Like many media companies, the BBC already uses a cloud-like network of 48,000 servers run by Akamai. These cache and distribute content around the world from a server as close to the end user as possible. Tod Paoletti, director of product marketing at Akamai, believes that what he calls the company’s ‘cloud overlay’ will become more popular as video streaming goes to high definition.

“You need to be as close to the end user as possible for them to have a good experience, particularly of massive events such as President Obama’s inauguration speech, which saw the greatest demand on our network ever,” Paoletti says. “With the recent March Madness college basketball games, four in five viewers went for highdefinition. Media companies will struggle if they don’t move beyond their own servers in just one or two locations.”

News International uses Akamai’s network but Ian Parr, the media giant’s head of architecture, says other parts of the business, primarily in Australia, are experimenting with Amazon’s cloud service to host content outside their own data centres. “Akamai distributes around 90% of our content, which can be cached from our servers,” Parr says. “We’re keeping a watching brief on both Amazon and Microsoft to see whether we might have more of our content hosted in the cloud.

“The rest can’t be cached because it’s dynamically built around individual preferences when people log on. We wouldn’t move everything into the cloud, certainly not mission-critical applications, but I think we might start by having our enterprise software available to staff from the cloud, to give greater working flexibility, and take it from there. We obviously have a lot to consider around News International’s extensive investment in data centres.”