How Cloud Video Delivery Can Help You Slash Costs

For companies just staring with online video, learn what the cloud can offer before you start. For companies already streaming video to customers and potential customers, learn how the cloud can help slash delivery costs while simplifying workflows.

In a helpful session at the recent Streaming Media West conference in Los Angeles, Chris Knowlton, vice president for product management at Wowza Media Systems, told a packed audience how they could save money and get better results with a cloud video solution. He focused on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure Media Services, explaining the benefits of each. Knowlton started with an overview of how a cloud solution can simplify operations.

"The basic media workflow is going to include a bunch of things from end to end, Knowlton began. "Today, if you're typically doing some kind of streaming and either you've encoded some kind of content and created a file or you have a live camera, you're pushing through an encoder and going to a media server and then to a client. That's it at its simplest, purest form. That is a live streaming workflow we see there. That's pretty easy to do on your own. I could do that off of this laptop."

As a company's video efforts grow, however, that laptop isn't going to cut it.

"The trouble is when you start scaling out and you start having really large audiences or you try and handle different situations," Knowlton said. "As you go further down the line and start scaling out, you might start adding things like caching tiers or a CDN to handle scalability so you can reach a much larger audience."

Today's video landscape is fractured in both the formats used and the browsers and end-user devices that companies need to support. More and more, companies are choosing not to invest in on-premises solutions.

Looking to the cloud for video delivery offers multiple benefits, Knowlton explained:

• Less expensive


• Able to experiment with new concepts faster without a big upfront expense


• Get to market faster


• Scale out rapidly to meet a growing audience


• Able to support fluctuating workloads


• Reduce hardware maintenance costs

For more on the benefits of cloud-based media delivery, watch the video below, and download Knowlton's presentation.

Troy Dreier's article first appeared on OnlineVideo.net