Old media — print, radio and film — are finally seeing that Silicon Valley is not some existential threat. Cloud technology can assist them as it has other industries, according to Brian Lillie (pictured), chief customer officer and executive vice president of technology services at Equinix Inc.

“Over the last two years, I think they’ve been the fastest-accelerating vertical using the cloud and interconnection to build their brand,” Lillie said of digital content media. The film industry in particular, with its productions requiring massive compute resources to appear and disappear after a short time, begs for the cloud’s agile resources.

“Wherever that set is, it’s ephemeral,” Lillie said. “You set up, and its big data needs, its high bandwidth, low latency; you’ve got to get the data, in some cases, centrally, but in some cases you’re processing it at the edge — it’s very cloud-like.”

Lillie spoke to Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during this week’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. (* Disclosure below).

Wave of future crests to cloud

Virtual reality and augmented reality are the wave of the future in film and will ratchet up Hollywood’s tech quotient and necessitate cloud even more, Lillie predicted.

“The massive bandwidth, the storage, the compute … because it’s no longer that you’re watching the movie in the third person — you are the movie, you are the experience, you’re in it, and that’s just going to require massive compute that in my opinion only the cloud can do,” he said.

Filmmakers on the high-level production tier need a hybrid environment that converges all networks and clouds to collaborate on VR and AR films, Lillie explained. Cloud providers and others must work to productize these solutions for those more comfortable with a camera than a code editor.

“How do we create the easy button for these folks to access these resources?” he asked.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the NAB Show. (* Disclosure: Western Digital is sponsoring theCUBE’s coverage at the show. Neither Western Digital nor other sponsors have editorial influence on content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE