New Media Cloud Computing: Opportunities and Challenges

Introduction

New Media is a 21^st Century catchall term used to define all that is related to the internet and the interplay between technology, text, images and sound. In fact, the definition of new media changes daily, and will continue to do so. New media evolves and morphs continuously (Hin & Subramaniam, 2011). What it will be tomorrow is virtually unpredictable for most of us, but we do know that it will continue to evolve in fast and furious ways. The technologies described as “new media” are digital, often having characteristics of being user generated data, networkable, dense, compressible, and interactive. As a consequence of the quick embrace of New Media by business, causes, communications, and a multitude of others, the question of “what is new media?” did not receive an official or standardized response. The term “new media” seems to escape its very definition. Loosely, new media is a way of organizing a cloud of technology, skills, and processes that change so quickly that it is impossible to fully define just what those tools and processes are. New media has had a profound effect on three of the most essential categories of society in the twenty-first century: economics, politics, and the exchange of ideas (Logan, 2010). Where is new media really going, and are we, as users, constructing the destination or are we blindingly falling into its clutches through necessities and paradigms? Perhaps the potential of new media is a function of its intermediate development and our social, political, and economic transition within and outside of it (Jones, 2011).

Cloud computing is an emerging technology aimed at providing various computing and storage services over the Internet (Sasikala, 2011a; Sasikala, 2011b). It generally incorporates infrastructure, platform, and software as services (Sasikala, 2011c). Cloud service providers rent data-center hardware and software to deliver storage and computing services through the Internet (Sasikala, 2011d). By using cloud computing, Internet users can receive services from a cloud as if they were employing a super computer (Sasikala, 2012a). They can store their data in the cloud instead of on their own devices, making ubiquitous data access possible (Sasikala, 2012b). They can run their applications on much more powerful cloud computing platforms with software deployed in the cloud, mitigating the users’ burden of full software installation and continual upgrade on their local devices (Sasikala, 2012).

With the development of Web 2.0, new media is emerging as a service. To provide rich media services, new media computing has emerged as a noteworthy technology to generate, edit, process, and search media contents, such as images, video, audio, graphics, and so on. For new media applications and services over the Internet and mobile wireless networks, there are strong demands for cloud computing because of the significant amount of computation required for serving millions of Internet or mobile users at the same time. In this new cloud-based new media-computing paradigm, users store and process their new media application data in the cloud in a distributed manner, eliminating full installation of the media application software on the users’ computer or device and thus alleviating the burden of new media software maintenance and upgrade as well as sparing the computation of user devices and saving the battery of mobile phones. The demanding apps in mobile devices are new media channels that are expected to be fine tuned with convergence of cloud computing.