If you are on this blog, you are either casually dabbling with the idea of building your own video solutions or seriously evaluating some practical options. Well, I won’t go as far as saying you have come to the right place, but this can be a good starting point for you. This is the first blog of a multi part series where we will be taking some baby steps into building a few OTT video workflow solutions on Google Cloud.
Now, the why.
I work with quite a few customers in the OTT space. Most of them seem to have this age old problem of striking the right balance between control, cost and operational excellence. This blog is an effort to evaluate these conditions and layout some hand-made solutions on Google Cloud.
Today’s existing managed video solutions come with a great plug and play formula. It’s simple and easy to start. For instance, there’s a whole gamut of software based transcoding solutions out in the market with flexible deployment models — on-premise or cloud. All someone needs to do is throw a bunch of source videos and wait to see them transformed in some output location. But not everybody goes with this kind of a formula.
Again, why?
To know why, we need to peel this onion further. So let us broadly (and boldly) classify customers in the OTT domain across these two categories
- Vendor Driven
- Engineering Driven
The Vendor Driven OTT platform
Most of the major media house giants and cash rich companies fall under this category. We can describe their operational model in as many words — “Take me to the market quickly, own your workflows and meet your SLAs”. Vendors have full control and choice with limited technical intervention from the customer. The main focus of this class of companies is Content. How do I buy or produce the right content? How do I promote the right content to the right users? How can I acquire and retain customers with new content?
Content is King. And there’s no doubt about it
However, even these companies are now increasingly giving more importance to the operational aspects of running an OTT platform. Having too much dependency on vendors and SIs is not only a commercially sustainable approach in the long run, but also stunts your growth from an innovation standpoint.
“Can I experiment with the latest H.266 video codec to provide better video quality at higher compression ratio? No, sorry. It’s still on the roadmap”. The harsh reality is your innovation is now tightly coupled with the product cycle of a third party vendor
To give credit where it’s due, this may be a great strategy when you are going to the market with a bang and hoping to cover a wider audience in a shorter period of time. This usually involves smaller teams and lesser engineering investments. However, the fact is at some point your monthly invoices will start giving you sleepless nights, not to mention the growing engineering inertia and technical debt. All this has now become even more relevant in today’s COVID situation where traffic volumes are going over the roof on one hand and ad revenues dipping on the other.
The Engineering Driven OTT platform
This class of players have already seen a substantial amount of growth and acquired a sizeable user base. They may have started off with a vendor driven strategy for managing their content management systems, transcoding workflows, video QoE analytics etc, but usually have been quick to realise the importance of investing in engineering efforts for building in-house solutions.
The mantra here is “Operational excellence and Cost”.
One of the driving factors is their broader vision. The spectrum of reach of OTT platforms has broadened in the last few years. People who intend to play the longer game want to not only venture into new streams of revenue, but also build their own loyal community of users. So now all of a sudden, OTT video is not only about delivering the right content to users, but also about giving users a wholesome 360 degree experience.
Let’s admit. It always feels great to order our favourite biryani from the nearest restaurant while watching a tense T20. All this without having to switch app screens.
So these companies want to transform their OTT video platform into one large aggregate platform — social, merchandise, e-commerce , gaming and lifestyle.
Now, imagine someone pitching this idea to a CTO of a fairly new OTT platform. What do you think they will ask? You guessed it right. How do I first optimise my existing platform to improve business agility and reduce operational costs? With optimisation comes innovation and exploration. So this is all we will strive to openly discuss and deliberate in this series of blogs.
To summarise, building and maintaining your own solutions at the right performance and cost ratios is a journey, not a destination in itself. We will always need strong support from the right partners, vendors and managed solutions. Identifying the right mix that works for you and aligns with your company’s vision is the trick here.
The point of this multi-part series is to explore some alternative methods, techniques and technologies and see what it takes to build and own your solutions for your platform. And yes — In the course of this series, we will also try to do some TCO calculations to evaluate these DIY solutions from a commercial viability perspective.
In the next blog, we will explore the use case of running a basic transcoding workflow on Google Cloud leveraging containers, notification queues and Data store. Until then, stay tuned and stay safe!