As the dust settles after IBC, life at Sony Media Cloud Services has continued to be frenzied. We’ve been following up with all the new potential customers that we met during the show, watching our new, self-service sign-up accounts take off, and meeting the accelerating requests from our neighbor, Sony Pictures. All very nice things to be busy with – the air is buzzing. The range of interest at IBC was great – from individual producers to marketing agencies to broadcasters. We talked about uploading and sharing, media asset management, archiving, disaster recovery, camera workflows and, of course, collaborating, logging, reviewing, and rough cutting. Overall, it was an excellent show for Sony with 4k and Ci being big hits. We were featured in ‘What Caught my Eye’ and picked out by TVB Europe as ‘Best of IBC 2013’ – making it a great debut for us in Europe.

Meanwhile, in the lab… our evil engineering geniuses tell me that they’ve made some sort of step-change breakthrough in transcoding which radically speeds up our ingest processing for files even when our users are throwing hundreds of files at the system all at once. I’m looking forward to seeing this in action and have a personal stash of ‘fun’ files to try out on them.

I had an analyst interview this week and was reflecting on how much has changed in the cloud world over the last year. A year ago, I had a lot more hypothetical questions and conversations with customers about security, privacy, cost, and practicalities. Already – I’ve seen a huge shift as more people in our industry have been exposed to the cloud. Consumers, businesses, and enterprises have developed a high degree of confidence in the cloud as a mainstream part of any business. One customer was telling us that a treasured employee is relocating with her husband from LA to London. With Ci they realized they could still let her do her job. She can move with her husband and continue to work for her employer, a win-win for both parties!

And on the Sony family news front, Sony’s wireless camera adapter is launching globally later this month with Ci as a fundamental part of the overall offering. We can’t wait to see what sort of activity this generates and we’re looking forward to expanding our user-friendly camera integrations based on what we learn from the adapter launch and our own mobile Ci Capture app prototype. I’m looking forward to working with Sony to see where else we can ‘cloud enable’ their hardware and software to improve the user experience.

Meanwhile, it rained this past week in LA – I think the first time in 6 months. The weather reports have been full of ‘storm forecasts’, but the shower was so brief, I didn’t actually see it happen. As a Brit, I’m finding it relatively amusing, but at least for now – LA is cloudy… which is just how we like it.