MovieLabs 2030 Vision: How the Industry Can Meet It (and What Happens if It Doesn’t)

Fresh off the MovieLabs 2030 Forum naming its roster of inaugural members (including MASV!) back in March, we thought it a good time to gauge just how prepared the industry is to meet the MovieLabs 2030 Vision, along with how much progress has been made so far.

We also wanted to check in on some of the biggest challenges facing companies aiming to align with the 2030 Vision, the opportunities for those who get there, and what it all means for organizations in any industry who work with people and data.

Make sense? Good. Let’s get it.

• What is the MovieLabs 2030 Vision?
• Meeting the 2030 Vision: The Biggest Challenges
  • Is it possible to meet the 2030 Vision with a lift-and-shift model?
• What Else Needs To Be Done — and What if Time Runs Out?
  • ‘Creators are moving faster, and starting to eat their lunch’
• MASV: Designed With MovieLabs 2030 Vision in Mind

What is the MovieLabs 2030 Vision?

Originally published in 2019 by Motion Picture Laboratories (MovieLabs), the 2030 Vision plots out how organizations in content creation, post-production, VFX, distribution, and other elements of the media creation value chain can explore innovative technologies (and adopt them) through 10 guiding principles.

The technology focus is on cloud infrastructure, enhanced content protection through security by design, and software-defined workflows.

MASV CTO and CEO Majed Alhajry – the company’s technology, innovation, and software development leader, and someone well acquainted with the MovieLabs Vision – says the 2030 Vision applies to far more use cases than just media and entertainment (M&E).

“You can extend these principles into so many industries – really any workflow that involves data and humans,” he says. Any collaboration involving technology, data, and multiple steps require nimble tools capable of adjusting to new realities and new workflows – qualities not often associated with traditional on-premises infrastructure.

MovieLabs is a technology joint venture between major studios Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Paramount Pictures Corporation, Walt Disney Pictures, Warner Bros., and Universal Studios. It develops and recommends technology-enabled industry standards and specifications, such as its 2030 Vision, Digital Distribution Framework、 Common Security Architecture for Production.

Meeting the 2030 Vision: The Biggest Challenges

The biggest challenge of meeting the 2030 Vision, however is the prospect of lifting-and-shifting on-prem workloads to the cloud – a tempting (albeit usually misguided) approach for any organization with traditional on-prem workflows. This can generally be attributed to two factors: Mentality and technology.

Mentality is often the easy part: Even though some companies still face internal resistance to moving workflows to the cloud, this year’s NAB Show demonstrated its popularity with its focus on hybrid workflows involving a mix of cloud and on-prem tools.

The technology challenges, however, can be a bit more… challenging.

Alhajry points to one recent production as an especially notable example of content producers meeting significant roadblocks when trying to align with the Vision.

“They tried to do all production in the cloud,” he says, but hit a snag during color grading, which required a physical workstation with ultra high-res reference monitors. “They just could not do that in the cloud. Technology is going to be a hurdle for some of these workflows, and it’s going to remain a challenge.”

Technology roadblocks in certain areas of the value chain, like the above, run deep. He also points to the nature of non-linear editors (NLEs) like Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro, which aren’t designed to be cloud-native and require files to be on a physical storage drive.

This proved another key challenge for the project mentioned above, which needed to copy and move files multiple times, with files landing in an expensive cloud-based network attached storage (NAS) with Premiere Pro running in a virtual machine for editing.

Similar challenges were recently noted by Netflix in its TechBlog.

“Even when workflows are fully digital, the distribution of media between multiple departments and vendors can still be challenging. A lack of automation and standardization often results in a labour-intensive process across post-production and VFX with a lot of dependencies that introduce potential human errors and security risks.

“Moving media into the cloud introduces new challenges for production and post ramping up to meet the operational and technological hurdles this poses. For some post-production facilities, it’s not uncommon to see a wall of portable hard drives at their facility, with media being hand-carried between vendors because alternatives are not available.”

Is it possible to meet the 2030 Vision with a lift-and-shift model?

While it is possible to meet the 2030 Vision using a lift-and-shift model, it’s much more expensive and inefficient than working with cloud-native tools.

“And they will get burned by it,” he says. “It has to be cloud-native – period.”

For that to be realistic from a media production standpoint, technology companies like Adobe will have to produce cloud-native, browser-based versions of their software – a little like when the traditional on-prem MS Office became the browser-based Office 365.

Similarly, companies like Apple and Google that own web browsers will also need to add certain standards to their products that don’t currently exist.

But pressuring companies to move on these realities isn’t something a single entity can do on its own: It will require an industry-wide push, Alhajry says.

“This is where the industry needs to extend beyond themselves,” he says. “Right now, for me to go and push a standard as a startup, that’s a steep hill to die on. But it’s different if you’re moving as an industry, and saying: ‘Look, browser makers, you need to adopt these standards so we can move our software to be cloud-native and work on a browser.’”

So What Else Needs To Be Done — and What if Time Runs Out Before 2030?

Here’s the good news: If the industry hasn’t met all (or even most) of the 2030 Vision’s 10 fundamental principles, you won’t turn into a pumpkin at midnight.

The main benefit of the Vision’s 10 guiding principles – including the requirement that all assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud; and that applications come to the media (and not the other way around) – are the action and conversation they’ve spurred, Alhajry says.

“I’m a big believer in setting goals to start the conversation, to force the conversation,” he explains. “That’s how I see the Vision: To force the conversation, rather than achieving a specific goal by a specific time frame. What happens if you don’t meet the 2030 time frame? We still learned a lot. And it has helped people wake up to the fact that things are changing quickly” thanks to the creator economy.

‘Creators are moving faster, and starting to eat their lunch’

Alhajry adds that large studios and others in the filmmaking and television industries have built a metaphorical moat around their industry by enacting and enforcing controls and standards around how media is captured and displayed, “right down to HDR standards.”

But that model, which seemed to work so well for years, is now dying a slow death.

“You force customers to buy stuff because you want to control the whole ecosystem, top to bottom, because of those high quality standards. But there’s this little thing that came along: It’s called YouTube. It’s called Instagram,” he explains, referencing recent Nielsen data that show YouTube now dominates U.S. TV viewership, at 25 percent market share. “Creators are moving faster (than Hollywood) and starting to eat their lunch.”

He chalks this up to generational factors, along with the ever-shrinking quality gap between major productions and creator videos recorded with powerful new smartphones and other gear instead of six-figure cinematic cameras.

“The gap is really shrinking,” he adds. “So as an industry, you need to wake up. And to wake up you need to remove all that friction, because you don’t have momentum anymore. The momentum is with the creators.”

Regaining that momentum will require a major effort by the big studios and others in that ecosystem to remove friction points and sometimes cumbersome standards that have become counterproductive as creator technology improves.

“Think about being nimble, think about APIs, think about cloud-native,” he says. “That’s the future. You’ve got to have APIs. They have to be open. You have to use open standards so everyone can interface with them.”