AWS Case Study: SPIEGEL.TV

schnee von morgen webTV GmbH offers a wide range of TV services, including consulting, project management, content management, video transcoding, video delivery, statistics, broadcast archive systems, and storage.

To reduce costs and increase scalability, the company uses a variety of Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).
One of their customers is the German documentary and award winning platform dctp.tv. SPIEGEL.TV is the latest webTV partner of schnee von morgen and a producer of factual programming with a strong focus on history, science, social issues, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs. According to Nikolai Longolius, CEO of schnee von morgen, the company manages “the whole TV workflow between the video camera and the video player to reinvent TV.”
The company chose to work with Amazon Web Services (AWS) based on pricing and scalability and uses multiple AWS services. Longolius notes, “We use nearly every Amazon service.” The company specifically uses the following services:

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for CMS systems and video transcoding
Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for queues
Amazon CloudFront for delivery of static files and video streaming (for over 70 million requests per month)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for storage
Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) as instance store with hourly automated snapshots and disaster recovery

The SPIEGEL.TV solution was built using Python and Django, as well as the boto library. Through the development process, says Longolius, the team learned “to expect failure and work around it,” as well as to learn from other people’s mistakes and be transparent with their own.
The results of working with AWS have been positive for SPIEGEL.TV. Longolius explains, “By the end of this year, we will have served over 1 billion static objects over Amazon CloudFront. It is hard to argue in cost savings because most of our business would have been impossible without the usage of cloud computing.”
“Take, for example, video transcoding. Next month, we are going to transcode more than 20,000 videos into seven high quality formats. This job is going to use approximately 40,000 high CPU hours, and we are going to transcode everything in under two days. We couldn’t even pay the electricity bill for all the servers that would be required to perform this operation in our own datacenter.”
Longolius adds, “Reinventing TV is a complex problem even without sysadmins involved. Amazon helps us to keep infrastructural problems away from the creative people.”
schnee von morgen webTV GmbH expects to use additional AWS services in the future, including Amazon Route 53 as a failback to their current DNS configuration. Longolius adds, “Our next webTV projects are definitely going to be in the cloud.”

To learn more, visit http://www.spiegel.tv/ This link will launch in a new browser window or tab. .