Blazeclan Helped A Leading Entertainment Company Reduce Operational Cost

Customer Profile

The Group Company is a leading content and consumer group in Malaysia and Southeast Asia with a focus on the pillars of watch, listen, read and shop. It’s an offering of TV channels are delivered via Direct-To-Home satellite TV, IPTV and OTT platforms.

Fulfilling its promise to bridge the digital divide for all of Malaysia, the company has an entry-level DTH satellite TV service which is the country’s first non-subscription based satellite TV, offering both TV and radio channels.

The Challenge

The company’s content delivery system consists of 4 interlinked applications that created the backbone of their content distribution system.

• Metadata system
• Ingestion & Metadata Management System
• Media flow
• Entitlement System for DTH and OTT Platforms

1. Metadata System (MS)-they wanted to redevelop and further enhance to meet the requirements. They also wished to rewrite the entire code using open source technologies. The existing system faced performance issues that were affecting the user experience and required a fix.
   Owing to the business needs, this system required a major enhancement with respect to new features, enabling single sign-on, ability to integrate with more internal/external systems using RESTful APIs.
2. Ingestion and metadata manager -they wanted to redevelop and further enhance to meet the requirements. They also wished to rewrite the entire code using open source technologies. The existing system faced performance issue that was affecting the user experience and had many functions that were not working properly
3. Media flow-They were using a SaaS platform, Movideo, a managed video platform that provides cloud services, tools and infrastructure to media companies. Since Movideo was shutting down its services in a specified duration, the company required an alternate solution within a time frame of two months to upload, transcode and build APIs to enable streaming of MP4 and M3U8 file formats to different web properties.
4. Entitlement Service for DTH and OTT platform-they have a platform that holds online user entitlements to become single source across verticals. It collects up-to-date user entitlements by integrating with different systems to get information related to billing, offers, and packages. Information older than six months is then pushed to the Enterprise Data Warehouse. The customer was looking to revamp and migrate the system to AWSin order to reduce the latency in entitlements, provisioning for the linked user to other partners and vice versa.
   The company also wanted to leverage the potential of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its benefits like managed infrastructure, application services, scalability and fault tolerance.

The Solution

• 1. Metadata system-BlazeClan conducted an exhaustive study of the existing system and charted out a roadmap of designing, developing and deploying the Metadata System with open source technologies and AWS application service components.The journey initially started by helping the customer understand the overall Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) of using AWS.The Group Company is a leading content and consumer group in Malaysia and Southeast Asia with a focus on the pillars of watch, listen, read and shop. It’s an offering of TV channels are delivered via Direct-To-Home satellite TV, IPTV and OTT platforms.

BlazeClan’s product development offering comprised of:

• Extensive study by our team of certified SAs began to understand the existing code and the system.
• The new system was rewritten and developed capitalizing on open source technologies like Linux, My SQL, and Java spring, and Nginx Tomcat.
• Brainstorming sessions were conducted to scope out new features that can enhance the system.
• Micro Services Architecture was used to develop independently deployable, small and modular services to achieve a loosed coupled and scalable architecture.
• Active Directory was integrated to ensure that the users have the ability to seamlessly login using their existing credentials.
• The public RESTful APIs enabled the metadata to be available to many downstream applications and web platforms.
• UI/UX development process became an integral part of the project as the system catered to more than 150 users. The team understood the user requirements, created prototypes, rinsed and refined and developed the UI.

For a Media organization a metadata system is like a lifeline as it provides metadata to all other downstream applications like VoD and OTT platforms. This application provided a platform for organizing the metadata of media content and resulted in accomplishment of following key functions:

1. Ingest-linear schedules and non-linear products.
2. Verify-existing data is correct and meets company’s standards.
3. Link-matching titles across multiple channels / products.
4. Enrich-metadata both manually and against external sources.
5. Index-the data for faster search.

• 2. Ingestion and Metadata Management system -is designed to process external schedule data received from external channel providers. The system provides editors to proof read data and ensure it is complete. It also provides upfront validation for content managers when submitting scheduled data. Lastly, the system enables data import from the excel sheets and facilitates creating new “ad hoc” events.
  BlazeClan conducted an exhaustive study of the existing system and charted out a roadmap of designing, developing and deploying this application.
  The journeyinitially started by helping the customer understand the overall Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) of using AWS.
  This application provided a platform for organizing the schedule provided by broadcasters and resulted in accomplishment of following key functions:

• 6 Upload -content in the form of Excel files received from external channel providers.
• 7 Approval -Have appropriate approvals for the uploaded file. Scan for completeness, overruns, and underruns.
• 8 Update -Have this content updated and linked to master library.
• 9 Export -Export the content to a scheduling systemwhich integrates with set top boxes to provide schedule and metadata.

As part of the engagement with external channel providers, content screeners were periodically sent to the company for review. The company was then responsible for generating compliance notes for video files received from the Channel Providers and feeding this information back to various sources in PDF format.
BlazeClan assisted in automating this process for the company, thereby reducing their time and efforts.

• 3. Media Flow -BlazeClan proposed the use of its in-house product –CloudStream, which is a combination of Media Asset Management and a Video CMS, with customizations to meet the company’s requirements. This delivery was divided in 3 phases:
  The Group Company is a leading content and consumer group in Malaysia and Southeast Asia with a focus on the pillars of watch, listen, read and shop. It’s offering of TV channels are delivered via Direct-To-Home satellite TV, IPTV and OTT platforms.

Phase I and II included –

• Customizationof the content management & administration.
• Video acquisition and ingestionvia CMS and FTP push/pull mechanism.
• Video transcodingto support multiple formats like MP4, HLS-M3U8 enabling streaming of video content across all web and mobile devices.
• Migration of 16 TB of video content including high resolution video content, thumbnails and transcoded video content from Movideo. Cutover strategy was planned to ensure minimum downtime which included migration of:
  — Video files
  — Thumbnails
  — Metadata
  — Playlists
  — Users
• Integration with Google Analytics to ensure that the platform users have reports, related to user behavior, video views, popular videos etc. available on the same platform..

Phase III- This phase focused on major enhancements like:

• Video Preview option to cut video preview from main video and upload the same.
• Archival ability to utilize AWS service (Glacier) for archival of old videos and enabling retrieval on a need basis.
• Publishing REST APIs and SDK for publishing of video content to Syndicate partners like YouTube, Vimeo, Daily motion.
• Migration of around 8 TB of video content including high resolution video content, thumbnails and transcoded video content from another popular video platform Bright cove.

UI/UX development was also an integral part of the project where BlazeClan team understood existing user stories, created prototypes, rinsed and refined, developed UI and finally tested for acceptance.

• 4. Entitlement Service for DTH and OTT platform-BlazeClan conducted an exhaustive study of the existing system and charted out a roadmap of designing, developing and deploying the application.

• The revamp was broken down into 2 phases.Phase I- The application revamp was broken down into migration of-
  • SOAP API to RESTful APIs
  • Database engine fromMSSQL to MySQL using AWS Database migration service
  • Database migration from on premise to AWS
  • Setting up of AWS infrastructure using automation services like Beanstalk.

  Phase II- This ensured migrating the application to AWS seamlessly.

  • Setting up direct connect between the company location and AWS.
• This application is a central source for entitlements information across the different system and it merges the Caching Service and Package Manager component.

Front end was provided to the package management team which enabled them to create different packages for Set Top boxes and OTT platform

The Benefits

1. Improved Performance-Customer experience increased as the redeveloped application provided better performance than the previous one.
2. Scalability-The Company achieved the ability to scale the application as and when required by leveraging auto scaling and load balancing features of AWS.
3. Reduced Cost-The Company was able to decrease its operational costs considerably by migrating to AWS.
4. Fault Tolerant-were able to achieve a fault tolerant architecture.

Tech Stack

Metadata system

• Linux
• My SQL
• Java spring
• Nginx Tomcat

Ingestion and Metadata Management system

• IAM
• S3
• Cloud search
• SQS
• SNS
• My SQL Multi Availability zone deployment
• Transcoder

Media Flow

• Angular JS
• Spring Boot
• Spring Data
• Java Version 8

Entitlement Service for DTH and OTT platform

• Linux
• My SQL
• Spring Boot
• Nginx Tomcat
• Angular Js
• Spring Data JPA
• Bootstrap

AWS

• EC2
• RDS
• VPC
• ELB
• Elasticache
• Kinesis firehoseDMS
• Elastic Search
• SQS
• Lambda
• S3
• Direct connect
• IAM
• S3
• Cloud search
• SQS
• SNS
• My SQL Multi Availability zone deployment
• Transcoder
• Elastic Search
• CloudFront