Primary connectivity and a competitive pricing structure were essential factors in choosing a data centre provider to partner with.
Streamworks
As part of its growth and investment, and in order to ensure the reliable delivery of high quality content, with the widest audience reach, Streamworks required a technical infrastructure that would help it to enable its customers to build brand credibility and increase revenue.
Client
Online video consumption is growing year-on-year and continues to be a fiercely competitive space – more engaging digital property means more revenue touch points. Founded in 2006, Streamworks International is a global streaming company at the forefront of the videoanywhere revolution. Already working with frontline breaking news, sport and entertainment brands, Streamworks provides a fully managed service delivering live and on-demand video on behalf of its customers. By managing the entire ‘live’ work-flow from signal acquisition, be it onsite, routed through satellite or fibre networks to the encoding process, Streamworks can deliver content across multiple delivery networks and internet service providers (ISP’s). This ensures maximum uptime and increased viewer engagement for its customers.
Challenge
Streamworks’ patented encoding technology for live and on-demand video streams uses video signal processing to optimise video and audio data. This reduces bandwidth for live video streams by approximately 30 per cent, while improving picture quality, and allowing efficient delivery to end-users. With international customers including Associate Press (AP) and the United Nations, Streamworks has to deliver a reliable and consistent service. However, the live streaming of content introduces a number of challenges including having to deal with highly complex capture from disparate geographies, and the extreme variability of live content. A poorly executed stream will disrupt an event, tarnish a brand’s image, confuse audiences, lower retention and ultimately reduce revenue. As part of its growth and investment, and in order to ensure the reliable delivery of high quality content, with the widest audience reach, Streamworks required a technical infrastructure that would help it to enable its customers to build brand credibility and increase revenue.
“Our business model is wholly reliant on international service availability and reliability of the network, so Telehouse West was an obvious choice. The infrastructure, level of support and security it boasts is unrivalled and it provides our tech team with the peace of mind that the proprietary technology they have painstakingly developed is in safe hands.” says Paul Ayres, chief strategy officer, Streamworks International.
“The ability to stick your own bits of patented and secret technology into your own rack was another critical success factor for the tech team. Our broadcast technology experts have decades of experience and the attention to detail they expect is unrivalled,”
– Paul Ayres, chief strategy officer, Streamworks International.
Solution
Streamworks’ universal delivery network (UDN) utilises point presence in Telehouse Hong Kong, Telehouse Singapore and Telehouse America (Los Angeles and New York). The primary technology is housed in Telehouse West, located in London Docklands. This network enables Streamworks to achieve the delivery of multimedia data globally. Streamworks has a six rack suite with a dual 100MB circuit internet connection house in Telehouse West with 100MB circuit internet connection in Los Angeles and New York. The two further data centre locations in Singapore and Hong Kong act as point of presence locations.
“The technology implementation into Telehouse West was seamless and the end-to-end service provided by Telehouse was phenomenal. From a day-to-day perspective, the support that they deliver continues to surpass expectations.”
Results
Telehouse has equipped Streamworks with the international service, security and network resilience that enables it to lay the groundwork for continued success.
“We’ve pretty much broken every record in the book for live video streaming,” says Ayres. “This would not be possible without a strategic partner that sits at the very core of our optimisation and delivery service. Telehouse has enabled a very advanced tech start up to cross the chasm to full
technology company.”
Telehouse’s technology infrastructure is at the heart of Streamworks international service. Operating across the globe, Streamworks streams footage from various ‘hard-to reach’ locations including the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. The global network of Telehouse data centres enables Streamworks to deliver a fast and reliable live service that is unaffected by
geographic location. This global availability has allowed it to continue its record breaking habits. In 2012 it enabled the Major League Gaming to deliver content to over 4.7 million unique online viewers tuned in during the MLG’s 2012 Pro Circuit Spring Championships weekend. Concurrent viewing peaked at 437,000 viewers. In an increasingly connected and mobile digital landscape, Streamworks is now helping its clients generate revenue wherever possible. This monetisation
strategy extends to video anywhere, including smartphones, Smart TVs and traditional online entities. Streamworks recently signed a new deal with AP that expands the live news streaming service to the AP Video Hub live news service. This allows end-users to have access to breaking news events as well as the ability to book and schedule planned live news events on an ad-hoc basis.
“To deliver reliable live content we need to have 100 per cent confidence in the security, resilience and reliability of our service. If something goes wrong then we have complete faith in the support team at Telehouse to ensure our service remains un-disrupted. That is invaluable for an online company,” comments Ayres.
The infrastructure that Telehouse offers is enabling Streamworks to deliver better quality content at lower costs. With a growing audience and record breaking viewerships, customers are seeing considerable return on investment (ROI) and increased margins. “We couldn’t do what we do without Telehouse,” says Ayres.
Streamworks is currently headquartered in Luxembourg with operational offices located in London and New York. With measured growth expected up until the end of this year, Streamworks is expecting an explosive start to 2014 with the company looking to expand in territories such as Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.
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