Cloud and SAAS costs are hard to manage not because they are high, but because they are consumption based. Insight tracks AMPP token consumption and every major Hyperscaler daily - attributing spend to the production that caused it, and flagging an anomaly while there is still time to act. FinOps is a critical part of the Dynamic Media Future.
Digital Joy is a technology company within the Black Dragon Capital portfolio, founded by media and technology veterans. The company builds cloud-native tools for media organizations: Insight for FinOps and cloud cost management, Newsroom for editorial workflows, and Engagement Suite for audience interaction.
Insight is Digital Joy’s FinOps platform – Insight is a cloud-native FinOps and technology governance platform that brings cloud, SaaS, and operational spending into one view.
Monitor costs across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and Grass Valley AMPP; create budgets and forecasts; allocate costs; and set customized anomaly thresholds. Insight gives finance, engineering, and executive teams greater visibility, control, and accountability while helping organizations identify waste, anticipate spending, and maximize technology investments.
Deployed at Brazil’s largest media company, tracking cloud spend across three Hyperscalers daily.
AMPP scales on demand - that elasticity is the point. But elastic infrastructure produces elastic bills, and no finance team budgets against a number that moves. Insight reads AMPP token consumption alongside AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI, converts it to dollars at your negotiated rates, and attributes every dollar to the production that spent it. The elasticity stays. The unpredictability does not.
AMPP tokens, AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI in a single cost model, converted to USD at your negotiated rates and updated daily. Anything that bills through AMPP is included.
Spend attributed by cost center, production, channel, department or client - so budget-versus-actual is a conversation with a name on it.
Set thresholds per cost center and platform. When spend breaks its pattern - an instance still live after the show, an egress charge nobody planned for - Insight flags it in minutes, not on next month's invoice.
AI cost models per cost center, adjusted by hand for the events you already have in the calendar - a tournament, an election night, a seasonal peak. Finance plans around the schedule instead of explaining it afterwards.
Token counts in, budgetable numbers out
- Live channels, playout and contribution run as AMPP workloads
- AMPP Billing Portal records token consumption, subscriptions, PAYG and AI usage
- Insight connects natively to AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI
- Cost and usage data flows into Insight automatically
- AMPP billing and hyperscaler costs combined in one model
- Converted to USD at negotiated rates, mapped to cost centers and productions
- Anomaly detection flags spend outside user-defined thresholds
- Forecasting models project costs with manual event adjustments
- Finance, operations and engineering work from role-based dashboards
- Optimization recommendations quantify savings by resource and account
The shift from CapEx to OpEx moved cost from a decision to a consequence. FinOps is the practice of managing SAAS and consumption spend as an operating discipline rather than a monthly reconciliation. In a hardware world, cost is fixed at purchase (outside of SLAs) and depreciates on a known schedule. In an elastic one, cost is the sum of operational decisions - a channel spun up, a render queued, a file moved between regions - taken daily by engineers rather than by finance. FinOps is the practice of managing these costs and ensuring that both groups use/are aware of the same numbers and have visibility of the impact.
We’ve all seen the media reports of cloud and AI spending vastly overshooting expectations. In other industries, FinOps has been an established practice as the importance of managing and monitoring elastic spend has grown. As the media industry moves towards a more dynamic software-defined future, the importance of these disciplines grow. One core element that contributors to Industry Reports say is holding back their transformations is cost unpredictability.
A service provider running channels for several clients on AMPP needs each invoice to reflect what that client actually consumed. Insight attributes AMPP tokens and hyperscaler spend per client and produces the chargeback report from the same data the platform bills on - so the invoice is accurate and easy to generate.
A tournament or election night spins up channels and compute for days, then releases them. Insight costs each event as it runs across AMPP and the hyperscalers, then sets that history against the calendar ahead and how far existing commitments are actually being used. Forecasting spend becomes more accurate.
Hybrid means choosing, workload by workload, what belongs in the cloud and what belongs on your own infrastructure. Insight gives each AMPP workload and cloud resource a real cost with its storage, compute and egress separated, so placement is argued from numbers rather than assumption.
Talk to the Grass Valley alliances team about Digital Joy on AMPP.
