{"id":21688,"date":"2018-03-05T19:08:13","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T19:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the_future_of_content_delivery_and_management_is_crazy"},"modified":"2024-06-06T13:05:55","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T20:05:55","slug":"the_future_of_content_delivery_and_management_is_crazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudinary.com\/blog\/the_future_of_content_delivery_and_management_is_crazy","title":{"rendered":"The Future of Content Delivery and Management is Crazy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Let me take you back\u2026<\/h2>\n

From time immemorial, information and communication has been critical to society. Over time, the means and methods of communicating has evolved considerably, starting with storytelling amongst the early men to print in the 1600s.<\/p>\n

\"Newspaper\"<\/p>\n

Other influential means of communications also evolved, such as radio – which was invented by Gugliemo Marconi in 1895. The radio, I believe, began expansion of media as we know it today.<\/p>\n

\"Radio\"<\/p>\n

Then came the mechanical televisions in the 1800s and early 1900s. You can find out about them here<\/a>. The electronic television, invented in 1927 by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, paved the way for the future of electronic graphic media.<\/p>\n

Modern Media<\/h2>\n

Fast forward to 2018 and a lot has changed. Now we have the internet (you must have heard of it), which was born with the World Wide Web in 1990. The media and mass communication is still central to society with millions, if not billions, of gigabits of information flying around each day.<\/p>\n

How is the majority of this information conveyed across the internet? Mostly through digital media (of course). In the Hubspot article, 42 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2017<\/a>, it states that after<\/strong> three<\/strong> days, 65<\/strong> percent<\/strong> of people remember information if it involves an image<\/strong> compared to just<\/strong> 10<\/strong> percent<\/strong> if the information is just text<\/strong>**.** This explains why nearly 74 percent of social media marketers use visual assets (mostly images and videos) in their campaigns. Media goes a long way to show us how significant visual assets are to effective communication in the society.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong>

After 3 days, 65%<\/strong> of people remember information if it involves an image as against 10%<\/strong> if the information is just text<\/p><\/div>\n

How are media assets delivered online?<\/h2>\n

Next we need to consider how these assets are delivered online. To the average user, these media assets are simply uploaded from their device to the internet (including an awesome caption or tagline to support the post). The website does some magic and it is delivered to the internet, voila! The awesome post is ready.<\/p>\n

The website developers have to ensure these media assets not only suit the websites\u2019 specifications of size and quality, but also meet the user\u2019s context and are still optimized for viewing across multiple devices. Whew, that sounds like a lot of work!<\/p>\n

If media assets are to be delivered by a blog, for instance, they are included in the HTML script of the webpage and the server renders the page along with the images and\/or videos. Care is taken to ensure that images are of the right size (not too large) and of nice quality too. Any transformations required on the image are done with image editing tools and service prior to including it on the website.<\/p>\n

For videos, they are mostly uploaded to the server as is, using HTML5 video tags to fetch the videos and include features, such as controls. Sometimes the transformed images are uploaded to a content delivery network (CDN) and hauled back from there onto the webpage when requested.<\/p>\n

This works, but it really isn\u2019t efficient.<\/p>\n

So, what do we want?<\/h2>\n

What we want is a solution that delivers images transformed and optimized for any device (mostly mobile and web). These images also should be stored on a CDN to reduce server load and augment delivery across the web. Images should be transformed on-the-fly without the need of a third-party application.<\/p>\n

And we want a robust media management console to comfortably manage, organize and track media assets across various platforms.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, we want sheer control.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the solution?<\/h2>\n

Cloudinary<\/a> is a market leader in providing cloud-based image management solutions, ranging from image storage and transformation to image delivery. Cloudinary offers developers the opportunity to \u201cown\u201d<\/strong> their media asset delivery.<\/p>\n

Delivery of our images<\/h2>\n

Cloudinary touts an efficient image management system<\/a> that handles three core functionalities:<\/p>\n