is currently used to power immersive streaming, the entertainment infrastructure will support even grander experiences in the next few years:
- Multi-platform streaming aggregation through services like Xumo stitches together content libraries into unified catalogs as audiences jump between smart TVs, consoles, and mobile devices.
- Remote production techniques adopted during the pandemic will likely continue. Cloud-based tools facilitate more efficient collaboration between creators over the internet rather than physically being together.
- As gaming intersects with social media, dedicated eSports streaming platforms and infrastructure will trend towards mainstream. It is the power of creating a community around competitive gaming that Amazon has recently used in acquiring Twitch.
- The use of 5G and edge computing will help in the faster adoption of cloud game services such as Google Stadia because it will enable responsive, low-latency video streaming. Streaming to any device of console quality experiences could have an enormous effect on access and use.
- There will be an increasing role of AI-generated media content. Companies such as Synthesia already produce synthetic video and audio that is realistic enough to allow new formats. The community of startups that is building such generative creation tools is worth following.
Technological underpinnings that allow the on-demand digital entertainment to happen become even more powerful with every passing year. Silicon Valley cloud structures and internet backbone upgrades are expensive to keep up with. However, the first-movers can gain immensely by adopting innovative formats. These are some of the new trends that both the traditional leaders of entertainment and the disruptors in the tech industry can exploit in the years to come with smart strategic choices.
