Day one of Media Management in the Cloud, a two-day conference co-produced by NAB and the ETC, opened Tuesday morning to a standing-room only crowd in the Convention Center’s South Hall. After a brief welcome by ETC CEO Ken Williams, ETC’s Erik Weaver began the day’s events, noting that almost everything happening at NAB this year seems to have some connection to the cloud. Day one presentations and panels focused on key areas related to cloud services, such as cost, scalability, security, production and storage.

The morning keynote session was delivered by Mark Ramberg of Amazon Web Services, currently the largest cloud services provider in the world, who stressed simple ideas that would become the major themes for the day: that the cloud is cost-effective, that the cloud is scalable, and that the cloud is secure.

The remainder of the day’s program consisted of a series of panels and case studies that centered around various aspects of the use of cloud services in media and entertainment. Topics included uses of the cloud for independent film production, use of the cloud for post-production services, questions of how best to transport data in and out of various clouds, and issues of both short and long-term cloud-based storage. Panelists included senior executives from studios, vendors, and associated companies.

The theme of nearly all of the panels eventually began to circle around a core group of issues, including the need for better and more consistent use of metadata, the belief that content in the cloud is far more secure than is commonly believed (and perhaps more secure than many current storage systems), and the assertion that our industry has been slower than others to adopt cloud technologies.

“The key idea here is that using these systems saves money,” said Weaver. “But until companies in our industry see that, they will be hesitant to change. Showing them how this tech can work is one of the reasons we are here.”

The two-day conference continues on Wednesday, with another full day of panels, focusing specifically on reliability, security, and return on investment. The conference schedule is available online.