Media cloud: When media revolution meets rise of cloud computing

Media content has become the major traffic of Internet and will keep on increasing rapidly. Various innovative media applications, services, devices have emerged and people tend to consume more media contents. We are meeting a media revolution. But media processing requires great capacity and capability of computing resources. Meanwhile cloud computing has emerged as a prosperous technology and the cloud computing platform has become a fundamental facility providing various services, great computing power, massive storage and bandwidth with modest cost. The integration of cloud computing and media processing is therefore a natural choice for both of them, and hence comes forth the media cloud. In this paper we make a comprehensive overview on the recent media cloud research work. We first discuss the challenges of the media cloud, and then summarize its architecture, the processing, and its storage and delivery mechanisms. As the result, we propose a new architecture for the media cloud. At the end of this paper, we make suggestions on how to build a media cloud and propose several future research topics as the conclusion.