In what it says is a recognition of the importance of scalability and reliability in accommodating growth of its key streaming service, broadcaster TV 2 Dammark has transitioned TV 2 Play from on-premises to an AWS cloud infrastructure.
TV 2 believes that the new foundation has helped accelerate its transformation from entertainment provider to technological innovator as the streaming platform has grown from 400,000 to more than 900,000 subscribers in just two years and is expected to reach 1.3 million subscribers by 2025.
The broadcaster's live-to-VOD workflow uses AWS Elemental Live video encoding technology to create a clean feed of broadcast content from an SDI source with SCTE 104 markers indicating program start and end timecodes. Elemental Live decorates the HLS manifest with SCTE35 markers it decodes from the SCTE 104 markers, and the feed is then written as HLS, an HTTP-based adaptive bitrate streaming communications protocol, to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). An AWS Lambda function parses the manifest and transfers segments between programme start and end markers to another Amazon S3 bucket. Programmes are then transcoded via AWS Elemental MediaConvert to deliver frame-accurate live-to-VOD assets.
Since shifting to AWS, TV2 says that it has also realised scalability, stability, and flexibility improvements. “TV 2 prides itself on delivering live and near-live content that brings us Danes together, and our technical teams and infrastructure play a big role in that. More than fifty percent of our customers are live users. However, when a viewer misses the evening news or the start of a major sports match at 5pm and wants to catch a replay, they need to be able to catch up as soon as possible. AWS allows us to deliver near-instant access to live content for on-demand viewing,” explained TV2 chief technology and digital officer Rahul Yadav.
“AWS offerings are extensive and provide a strong shoulder for our team to stand on,” “Our new infrastructure has helped our team establish a solid workflow and improve the viewer experience by enabling us to rapidly turn around frame-accurate live content for on-demand viewing, so our subscribers don’t miss a beat. It’s also allowing us to reach our goal of becoming a technical hub for innovation where bright minds in tech can thrive.”
Generating VOD files previously took TV 2 up to three hours, and with AWS, it can deliver them immediately. The infrastructure has also helped TV 2 accelerate ingest and transcoding of new content libraries for its VOD platform while enhancing the overall quality of the content it distributes. “We’re increasingly transcoding large volumes of content from libraries we acquire and ramping up our video quality,” Yadav added. “With AWS, we can make that content available via VOD more rapidly to improve the overall platform experience for subscribers.”
Going forward, TV 2 says it will continue to focus on improving the subscriber experience. The company is exploring how to expand the use of machine learning and the tools AWS provides to improve custom viewer profiles and real-time content recommendations.