A raft of companies have been building cloud-migration capabilities in the past couple of years, Photo: Shutterstock

Vu Kiem Van, deputy general secretary of the Vietnam Digital Communications Association, said at a March 25 conference on the future of media that it, along with the entertainment industry, has already gone almost fully digital, with social networks leading the way to provide products, livestreams, online sales, e-commerce, and digital payment platforms, as well as e-logistics services.

“Providers of entertainment content tend to base activities on advanced technologies like AI, big data, blockchain, the cloud, and others towards personalisation to increase their interaction with customers,” he added.

Cloud computing now plays an important role in creating better services while facilitating collaboration and data sharing among government agencies, while digital infrastructure transformations can benefit governments and residents by galvanising innovation, facilitating interagency collaboration, and accelerating the timetable for services to reach constituents, according to Van.

In practice, general running costs are a serious hurdle for businesses of all sizes, prompting them to go to the cloud and apply new technologies such as AI and big data in an attempt to save costs and increase operational efficiency.

This can be most clearly seen with domestic television channels such as VTV and VTC, which have crafted new strategies in digital transformation such as VTV Digital and VTC Now. These sit alongside traditional platforms and follow the lead of internationally-known entertainment equivalents such as Netflix and Spotify, as well as other groups in the gaming market and esports.

Tifi Liu, regional marketing manager at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said the behaviour of users and customers has changed and businesses have to make changes in return. Alibaba – the top public cloud provider in China and Asia-Pacific, and third-biggest worldwide – has been venturing strongly into supporting entertainment and sports events through its innovative cloud and e-commerce technologies.

Since becoming a worldwide Olympic partner in 2017, Alibaba has committed to helping transform the Olympic Games for the digital era. Its cloud technologies were utilised during the recent Beijing Winter Games, as an effort to increase broadcasting efficiency whilst bolstering the coverage of the Games through a more innovative and inclusive viewing experience for global sports fans.

For the first time, broadcasters received live footage through the public cloud infrastructure – a more agile option at only a fraction of the cost compared to other transmission methods.

“Traditional steps of digital transformation are standardisation-computerisation-digitalisation. However, the media and entertainment industry has its own distinction, so there is no need to always follow the same route, cloud technologies like content delivery network, AI, and big data can help to optimise the steps to be fully automated” explained Khuong Truong Giang, business development director at Alibaba Cloud Intelligence.

“We plan to bring our international standard cloud services to Vietnam to support our media and entertainment customers even better then now. This will take time, but it is the trend of the future.”

Alibaba is also seeing increasing success with its November 11 Global Shopping Festival. From a steady $7.84 million in revenues when it was established in 2009, last year the event raked in $84.77 billion, thanks to the Alibaba Cloud technology.

Similarly, Amazon Web Services (AWS) hopes to offer more media and entertainment content creation to customers in Vietnam, as well as the ability to offer end users single-digit millisecond performance designed to suit, with the announcement last month of new AWS Local Zone cloud infrastructure in Hanoi.

The other applications involved are remote real-time gaming, live video streaming, engineering simulations, AR and VR, machine learning inference, and more. The new AWS Local Zone is a continuation of the company’s investment in supporting customers of all kinds and commitment to accelerating innovation.

Elsewhere, for Renova Cloud, its main progress during 2021 was in building the capabilities for cloud migration as well as DevOps and automation. Because of that, it has invested in different levels of projects and enhanced its hands-on tech team experience. Domestic cloud service providers like FPT Telecom International have also made changes. According to executive director Chu The Anh, besides traditional infrastructure, it is necessary to provide new digital platforms based on customers’ experience.

“State agencies have tended to go to the cloud, and such service providers have seen a growth of 30-50 per cent, and even as much as 100 per cent in recent years,” Chu added.

Vietnam now boasts nearly 40 cloud service providers and 27 data centres for 11 businesses. Vietnamese businesses now make up 20 per cent of the local market, while the rest is dominated by foreign players.

Chu added that the government’s orientation towards considering cloud computing as an important platform for national digital transformation is also a motivation for development, which is why last year, the Ministry of Information and Communications launched the Vietnam Cloud Computing Alliance.

More favourable conditions are expected to come with Vietnam working on the amended Law on Telecommunications to facilitate cloud application.

In addition, the National Digital Transformation Programme approved by the government in 2020 includes many tasks for ministries, agencies, and localities related to the development of cloud computing infrastructure as well as coverage services.

Vietnam’s online media market was valued at $2.8 billion in 2019, ranking third in Southeast Asia. According to auditing giant PwC, the entertainment and media industry in Vietnam will continue to grow over 6 per cent in terms of the number of users into next year.