LAS VEGAS — Amazon Web Services is getting the first big customer announcement of re:Invent 2017 out of the way early. The public cloud market leader has signed Turner, the Time Warner company behind CNN and Cartoon Network, to a “preferred cloud provider” deal that will likely take advantage of new cloud video tools announced yesterday.
As part of the deal, Turner has “reengineered its end-to-end media supply chain on AWS,” it said in a press release. Turner plans to move a 15-petabyte (15,000 terabytes) library of CNN archival video into AWS as part of the deal, and use some of the machine-learning services offered by AWS to help customize content for its viewers.
The Turner deal — which probably won’t be the only new customer paraded before re:Invent attendees before the week is over — will be announced a day after AWS rolled out five new video services from its Portland-based AWS Elemental unit. As everyone is probably aware at this point, media companies have been slower than others to take advantage of new technologies, but that’s finally starting to change as cloud companies pursue companies that haven’t updated their technology strategies in some time.
The two companies aren’t strangers: Turner presented last year at re:Invent on its use of AWS services for video streaming and production. It’s not clear how much of its total production workloads are moving over to AWS, but the “preferred cloud provider” language tends to mean that Turner reserves the right to use the services of other cloud providers, should it decide that makes sense.
