over Their Personal Data?
2. State of the Art: Media, Cloud Computing and End-user
2.1. Media Landscape Reshaped
According to the Oxford Dictionary, ‘media’ is defined as the main means of mass communication: television, radio, newspaper, book, magazine, etc. The emergence of new technologies in the past, namely printing and the Internet, have revolutionized the traditional media industry thoroughly. Now, cloud computing is bringing another complete transformation.
As the information era has enabled market segmentation, the Internet era has enabled mass-customization with social media (Kilian et al., 2012). Altogether, the Internet, social media and cloud computing have altered the mass communication of traditional media by increasing the interaction between the media and the end-users, changing the roles of and relationships among different media stakeholders, and enabling the locational data spread.
Notably social media has turned traditional media from passive to responsive. In fact, the rise of social media has lead to the Internet going back to its initial purpose:
a platform that facilitates information exchange between its users. By definition, social media indicates “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideo-logical and technoideo-logical foundations of Web 2.0 to allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content” (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010).
Ever since it’s emergence, social media has fundamentally modified the distribu-tion of media and its business models by changing the way of communicadistribu-tion from one-to-many to many-to-many. It has made active users become co-producers by sharing their media content among themselves (Kilian et al., 2012). This change of media users’ behaviour has redefined the business practices of media companies.
Thus, Berman, Abraham, Battino, Shipnuck and Neus (2007) have predicted four potential business models for the future media industry: traditional, walled
commu-nities, content hyper-syndication and new platform aggregation. Their prediction on these segmented markets has come true today.
Besides, the mobile technology has expanded social media’s realm with features such as collection of location data as well as individual message delivery (Kaplan, 2012). The mobile social cloud computing paradigm has allowed end-users to co-produce, co-share and co-consume media contents at any time and from anywhere.
The aforementioned issues have illustrated our understanding of media in this article. That is, it not only consists of the traditional mass media (newspaper, radio, TV, etc.), but also contains a social-creational element enabled by the Internet, cloud computing and social media. The one-to-many communication model consequently becomes many-to-many. Before, it was professionals distributing media content to consumers. Now consumers, i.e., end-users, can utilize the provided platforms to co-produce, co-share and co-consume media (Berman et al., 2007).
2.2. New and Old Media Businesses Moving to the Cloud It is known now that after the Internet, the phenomenon of cloud computing is transforming traditional media companies (Dihai, Bouwman, de Reuver, Warnier and Carlsson, 2013) and is bringing new forms of media services into the light.
The former old media businesses include television broadcasting, radio, newspapers, publishing houses and the music industry; the latter new ones contain telecom opera-tors, the game industry, mobile media and so on. As media are evolving all the time with new technologies, cloud computing is the latest catalysis as it offers novel and efficient solutions for media service providers in content storage, streaming, market data collection and specified mass-customization. The roles and the power structure among various media stakeholders fluctuate because cloud computing makes media accessible without limitations in terms of time, space and/or device.
What is this powerful cloud computing then? Being the latest computing paradigm (Buyya, Yeo and Venugopal, 2008), it has dozens of definitions. One of the most cited is from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, 2011):
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand net-work access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., netnet-works, serv-ers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
This definition comes from the classification of cloud services in three levels. (1) Infrastucture as a Service (IaaS): Providers offer access to servers for users to perform their computing tasks in running a program or a service. This model does not neces-sarily include Operating Systems. (2) Platform as a Service (PaaS): Providers offer a platform for users to develop and run their own programs and software. (3) Software as a Service (SaaS): Providers offer the whole software as one service (National
Insti-tute of Standards and Technology, 2011).
The growth rates of cloud services in various sectors are high, according to Lurcott (2013). By 2014, 60 percent of server workload will be virtualized and more busi-nesses will employ cloud services. Already, 40 percent of the customer relationship management (CRM) systems sold globally are cloud-based. About 50 percent of the revenues from cloud computing revenues are from the United States. The media industry is no exception. As cloud computing provides efficient and economic ways for content distribution, media companies start to offer their cloud-based services through cloud service providers. We hereby added to the NIST three levels with the (4) cloud service level as Media as a Service (MaaS). The layered nature of cloud computing is illustrated in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Media as a Service: Media can be considered as a fourth service level in a cloud-computing scheme.
In traditional media, television companies like BBC have provided free online stream-ing of selected series and shows (Hunter, 2012). Some of the operator companies also employ cloud computing actively; for example, Virgin Media (UK operator) has used cloud computing to upgrade their services and improve the customer experi-ence (Williams, 2011). Consequently, they have recognized the potential to adopt cloud-based publishing technologies (Hill, 2012). In addition, the music industry is the pioneer in expanding business with cloud computing. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, end-users have been able to store and record their music files in the cloud (Straubhaar, LaRose and Davenport, 2010).
Although there are solid reasons for media companies to apply cloud computing,
“the factors that make the cloud model appealing – the enormous bandwidth and storage capacity consumed by video – is also holding it back” (Hunter, 2012). Data
privacy and the legal terms and agreements suggested by cloud service providers are major concerns (Bender, 2012). Besides, the current costs of Internet bandwidth make it unprofitable, and, therefore, a complete migration to the cloud is yet to be realized (Hunter, 2012). The room to develop new business models with sustain-ability remains vast, though exist already a few with small scale based on inserting banner advertisements into video streams according to collected data as the end-users’
preferences. (Hill, 2012).
2.3. The Changing Role of End-users
The term ‘end-user’ originated from two fields: economics and computer science.
In economics, ‘end-user’ indicates an actor who ultimately uses the product on a legal and commercial basis. In computer science, it is based on the idea that the end-goal of a software or hardware product is to be useful to the end-user (Laudon and Laudon, 2011). The term signifies that a software program or hardware device is designed for the end-user either technically or socially. End-users also are in a separate group from the installers or administrators of the product. However, this demarca-tion is becoming blurred with innovative end-user computing (McBride, 2007), open source, crowdsourcing and social media.
As described previously, media companies new and old are moving to the cloud for economic reasons. Being media consumers, most of us are already in the cloud whether we know it or not (Devry University, 2013). We are in the cloud when we upload a video on YouTube; store our photographs to Flickr; post them on Facebook; collaborate a project through Dropbox; create documents, spreadsheets, presentations in Google Drive; and so forth. According to a study done by Devry University, 95 percent of people have used the cloud without knowing it, 54 percent claim they have never used the cloud, and only 16 percent correctly think the cloud is a place to access, store, and share data. The study predicts as well that by 2016 a billion users will be utilizing the cloud. Actually Gmail already has more than 425 million users, iCloud over 150 million, and Dropbox over 50 million. These num-bers demonstrate the popularity of and the definite shift toward the cloud in the context of media consumption.
However, despite the novel business opportunities for media service companies and cloud service providers, cloud computing has its drawbacks. As mentioned at the end of 2.2, end-users might not be aware of where their media services are run or who operates the platform while they are enjoying the convenience brought by cloud computing to access media from anywhere at anytime (Devry University, 2013). Data privacy is the core issue here.
Currently (a) end-users, (b) media companies and (c) cloud service providers are attached to the cloud media business. At least two legal terms and agreements exist between (a) and (b), and (b) and (c). In most cases, end-users are not aware of the second one. Although most cloud service providers acknowledge the concerns of
end-users regarding data security, privacy and sovereignty, they do not suggest concrete solutions, either technically or legally. We will discuss this issue further in 4.2.1 with our case studies.
Theoretically, it seems that there are ways to tackle the problem; for example, Trappler (2010) has tried to offer pragmatic suggestions on four points of view: (1) service level agreements (SLAs), (2) data processing and storage, (3) infrastructure and security and (4) vendor relationships. In addition, as more and more govern-ments employ cloud computing (Wyld, 2009), it becomes urgent to resolve legal issues and market regulations in terms of the scalability, reliably, data security, open standard and interoperability of cloud computing.
Together with the above-mentioned fact that end-users are now content providers who co-create, co-share, co-consume through social media enabled by the Internet and cloud computing, it is clear that they are no longer passive, non-reacting, or receptive consumers. End-users are seen as the centre of the design of ICT products.
Cloud computing has further pushed the current trend to a climax with the driving force behind it being human-centred technology thinking.