Cutting Through the BS of Corporate Video! Episode 5 | Content Factory and the Business

Here we are again with Episode 5 in our series on “Cutting Through the BS of Corporate Video“!

In this episode, together with Jeff Sengpiehl, The Post Doctor, we get into the business side of the Enterprise Video Content Factory: backup versus archive, the storage supply chain crisis driving hardware costs and lead times through the roof, and why IT, legal, and compliance are partners, not obstacles. We also look at what it actually takes to move video traffic on a corporate network, and why the content factory needs to integrate with the business systems broadcasters never touch.

Watch the episode here (don’t forget to share, like, subscribe, etc.!):

Join the discussion on Varde’s LinkedIn page and stay tuned for the upcoming episodes where we also bring in manufacturers and end-customers!

Takeaways

• Backup and archive are not the same thing. Backup answers “what if I lose it” through disaster recovery and business continuity. Archive answers “what do I have, and can I use it in 10 years.”
• Corporate archives are typically fragmented across departments with no coherent way to assess relevance or value, which means organizations may be keeping content they do not need and losing content that matters.
• Archive has a financial asset argument that enterprise organizations rarely apply, unlike media, where archive content has a clear market price.
• The AI buildout has consumed hyperscaler demand for storage hardware, driving nearline drive lead times from weeks to over a year and pushing server costs up four to five times. Storage budgets and timelines set before this shift may no longer be valid.
• Tape is now a strategic storage tier, not just a cheap one. LTO10 changes the speed argument, but it is not backward compatible, so tape decisions are migration decisions.
• Cloud-only and on-premise-only mandates are both risk decisions, not just cost decisions. The content factory should support whatever mix of cloud, on-premise, and hybrid the organization’s risk appetite requires, not force a single choice.
• IT, legal, and compliance are partners with real institutional reasons for their rules, not decision-makers to route around. Bringing them in early avoids the six-month delay that comes from surfacing objections right before contract signature.
• Corporate networks are not built for video traffic the way broadcast networks are. Moving video at scale over a corporate network requires deliberate planning with IT, not an assumption that existing infrastructure will handle it.
• Corporate content factories need to integrate with business systems broadcasters never touch, including CRM, ERP, and PMP, driven by the enterprise need to track cost and performance per campaign, not just per broadcast.

Full transcript

Lightly edited for readability. Filler words and false starts removed.

Introductions (0:07)

Jeff Sengpiehl: Jeff Sengpiehl. I’ve got decades in media technology, starting back at ABC and going all the way into AI. Along the way, broadcast engineering, post-production, systems integration, facilities build-out. I’ve had CTO and high-level engineering roles across post and storage: Light Iron, Chainsaw, KeyCode, Qualstar. Today I’m working as a consultant and fractional CTO as The Post Doctor. It’s vendor neutral, focused on production, post, infrastructure, live storage, asset management, expanding markets, and workflow integration. I’ve been involved with SMPTE, HPA, and SBE. I also publish and podcast under The Post Doctor.

Eivind Sandstrand: And I’m the founder and principal at Varde Media Solutions. Varde is a new, small, but growing little boutique consulting outfit. We’re also a solution reseller and a solution builder, as opposed to a traditional systems integrator. What’s unique about us is that we focus exclusively on non-broadcast clients. What we do is help our customers build the kind of media operation they truly need in order to meet the actual business objectives of creating, managing, and publishing the content, without dragging them down that rabbit hole of traditional broadcast engineering. And those of you who know what I mean by that, you know what I mean by that.

Backup vs. archive (1:29)

Jeff: All right, let’s get into a little bit more on the technology side. I always love to talk about archive, value, technology, and cost. What about backups of corporate video? They’ve built up a content factory and they’ve got a lot of stuff in there. How should we think about backups of corporate video?

Eivind: Well, I think one of the important things is we have to have a deep understanding that backup and archive are not the same thing. Having an episode of I Love Lucy is different than having the camera masters from the film shoot for I Love Lucy. They still have those things, they’re 75 years old, they have both of them, but an archive means I’ve got this piece that I can then use again in the same format. If I’ve got a backup and that becomes an archive, that’s different.

Backup and archive are not the same thing. An archive means I’ve got this piece that I can use again in the same format. A backup is the “what if I lose it” conversation.

Eivind Sandstrand

There’s also the concept of one being the preservation of value, the other a loss-protection strategy built on copying. The backup answer is the “what if I lose it” conversation, and that goes to two concepts: disaster recovery and business continuity. Disaster recovery is “my building burned down, I can continue the work after I rebuild the building and put the stuff back.” That may take 18 months depending on permits. Business continuity means I’ve got a deadline for a production due in 7 days, I’ve lost the building, how do I still continue to do that? The archive is answering the question of what do I have and can I use it in 10 years. Completely different concepts, different metadata, different retention rules.

Corporate archives are something each department has a different concept of how to handle. They’re all over the place, different formats, different storage locations. Oh yeah, that’s in the cabinet in the Iowa office, in the basement storage building. That’s not necessarily helpful, because if you don’t have anything coherent on how to figure out where it is or what relevance it has, you may also be keeping stuff you don’t need to keep.

Jeff: Sometimes people have shelves and shelves of stuff that really should just be in the dumpster. But what’s not supposed to be in the dumpster may have tremendous value. And that’s effectively your institutional knowledge. A content factory can normalize that, make it easy to ingest and figure out, so you can harvest that value and reuse it. It’s a financial asset argument for archive. And it’s more true in enterprise than it is in media, because in enterprise you never put a value to it. In media, I can pay $3.25 for an episode of I Love Lucy and stream it off my browser right now. It has an actual value.

Eivind: So what kind of archives exist for corporate video, and what should actually be considered?

Jeff: Well, some of the most commonly used ones, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, seriously, those are not backup archives, period. They’re not suitable for that in any kind of way, and it should be kept far away from a content factory. They are part of the ecosystem out there today and they need to be brought in, these archives need to be consolidated. Depending on preference and perhaps regulatory requirements, a cloud-based, in-house, or hybrid solution may be the right fit.

These days, in-house tape storage is perhaps the least expensive, but is also definitely the slowest and at times the most complicated, but can be integrated into a content factory. On the other hand, a cloud-based, hybrid, or multi-tier solution can also work really well, and if designed properly together with the right kind of workflows, can be very expeditious, but it comes with a little bit more cost and, of course, retrieval risk. These are very important considerations.

Eivind: And the other day you mentioned something like, if you’re not able to assess a value on everything you have, there’s no point in actually having an archive for it.

Jeff: The cost of maintaining that archive needs to be seen against what you actually have. And if you’re just guessing, that’s packrat syndrome. What’s the rule, if you haven’t touched anything for six months after you moved in and it’s still sitting in boxes, you may not really need it. Definitely no more than six years, I know that.

Supply chain and hardware (6:44)

Eivind: You’re closer than me to the hardware side. Supply chain is very much in the news these days. So what’s going on there? Because I don’t know if a lot of corporate or enterprise buyers understand what’s going on there.

Jeff: Sure. The too-long-didn’t-watch version is AI needs have caused hyperscalers to consume a lot of the storage supply chain and a lot of the server component supply chain, and corporate video is collateral damage. Film and television is also collateral damage. Nearline hard drives are effectively sold out. There are three major manufacturers, two have committed their entire 2026 production line, literally going to warehouses to go to hyperscalers, they will not sell to anyone else. You’ve gone from a few weeks of lead time to a year or more. Reporting has put the largest capacity drives as far out as two years. Pricing has followed, some places are talking about 45 to 50% up on drives alone.

RAM and NAND are hugely squeezed at this point. Certain RAM sizes aren’t available. If you were looking to do 4×16 gigs, now you need to buy 4x64s, and those prices have spiked. So a server that could have cost between $5,000 and $10,000 is now costing between $40,000 and $50,000. It’s a huge problem.

One of the things I’ve talked to people about is, if you get a quote for storage, generally the storage manufacturer will only give you 30 days, sometimes only 15 days of validity on a quote. So I’ve told people, get your quote on storage now. The rest of the workflow with servers, we may let that wait, but buy your storage now before that price continues to go up, because the pricing there has gone up faster than unleaded gasoline.

If you’ve got a budget for what it’s going to cost to enlarge your content factory in the future, that budget space may not exist at the price, or even on the date, of your plan. That’s a cost line and a schedule risk.

Jeff Sengpiehl

What that means for your content factory is that if you’ve got a budget for what it’s going to cost to enlarge it in the future, that budget space may not exist at the price, or even on the date, of your plan. That’s not just a schedule risk, it’s a cost line and a schedule risk. You can’t depend on the old supply chain concepts still being there.

This is also why tape is now very strategic rather than just cheap. It’s kind of a misnomer to say tape is slow, old tape is slow. LTO10 can deliver media pretty quickly, and there are now ways to do things like RAIL, redundant array of independent libraries, and put that all behind a head that delivers it as an S3 bucket or object bucket. It’s not in the same demand curve, some manufacturers have realized they can charge a little more for tape and that’s starting to go up a bit, but the cost per terabyte isn’t even close. You’re able to get to a large amount of space, and the air gap gives you the security that makes it happy, especially for folks with IT-heavy concepts inside their enterprise organizations.

The other piece is you’ve got to have the right guidance on how you size the tier-one storage, how you size the tape storage, how you size the nearline possibly in the middle, to allow that to work correctly for the way media processes through your content factory. Having a management layer that does that trick is going to be critical. It needs to understand: I’ve got this much media, it needs to be in this place at this time, transcoded in this way, what’s that going to cost in terms of storage, when do I need to have it there, and how soon does the project already in process that’s taking up that space need to be moved to less expensive disk or tape storage.

The other thing to look for: LTO10 is a whole brand-new thing, that’s why it’s faster, but it’s not backward compatible. So tape decisions made with existing tape are a migration decision. Don’t assume a new drive is going to read all your old tape, don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise, I spent months in the tape industry, this is the case. Get quotes with explicit dates, plan your procurement two to four quarters ahead of your need, and design that tiering so that if a disk order goes late, it’s not going to stall your entire project.

Eivind: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I’ll throw in another aspect of the consideration when you’re thinking about storage, and it’s the business risk element of it. It’s very tempting to just flat out say, cloud is never permitted, or we’re only going to be in cloud. There are many cloud storage providers out there, it’s a very competitive market, you can get good pricing and good performance. But I like to think there are three types of money: the money other people pay you, the money you pay other people to do things for you so you can get money from other people again, and then the money you may have to pay someone if you mess up. That’s the risk money.

There are three types of money: the money other people pay you, the money you pay other people to get money from other people again, and the money you have to pay someone if you mess up. That’s the risk money.

Eivind Sandstrand

Actuaries do math on this kind of stuff, airlines do it, and maybe your organization should do something similar, because as you consider the tightening of regulations, especially overseas, some companies have started saying an all-cloud solution carries too much of that cost and too much of that risk. Figuring out your business’s appetite for risk versus cost should also play into the decision of whether you’re going cloud, on-premise, or hybrid. And the content factory should support the outcome of those evaluations and analyses. If the content factory or the solution you’re choosing is forcing you into one or the other, it’s not a good solution, because things are going to change. Hopefully this supply chain crisis will be over one day, and you need to keep moving on from that.

Jeff: I think one other thing to note there is cloud doesn’t necessarily have to mean the major hyperscalers. There are small data centers out there that will stand up an LTO library and deliver it as S3. I’m working with a few now where you can put a smaller amount of data in without the egress costs you’d expect from a hyperscaler. You can get there with some middle-of-the-road solutions, especially while you’re waiting for other things to happen, because a lot of those things are pretty quick to start up.

The role of IT, legal, and compliance (14:48)

Jeff: You spent a number of years dealing with IT and building out those sort of structures. What do you say the role is of corporate IT and compliance, and what do we have to do to navigate these landscapes?

Eivind: It’s a great question, and as a consultant I’ve run into it in many different forms. Sometimes they’re the ones who drive the initiatives, that can be good, can be less good, but the thing to understand is that IT, legal, and compliance exist to protect the primary business. The solution we’re trying to put in is there to help the primary business. Therefore, these are some of my primary partners. However, as we said in an earlier segment, they’re not necessarily the system owners or the owners of the strategy behind a video content factory. Treat them as partners and the conversation gets easier.

Beyond their own internal rules, and in my experience most IT people are super skilled, whenever they put down rules there’s usually a good reason for it. Understand what those rules are, understand what other regulations exist that could carry real business risk if violated. These are obstacles that are immovable objects. You’re not going to get past them. You can try to sneak your way past them, but the moment you get found out, you’ve lost all credibility and trust, and you will be out.

Jeff: No question.

Eivind: So you’ve got to work through them and with them, not around them. Get familiar with these requirements early on. Again, they’re not a decision maker, they’re an influencer, but you’ve got to understand where they come from and address them explicitly with every manufacturer that’s part of the solution set. Bring the manufacturers to the table if you have to, in a kumbaya session, to make sure IT and legal feel fuzzy and warm, because if you don’t do it early in the process, they’re going to do it the day before they sign the contract, and suddenly you’re looking at a six-month delay.

Practical steps: compile the documentation that makes it easy for IT to find what they’re looking for, and act as the translator between the video world and their world, since these terms don’t automatically move from one side to the other. Do this once, and you’ll find you stop being the person asking for exceptions and instead become the person who brought them the complete answer. So partnership is the deal, but also understand why they exist and play to that.

Moving files and streams: broadcast networks vs. corporate networks (17:45)

Eivind: So what does an enterprise actually need to do to move the files and streams involved in video? This is very different than moving documents, Word documents and spreadsheets, around.

Jeff: It is, and this goes back to that concept of broadcaster versus corporation. Broadcasters move huge files and streams of video. A corporation’s network exists to serve the business reasons inside the company. A broadcaster’s primary business is moving these files and streams very fast, so their networks are purpose-built for that. Corporations have LANs and WANs and all that other stuff, often with a decent amount of capability and capacity, but the pipes weren’t built for video. IT isn’t going to want to let video traffic interrupt everything else running on the network.

This goes back to a client we talked to years ago, where they went from an SDI video cable environment over to video over IP, and in the process, because the ownership of that physical cabling changed from being a video function to being an IT function, IT looked at it and said, this isn’t going to work, you can’t do what you were doing here. So it needs to be thought about prior to trying to put the factory in, as to how you’re going to construct this.

Eivind: Yeah, it’s kind of a funny dichotomy that in a broadcasting corporation they’re not going to let the corporate things interfere with the video, and in a corporate they’re not going to let the video interfere with the corporate. So we often find in many cases IT and the networking teams need to be educated just as much as they need to be consulted, because the common starting position is often, we can build that with what we already have. Well, now you may not be able to, there may be intricate little things in the network settings that could really mess things up. But it’s important to understand that position isn’t arrogance, it’s usually correct for every other workload they’ve ever supported. But the moment you come in with things like video over IP and ST 2110, you really need to have a deep conversation with these people, because it can have significant impact, and you don’t want the content factory to be faltering at the end of this because you didn’t work closely enough with IT. Piloting and testing stuff is probably a really good idea as well, to ensure you can actually push video through all this.

Business systems integration (20:39)

Eivind: How does the difference between a typical company’s business systems and a broadcaster’s business systems affect this media supply chain or content factory?

Jeff: Well, as we’ve kind of talked about, every organization other than broadcasters and video-centric folks like post houses, video isn’t their primary business. They built things, they have tools, they have processes needed to fulfill the mission of getting the business done. Beyond their specialized applications, engineering tools, legal case management, patient records in some cases, almost every company’s concerned with sales, marketing, resource management. That means they’re using DAM, digital asset management systems, and assets aren’t necessarily what we’re thinking about, CRM, customer resource management, ERP, employee resource planning, and project management systems, PMP systems, they have those in place. These people talk through Slack, they have email, they have chats and video on Teams and Zoom, they generate huge amounts of visual content along the way, most of which no one has actually figured out if someone’s going to own. In some cases, a team’s meeting between the CEO and the CFO, no one wants to own that, we want to make sure that’s not recorded. So figuring all that out is important.

Eivind: Yeah. And these types of clients, whether financial services, education, or healthcare, they’re going to expect the content factory to integrate with their business systems, not only to deliver content to where it actually gets used, a DAM system, a web CMS system, or a product information management system, but they also want to track everything. It goes back to one of the first questions in the first segments we did, where does the content factory start? It starts even before you’ve turned on the first camera. It starts with the marketing planning, the budgeting, and organizations want to track the effort and the results of all this stuff.

Another part that broadcast people often underestimate is that they want to understand what the costs of these videos are, department by department, campaign by campaign, because they insist on knowing what works. We’re not selling advertisement in a news broadcast, we’re selling Q-tips or towels or whatever it may be, and we want to know what works so we can do more of that. These are integrations you don’t commonly see in the broadcast world, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever quite seen that. So a different set of conversational and analysis skills are needed, and designs are needed in order to build them. The technology needs to be open to building these kinds of integrations as well.

Closing (23:58)

Jeff: Yep, definitely. That brings everything right back to where we started. The reason corporate video is BS as a category is it’s not a media problem with a business wrapper. It’s a business problem that happens to involve media.

Corporate video is not a media problem with a business wrapper. It’s a business problem that happens to involve media.

Jeff Sengpiehl

Eivind: Yeah. So I’d say the one thing to take away from this episode is that the tools aren’t the hard part any longer. The hard part is the language, the nomenclature, the ownership, the process. And I don’t think there are manufacturers who are able to sell those to you.

Jeff: No. And I say this with love in my heart, but most tech vendors that I know, they’re trying to sell you a piece of their version of the corporate video, whatever fashion their understanding of it is. It goes back to one of our earlier segments when we talked about, is this really real? Someone still has to walk the client through: what do you have, what do you really need, and how are you going to build this thing, the content factory that enables your organization to use video as a strategic asset. And that’s a conversation that should happen long before the technology is picked.

Eivind: No question. And in the coming episodes, we’ll be bringing some manufacturers and some integrators in. Let’s show what we’re talking about rather than just describing it. Please hit those like and subscribe buttons. And if you’ve got questions about the concepts around this, please hit us up in the comments. Both of us will have our contact information popping up shortly, and we look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for joining us here today.

Jeff: Thank you very much, everyone.