T3Media has integrated its cloud-based T3 Library Manager content management solution with Amazon Web Services (AWS), so that common clients can seamlessly connect to their Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier accounts. Mark Lemmons, T3Media's CTO, explained to me that the company's content provider clients gain a new level of scale and control over their storage and compute resources with the Amazon integration.

This is valuable, because as Mark noted, clients' needs for both storage and computing resource planning can be very challenging, depending on particular distribution needs, device compatibility, unusual programming events, etc. These requirements match up to AWS's key strengths in cloud-based on-demand storage and computing.

Mark envisions Amazon helping provide a "federated" storage model where clients can store digital files at one of T3Media's facilities and/or in S3. Regardless of where the files are, they would be accessible in T3 Library Manager's workflow.

An example Mark provided is of a content owner that has to quickly transcode tens of thousands of videos already stored in S3. Using T3 Library Manager, it would be able to create the workflow including tapping transcode resources either at Amazon or one of its partners such as Zencoder and creating metadata. All existing T3Media APIs are fully functional with Amazon as well so no new custom development is required.

The integration underscores the important role that cloud-based apps, storage and computing are continuing to play in helping move massive volumes of premium video online to be viewed on multiple connected devices. Major content providers, especially with large libraries, face a daunting level of complexity, potentially involving a lot of capex and opex. Integrations like this one, between T3Media and AWS, help to lower content providers' startup and maintenance expenses, in turn creating more business model flexibility.