In an industry where time is money and creative vision must translate into high-quality output at breakneck speeds, media and entertainment (M&E) studios can’t afford inefficiencies. Traditional workstation setups often create bottlenecks – from capital expenditures to rigid provisioning timelines that slow production and inflate costs. The emergence of on-demand workstations delivered via Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms is flipping that model on its head.
We’ve worked closely with many of our customers to help them unlock real ROI by moving to cloud-based on-demand workstations. In this blog, we’re sharing some of those experiences to highlight the real-world benefits studios are seeing today.
1. Cost Transparency: Know What You’re Paying For
One of the biggest frustrations with legacy infrastructure is opaque costs. CapEx investments in high-performance hardware (often £2500–£12000 per seat), along with recurring maintenance, licensing, and upgrade expenses, make budgeting unpredictable.
With on-demand workstations, studios gain clear, usage-based pricing – you pay only for what you use. There’s no upfront investment and no underutilised machines sitting idle between projects. It’s also easy to scale up quickly, making it far more manageable to take on multiple projects that might otherwise exceed your in-house capacity.
According to a 2023 Forrester study on cloud-based creative infrastructure, companies using on-demand solutions saw up to 45% reduction in total cost of ownership over three years compared to traditional setups. That’s money that can be reallocated to talent, tools, or marketing.
2. Reduced Downtime: From Creative Stall to Full Throttle
Every hour a workstation is down due to hardware failure, compatibility issues, or system updates means lost productivity and lost revenue. Downtime during rendering or asset syncing can delay entire production timelines.
On-demand workstations mitigate this risk with pre-configured, scalable environments that are continuously updated, monitored and supported. If one virtual machine fails, spin up another in minutes. Need to shift artists between projects or geographies? No problem – access is global, secure, and instantaneous.
A study by McKinsey indicates that companies adopting cloud technologies can boost productivity by up to 20–25%. This enhancement is attributed to the cloud’s ability to facilitate real-time collaboration, streamline workflows, and provide flexible access to resources, all of which are crucial for media and entertainment studios aiming to optimise their operations.
3. Quicker Ramp-Up on New Projects: No More Waiting Weeks to Start
Time to market matters, especially when content trends are fleeting and delivery windows are tight. Traditional setups can require weeks to procure and configure hardware for new team members or projects. That’s time studios don’t have.
With an IaaS model, you can provision entire creative environments – software, storage, GPUs, and collaboration tools swiftly. Whether it’s a VFX team in Canada or a sound design crew in Berlin, everyone gets what they need to create quickly.
This agility empowers studios to bid on more projects confidently and scale resources fluidly based on real-time demand.
“We have very ‘peaky’ workloads and with ERA, we quickly ramped up our workstations and render capacity, allowing us to take on jobs far larger than our core infrastructure could handle”
Tom Swetnam, Head of Technology at RASCAL Post
Real-World Use Case: Giant Animation’s Scalable Rendering Success
Take the example of Giant Animation. Faced with rapid growth and multiple concurrent productions, Dublin-based Giant Animation needed to scale beyond the limits of their in-house infrastructure. By partnering with ERA and Tyrell in early 2024, they deployed an on-demand solution including over 100 high-performance workstations and 70+ render nodes—scaling up to 12,000 CPU cores.
The result? Artists ramped up quickly, infrastructure bottlenecks were eliminated, and rendering performance scaled seamlessly with demand. Giant reported smoother collaboration across teams, predictable costs, and a significantly more agile pipeline for delivering projects to global clients such as BBC, TED, YouTube and DreamWorks.
Final Thoughts: Infrastructure That Moves at the Speed of Production
In today’s media and entertainment landscape, the real ROI of on-demand workstations isn’t just about cutting costs – it’s about gaining operational flexibility, accelerating time to market, and eliminating the friction that kills creativity.
Studios that embrace this model aren’t just saving money – they’re setting themselves up to win more work, deliver faster, and scale smarter.
“The support from ERA’s engineers is incredibly responsive. We give them a date, and the workstations are delivered pre-configured and production-ready.” – RASCAL Post
Ready to modernise your creative pipeline?
Talk to us today about how our IaaS platform is purpose-built to meet the performance, security, and creative needs of today’s M&E studios.
