Transcoding provider Bitmovin has announced its Cloud Connect platform, designed to target AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure users, and allow them to implement Bitmovin’s encoding offerings inside an existing cloud deployment. With prominent support for VP9, AVC, and HEVC, the multi-codec angle is there to appease the OTT need to cater for the unpredictable devices of their viewers.
On paper, this opens the door to potential customers that are not able to simply move cloud providers, in order to purchase Bitmovin’s services. For OTT customers, the additional stress is the need to be able to scale the deployment up and down, as demand shifts over time. This is why they are drawn to cloud computing, as you are able to spin up and then shut down processing jobs rather flexibly – instead of burdening yourself with racks of servers that sit idle for the entire time you are under peak load.
Despite the promised flexibility of cloud computing, the reality for video workloads is that you end up making a series of third-party vendor choices based on your needs. With every new plug-in, it becomes more difficult to move away from that cloud provider.
So, the multi-cloud angle should open the door for Bitmovin, to target customers that were previously out of reach. Aiding this is the compatibility with Bitmovin Managed Cloud, which is an on-premises encoding service that Bitmovin will manage for its customers. Bitmovin promises that those existing on-prem encoding workflows will work seamlessly with the new Cloud Connect offering.
Of course, the industry is in a weird transitional period – moving from on-prem to public and private cloud being the conventional deployment. A number of encoding providers have made plays in this moment, by creating an on-prem deployment that has some of the managed cloud capabilities you could not yet acquire from the general-purpose cloud computing systems.
However, the list of native tools that the cloud providers can offer is increasing by the day – putting the pressure on the encoding specialists that sprang up to fill a need that the likes of AWS, GCP, and Azure could not yet offer. To that end, the cloud providers are turning the screw, and it behooves the likes of Bitmovin to get its hooks into customers as quickly as possible.
For Bitmovin, the pitch to potential clients that already have substantial cloud deployments is that they may find it advantageous to work in the same environment where their content and security already lives – as file-based storage and integrated plug-ins. Leveraging chunk-based encoding, as well as ‘split and stitch’ (splitting a video into multiple parallel encoding jobs, identifying already-encoded parts you have, then only encoding the new bits you need), are also prominent in the pitch.
Strangely, a supporting quote points to benefits that the multi-cloud approach has for vendor lock-in. We don’t quite agree here, as the bespoke nature of encoding environments means that you can’t simply migrate between public clouds – not in the same way that you might export a database, email system, or file storage. Because there are so many moving parts in video delivery, actually upping sticks and leaving is a significant operational risk.
Rounding out the announcement, Bitmovin CEO Stefan Lederer said that “many of our customers have made significant investments in cloud services. Additionally, many organizations have strict security guidelines that mandate the work be done within their current environment. With Bitmovin Cloud Connect, customers will have the flexibility to take advantage of all of Bitmovin’s benefits in the comfort and safety of their own development environment.”
Coinciding with the launch was the latest installment of Bitmovin Live, the vendor’s webinar series. Bitmovin’s Teddy Zeskind, Partner Manager, was joined by Vimond’s VP Sales Engineering Stein Erik Sorhaug, and Accenture Managing Director for Media Practice and Global Lead for Media Cloud Supply Chain Mark Peters.
The topic was the coming of age of cloud television, and called on Accenture’s integration services, with Vimond’s heritage in TV 2 Norway – the first major FTA broadcaster to provide streaming access to that content, which led to TV4 in Sweden and MTV3 in Finland to do the same. Vimond was spun out in 2011, and has been plugging away since.
Accenture’s Peters explained that the trio had a number of shared clients, which brought them together. Cost cutting and operational consolidation are common trends among these customers.
Vimond’s Sorhaug pointed to the broadcast industry’s collective tardiness in moving to the cloud – that people used to be very focused on hardware and its physical deployment, and that only in the past few years has the focus shifted to user experience and creativity, rather than the nuts and bolts of the old ICT-heavy approach.
To this end, the software-based approach lets people be more flexible, said Sorhaug, which has been especially helpful during the pandemic. It also lets teams be smaller and more agile, and because of the aforementioned scalability of cloud computing, the video services are able to focus more on the customer experience, rather than obsessing about the seasonal peak viewership that would traditional drive all their operational thinking. Making sure that the network didn’t fall over when everyone tuned into a sports final was more important, historically, than the actual user experience of these services.
Bitmovin’s Zeskind pointed to his firm’s annual Video Developer Report, which attempted to gauge the challenges faced. Over 50% pointed to cost control, but live low latency and stream quality were second and third place. Similarly, cost reduction pressures in the wake of Covid-19 were cited as the main concern, by respondents, but needing faster time to market for new services were also reported by over 40%, with 30% pointing to changing business models.
Accenture’s Peters said that new linear channels are still being spun up, and that the cloud-first approach lets you avoid the traditional linear playout investment. An added bonus is how cloud services will help video services consolidate their disparate workflows into one uniform set of tools – which should help solve a lot of operational headaches, when it comes to different teams and publishing to different locations – syndicating content to existing services where the viewers already exist, notes Sorhaug, for smaller video services.
Building on that, Sorhaug pointed to how these flexible systems let you create more personalized video experiences for viewers- letting broadcasters promote the best content for their audience members. Content owners are also able to push AVoD models with ‘hyper-targeted’ adverts, notes Sorhaug, while Peters noted how new business models need to be properly managed, before they spiral out of control – due to all the new data choices that need to be made.
Bitmovin’s Zeskind added that Bitmovin player data is a great source of data and analytics for Bitmovin customers – noting that in the integrated video platform that Accenture and Vimond built, using Bitmovin, that data helps guide how an operator should interact with its customers. Bitmovin calls this ‘workflow intelligence,’ internally, as a layer that spans across the lower-level elements the integrated video platform stack. The trio then walked through all the elements of this stack, without ever naming the customer itself.