Wazee Digital’s Cloud-Native MAM Stays Ahead with Telestream Cloud
Wazee Digital runs cloud-hosted asset management products and services for content creators and rights holders who want to enrich, monetise and share their media with specific people at specific times. The company recently migrated its own business operations to a cloud-native transcoding and media processing workflow with Telestream Cloud running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Customers use Wazee Digital’s cloud-native products, Core, Commerce and Digital Media Hub, to make their content available for global publishing, syndication, advertising and sponsorship. The Wazee Digital business model is based on a transcoding and media processing workflow that converts rich media files into low-res proxies for browser-based searching and live streaming, as well as the numerous file formats needed for video on-demand and multiplatform distribution.
“We currently handle 750,000 transcodes per month, with daily volumes ranging from 25,000 to 50,000 transcodes, and this workload is growing very rapidly. Our business model also needs a global cloud strategy that can intelligently distribute this media processing to the data centre that is closest to the cloud storage or source media, for faster transfer and delivery,” said Brian Noecker, Wazee Digital’s Vice President of Information Systems and Services.
Wazee Digital formerly worked through its own physical data centre. To save on the time and cost associated with running, upgrading and maintaining the centre, the company has shifted its operation to Telestream Cloud, which is devoted to a large range of media processing services including transcoding, workflow automation, timed text transcription and quality assurance. Since they now access Telestream Cloud as a usage-based service, Wazee Digital can provision whatever processing power and capabilities as soon as they are needed, as well as scale back when demand slows down to reduce costs.
“We have to be able to ingest high-bitrate native files, convert them to low-res proxies for browsing and streaming, and quickly output them in whatever file formats and resolutions are required for an optimal user experience. A usage-based, comprehensive service like Telestream Cloud is now essential to our platform because otherwise we would have to have all of this functionality at hand at all times, whether or not we needed it,” said Andy Hurt, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Wazee Digital.
Telestream Cloud can be set up on any major public cloud platform. Wazee Digital chose to use AWS, Amazon’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform because it allows them to localise their service - uploading assets to the AWS data centre closest to the customer’s location or cloud storage for faster transfer and processing times. In particular, Wazee Digital can save time and money by reducing the instances where large media files - especially HD or 4K resolution - must be transported to a centralised centre for processing.
“Not having to move an asset very far for transcoding is critical to serving our customer base and opening up new international markets. It is especially important to certain rights holders that don’t want their digital properties to leave their home territory or cross international borders. With 85 percent of our customers in the US, and 15 percent in the UK and Australia, it was beneficial to us that Telestream worked with Amazon to build out their Telestream Cloud service to include the AWS data centres we need in the UK and Australia,” Brian said.
Content owners can either upload their media files to the cloud storage of their choice or upload it to storage buckets associated with Wazee Digital’s AWS service. When that media is discovered by Wazee Digital’s Core, it is automatically prepared for media processing.
“With just-in-time cloud provisioning, we can keep up with what our market expects in terms of quality and turnaround times for media ingest, enriching and output,” said Brian. “In a similar way, the fact that the Telestream Cloud platform receives incremental improvements and updates makes it more likely that this SaaS infrastructure will keep pace with demands, and scale sufficiently as we grow.
“So, while we felt a certain comfort in controlling our own physical data centre, we know that we cannot pursue emerging market opportunities and meet our business goals as effectively without a very wide set of services available to us – such as Telestream Cloud on the AWS platform.” www.telestream.net
