Media firm A+E Networks EMEA has extended its relationship with satellite and media services provider Arqiva in a deal to provide on-demand content for its Amazon Prime on-demand service in Germany and UK.
The companies’ existing partnership spans playout and connectivity across Africa and the Middle East, UK DTH satellite capacity and on-premise VOD processing services across EMEA. As part of the new contract, Arqiva will manage the content processing, packaging and delivery of A+E Networks EMEA existing archive content in both UK and Germany, from where it is currently stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Simple Storage Service Glacier, to Amazon Prime.
One of the key requirements of the new contract was for a fully-managed solution to be able to process all VOD requests as close to the cloud-based archive as possible in order to minimise content movement and therefore avoid costly cloud egress into on-premise data centres. Another primary factor was its ability to integrate A+E’s existing identity and access management resources, ensuring the security of the platform whilst allowing A+E to retain full control of its content access and operation capabilities.
Based on its latest hybrid on-premise/cloud offering, the solution implemented by Arqiva is said to be the first to feature a completely cloud-contained journey, where content is taken from the online archive, processed packaged and delivered to Amazon Prime. This is said to not only ensure significant cost-savings, but transcoding in the cloud using AWS Elemental MediaConvert also enables Arqiva to process more simultaneous jobs at a far quicker pace.
“In a very dynamic and competitive media environment the ability to quickly and seamlessly deliver an even broader range of A+E Networks EMEA’s premium content to our Amazon Prime audience is a real strategic advantage,” commented Matt Westrup, VP technology and operations at A+E Networks EMEA. A solution like this means we can effortlessly build on our broadcast heritage in a viable way.”
“We’ve been working really hard to extend our broadcast products onto cloud infrastructure, and have built up an extensive set skills and experience building on AWS,” added Alex Pannell, commercial director video channels at Arqiva: “We see the fact that a major multi-channel broadcaster has adopted the cloud for its content archive as clear proof this was the right strategy to pursue for the future.”