ASIA-PACIFIC BROADCASTING

LONDON – Independent content producers can now colla-borate and create world-class content without incurring heavy financial outlays. Two new initiatives leveraging the power of cloud computing to provide low-cost compute resources for compositing, digital effects and animation rendering have been launched — one in London and the other in Singapore.
The first is a £10-million (US$16-million) agreement between Beijing-based XiKing Culture Media and UK company Soho Data Holdings to establish a data centre and render farm, aimed at “creative video and TV industries”.
The signing of the agreement, witnessed by the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and the Deputy Premier of China, Li Keqiang, last month, will fund the development of a carrier-neutral, 4,000sqm high-specification data centre, designed to support the latest technology demands for the video animation, 3D TV and Internet TV industries.
Said Ye Maoxi, president of Xiking Culture Media: “This deal establishes a bridge between China and the UK for the development of exciting new business opportunities. Soho Data provides the platform to build a new generation of 
Chinese-British partnerships within the creative, cultural and media industries.”
The new centre, to be based in London’s media heartland Soho, will offer a full range of data centre services, from co-location through managed services to high-yield computational capacity. It will also be able to support state-of-the-art rendering applications. Soho Data said, aside from the convenience of having a data hub close by, the centre offers highly competitive rates, thanks to the shorter data circuits that local locations provide.
John Mills, CEO of Soho Data Holdings, said: “This investment enables us to offer an unrivalled service to London’s creative and visual-effects companies, enabling them to create, store and produce digital content quickly, easily and cost-effectively.”
In the other development in Asia, Beijing-based Gobi Partners, a digital media and technology venture firm in Asia, and Singapore’s EDB Investments, is investing US$6 million in Cloudpic Global Inc, a “pioneering leader” in cloud computing applications for the digital entertainment industry.
The funds will be used to form Cloudpic Singapore, which will then go to market in Asia where the demand is especially strong for high-quality local content.
“Production of entertainment content is undergoing a massive shift. Artists want to work from anywhere,” explained Cloudpic co-founder and CEO Richard Chuang, who is also an Academy Award-winning pioneer of the CG and animation industry in the US, and ex-Dreamworks Animation executive.
“We created the Cloudpic platform to connect studios, artists, producers and invest-ors from across the world to develop and produce [content] for inter-national distribution. It effectively removes barriers, and connects talent pools, markets and investment funding from across geographical and cultural regions.”
Timothy Yiu, press contact for Cloudpic, told APB that Cloudpic is creating a technology foundation that will enable digital content production to take place securely in the cloud.
He added: “To do this, we need to solve a more fundamental problem than cloud storage or computation. The main technical challenge is how to securely manage the artists and the digital assets of a large-scale production when everyone is spread out.”
The Cloudpic production platform will also offer real-time transparency — meaning, producers and investors can see what is happening to their projects and manage their teams and studios accordingly. “We will enable new studios in Asia, including China and India, to join in world-class projects in collaboration with major producers, and we will create new content investment opportunities for locally produced content,” said Yiu.
While it is not Cloudpic’s current intent to build data centres, the company believes that there is a lot of computational and storage capa-city in the cloud, and it is Cloudpic’s intent to leverage third-party capital investments.
Yiu revealed: “We have a short list of potential partners that we are in discussions with, but we hope to stay agnostic. Our techno-logy is cross-platform, and it allows us and our client community to shift our assets to wherever it makes the most sense.”
Wai Kit Lau, a partner at Gobi Partners, told APB: “It is no longer enough to keep the creative pro-cess within the physical walls of studios. Instead, artists in different places shall collaborate to culturally enrich creative concepts, manage cost and shorten time-to-market. Cloud computing can empower artists to build ‘virtual studios’ to achieve this goal.”
Will cloud computing combined with Web 2.0 technologies be the production platform of the future ?  Will the two initiatives be  warmly received?
Mock Pak Lum, CEO of Singa-pore-based cloud computing technologies provider Aksaas, said: “I think they are excellent initiatives as they bring together the best technologies available today to enable independent content producers to collaborate and create world-class content.
“Cloud computing provides low-cost ‘pay-as-you-use’ compute resources for compositing, digital effects and animation rendering, with Web 2.0 technologies for low-cost collaboration on the Web and mobile platforms. This is the production platform of the future which promises to reduce the cost of production for content companies in this evolving digital media marketplace.”
On a more cautious note, Toong Soo Wei, general manager of J Team Productions, one of Singapore’s premiere and pioneer movie production houses, helmed by renowned local TV comedian and film director, Jack Neo, said that in order for the Cloudpic platform to succeed in Asia, the digital entertainment industry in the region must first be allowed to grow.
He said: “Digital entertainment is still a very new platform to Asia ... for it to be widely accepted in Asia, a lot of education and promotion is required.
“There is a need to make digi-tal entertainment easily accessible as compared to traditional methods of content production. More funds must be given out to attract companies to go digital so as to create a trend for it. This, I believe, will be a long process.”
John Galvin, director of Post Production for Bangkok-based Oriental Post, said that the idea of the virtual studios or data centres is not totally new, as post-production facilities have been sending data from system to system for some time.
“The benefit of these initiatives is that studio artists would be able to get access to a wide range of software applications, perhaps, at a fraction of the cost. It may also bring down the cost of hardware,” Galvin said. “You would need a very good, reliable Internet connection to maintain the speed of efficiency to meet client’s deadlines. Ideally, it may be suitable depending on the nature of the project.”

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