Client background

Client: Privately held global digital media services company

Industry: Broadcast Media

Services: Designs, operates and owns broadcast facilities; offers video solutions from start to finish, channel playback and playout; broadcasts over 800 channels. Offers satellite platforms, automation systems, on-air graphics, live Video on Demand (VOD), IPTV distribution

Areas of operations: The US, Europe, LATAM, Asia

Challenges

The digital media services company, whose VOD services comprised nearly a third of their total revenue, was grappling with issues related to longer processing time, high hardware costs, delays in client onboarding and lack of service customization.

The Media Asset Management (MAM) product that they were using was unable to scale up at times of high demand and could operate only on on-premise infrastructure and not on Cloud because of its proprietary nature.

The legacy product, which supported the VOD service, was taking way too long to process the content, sometimes even taking 4 hours to complete the demultiplexing (demux) and Quality Control (QC) process for just 1 GB of data/content. The hardware costs were growing 30% year on year, making a substantial dent on bottom line. The MAM product didn’t lend itself to quick customization and flexibility either.

All these were creating roadblocks for customer onboarding, taking anywhere between 3 and 4 months to bring new customers on board since the infrastructure for them had to be set up manually.

Solution

The Wipro team started by evaluating if the legacy MAM product could be migrated to Cloud, but ruled that out due to the proprietary nature of the product. As next steps, Wipro teamed up with the digital media services company to custom build a solution, called asset management and content injection workflow tool, that could process the digital content faster, offered higher scalability and flexibility for end customers.

We helped complete the VOD asset processing using the Microsoft Azure platform and the Azure Software Development Kit (SDK). The entire solution was built with minimal functionalities that helped migrate the digital media services company’s existing customers to Azure Cloud on VOD.

Here are some of the solution highlights:

• Offered a more intuitive user interface
• Provided a flexible platform that enabled easier customization and had the ability to debug faster
• Allowed for uploading and storing of the media content to Azure file/blob containers
• Made way for faster demuxing and QC

The solution was hosted on premium Azure hardware like the Azure D series VMs for video encoding and premium disk P30 for file storage operations. The aim was to achieve 200 mbps file transfer throughput as the video files formatting required very high processing power. This helped faster processing of the content, which would not have been possible with their on-premise set-up.

Business impact

The use of the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform helped the digital media services company spin up the necessary hardware on demand and in a pay-as-you-go model for processing the video assets.

Here’s how our custom-built tool helped -

• Switchover to Azure Cloud from on-premise infrastructure reduced hardware costs by 20-30%
• The demux and QC process, which earlier took 4 hours to complete, could now be done in just 2 hours
• Process simplification, along with ability to provision on-demand hardware, brought down customer onboarding time to just 3 weeks from the earlier 3-4 months
• Higher processing power allowed content processing to be completed in half the time now; helped process 50% more content/VOD assets

Wipro’s custom-built Cloud solution, for managing video assets and content, not just helped the digital media services company embark on a digital journey by modernizing their legacy MAM product, but also expanded their footprint in APAC and LATAM markets

- Janaki R Baratam, Global Head for Microsoft Application Services, Wipro