Nevada City, California, 13 March 2018 – With its cloud asset management service, Denver-based Wazee Digital gives content creators and rights holders a way to enrich, monetize, and share their high-value, branded media with the right people, at the right time, anywhere in the world. The company recently migrated its business operations to a cloud-native transcoding and media processing workflow with Telestream Cloud running on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Founded in 2003, Wazee Digital’s client roster is a Who’s Who of the media and entertainment industry, including Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Partners, College Football Playoff, FremantleMedia, USA Swimming, and CBS News.
Wazee Digital’s cloud-native products, Core, Commerce and Digital Media Hub, enable content creators and media rights holders to make their content available immediately for global publishing, syndication, advertising, and sponsorship. The Wazee Digital business model relies on an intensive transcoding and media processing workflow capable of transforming rich media files into low-res proxies for browser-based searching and live streaming, as well as the many 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 exponentially. Our business model also requires a global cloud strategy that can intelligently distribute this media processing to the data center that’s closest to the cloud storage or source media for faster transfer and delivery,” explained Brian Noecker, Wazee Digital’s Vice President of Information Systems and Services.
To save on the time and money associated with running, upgrading, and maintaining their own physical data center, Wazee Digital has shifted its operation to Telestream Cloud, which provides a full 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 immediately provision whatever processing power and capabilities they need when they need it, as well as scale back when things slow down to reduce costs.
“We must be able to ingest high-bitrate native files, convert them to low-res proxies for browsing and streaming, and quickly spin-up whatever file formats and resolutions are required for an optimal user experience. Telestream Cloud is definitely ‘core’ to our platform, no pun intended,” adds Andy Hurt, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Wazee Digital.
While 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. In doing so, Wazee Digital further streamlined its global workflow through localization—the uploading of assets to the AWS data center closest to the customer’s location or cloud storage for faster transfer and processing times.
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’s automatically on-boarded for media processing.
“With just-in-time cloud provisioning, we’re now free to on-board, enrich and output media with the quality and turnaround times today’s media market expects. So, while we felt a certain comfort in controlling our own physical data center, we know that we cannot pursue emerging market opportunities and meet our business goals effectively without a holistic solution like Telestream Cloud on the AWS platform,” explains Noecker.
By combining Telestream Cloud with AWS, Wazee Digital is realizing greater operational efficiency. Just in terms of localization, Wazee Digital saves time and money by reducing the instances where large media files—especially HD or 4K resolution—must be transported to a centralized center 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. And it’s 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 U.S., and 15 percent in the UK and Australia, it was beneficial to us that Telestream engineers worked closely with Amazon to build out their Telestream Cloud service to include the AWS data centers we need in the UK and Australia,” adds Noecker.
According to Noecker, the way the Telestream Cloud engineering team makes incremental improvements to its comprehensive cloud platform gives Wazee Digital confidence that this SaaS infrastructure will keep pace with their demands, and scale sufficiently as they grow.
“To put a sharper point on our partnership with Telestream, our Wazee Digital Core cloud asset management service simply isn’t as powerful without a robust, full-featured transcoding platform like Telestream Cloud,” concludes Noecker.
