Cloud powered video rendering for LocalTV

  • Customer
  • Industry
  • Service
  • Segment
  • Author
  • LocalTV
  • Media & Advertising
  • Cloud Adoption
  • SMB
  • Jodie Rhodes
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At a glance

LocalTV is the UK’s largest local broadcast television group, owning and operating nine channels that reach over 7 million homes. They provide sales and video services across TV, digital, and social media.

Challenge

LocalTV needed to replace their outdated in-house video processing system that was slow, error-prone, and unable to keep up with their growing content demands.

Solution

Firemind built a new cloud-based infrastructure for LocalTV using a range of AWS services, which significantly improved video processing speed and reliability.

Services used
  • Amazon ECS
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS MediaConvert
  • Amazon CloudFront
Outcomes
  • 80% improvement in video processing speed
  • Over 50% initial monthly cost savings 
Business challenges

Outdated infrastructure hindering LocalTV's growth

LocalTV specialise in high quality video and advertising content, reaching and audience of over 300,000 per month. LocalTV’s challenge was to replace an old, in-house windows system that wasn’t performing to a high enough standard. It was becoming slow, producing upload errors and needed a refresh and adoption to cloud services. With hundreds of large format video files added regularly, LocalTV had to future proof their existing infrastructure which meant building a new cloud dependant system with Firemind.

We knew that switching to AWS Managed Services whilst adopting best practices when building a new infrastructure would solve the issues the client was experiencing and enable savings opportunities and free up considerable time.

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Solution

Firemind's cloud-native solution for LocalTV's infrastructure transformation

Firemind’s solution was to build LocalTV’s website from the ground up, making it highly available, responsive and compatible with changing customer demands and request rates.

As such, Firemind made use of AWS Application Load Balancers, Elastic Container Service, AWS MediaConvert, AWS CloudFront and Amazon S3. Amazon ECS was also hooked up to CloudWatch, for deploying monitoring tools and alarms for CPU Utilisation, being responsive to change and auto scaling.

For the Load Balancer, Firemind’s solution was to put this behind a CloudFront Distribution. This was to improve caching, instead of making uncached requests to a load balancer which would’ve incurred a further cost. Also, Firemind understood CloudFront’s benefit in providing faster response times for users around the world. Local TV host video content on their website and within user access areas, so quick loading times were essential.

Included in the solution was a rebuild of Local TV’s media transcoding service. Previously this was all done via a Windows server, however Firemind decoupled their architecture and moved to Amazon ECS, API Gateway, AWS Lambda and AWS MediaConvert – this part of the solution also utilised CloudFront as a CDN. MediaConvert is a managed service, providing a variety of outputs for broadcast and online video playback. Lambda is a microservice provider, enabling rapid response times within the infrastructure when a video has been submitted for transcoding by MediaConvert.

Furthermore, CloudFront was used to playback the video files for Local TV’s website from an S3 bucket. Firemind chunked the files into smaller parts that were outputted by MediaConvert, supporting users on slower connections.

Firemind also made use of AWS Web Application Firewalls with CloudFront to ensure that malicious requests didn’t get through to the origin server. Firemind utilised multiple rulesets including the CommonRuleSet, WordPressRuleSet, IPReputationList and SQLRuleSet.

Unlimited storage

Switching to cloud storage ensured LocalTV could continue to upload their footage with no risk of down time or upload errors. The move from internal servers to the cloud will ensure an unlimited, scalable, backed-up and secure storage facility that will continue to contain LocalTV’s media.

Multi level encryption

AWS could provide full security with the use of KMS for encryption at rest and ACM for encryption in transit.

Cloud savings

Over 50% initial monthly savings when moving from an independent storage supplier in-house, to cloud storage using Amazon S3.

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