Time Warner-owned media conglomerate Turner Broadcasting System is the latest major customer signed by Amazon Web Services, the Seattle, Washington-based tech giant announced on Tuesday. The entertainment company is hence set to move a significant portion of its operations to Amazon’s cloud infrastructure after using its own data centers to host its content for many years. No financial details of the deal were disclosed by either party and the exact scope of the new partnership remains unclear, though “thousands of virtual machines” owned by Turner are now said to be in the process of migrating to AWS, with the entertainment giant deciding to rely on Amazon to host content from its established subsidiaries like CNN, TNT, TBS, Adult Swim, and Cartoon Network.
Consumers can also expect to start seeing the consequences of the new cloud partnership in the near future, with Amazon claiming that its technology will help the conglomerate “reimagine” contemporary television, in addition to providing it with a wider set of tools for collecting and analyzing data about its audience. While officially disclosed, the latter aspect of the partnership is unlikely to be widely publicized by either party following today’s announcement as digital privacy concerns in the United States and the world keep rising. Turner is implied to be saving a significant sum by migrating its services to AWS, with its new cloud provider also boasting that it offers a more secure solution than what the company had in-house.
Signing Turner as a customer is a major win for Amazon not only because Time Warner’s subsidiary is a massive business that’s bound to help improve its cloud unit’s bottom line but also because it’s one less major client that’s yet to fully commit to contemporary cloud technologies that its main rivals like Google and Microsoft could score. Both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are still growing faster than AWS, though it remains to be seen whether that trend will continue in the immediate future. The announcement of the new deal came shortly after Turner’s parent became the subject of a high-profile lawsuit launched by the Department of Justice against AT&T over its proposed acquisition of Time Warner. According to recent reports, the DOJ wanted AT&T to either agree to sell Turner or its existing DIRECTV unit before being allowed to go through with the vertical merger, a notion that the telecom giant dismissed and is now preparing to defend its position in court.