IMDb Video Team Builds Strategies for the Future Using AWS

IMDb is a popular and authoritative source worldwide for movie, TV, and celebrity content, designed to help fans discover and decide what to watch. The IMDb consumer site has a combined web and mobile audience of more than 200 million monthly visitors.

The IMDb Originals & Events team of producers, editors, and motion designers creates extensive original video content each year. The team needed an infrastructure that could support access to its millions of digital raw media assets and archive them securely. The team was previously using on-premises content storage and web-based file hosting services for storage and distribution.

Looking to supplement its on-premises storage with a system that could scale to meet data storage needs that were growing at 50–100 TB per year, IMDb, an Amazon company, turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Cloud storage is the future of asset management,” says Matt Detisch, senior production and post manager for IMDb Originals & Events. “We wanted to build a cloud-based storage system on AWS that would help us streamline asset management so that we could deliver content to meet customer needs faster and more efficiently.”

Throughout the year, IMDb provides coverage of major industry events, awards shows, and festivals. IMDb Originals & Events videos include celebrity interviews, topical explainers, and other on-demand content. The IMDb Originals & Events team plans to create more than 800 video deliverables in 2021, requiring management of a growing archive of more than 2 million digital raw media assets.

Wanting to install a cost-effective, scalable archive solution to future-proof these assets, the team chose to use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. It migrated 100 percent of its on-premises storage to Amazon S3, using the service for redundancy and transfer of information from deep-storage hard drives to the cloud.

By using Amazon S3, the IMDb Originals & Events team can deliver content to meet customer needs with improved efficiency. “We’re a small team that does big things,” says Detisch. “A key to our success is the ability to scale in a way that lets us tackle a broad variety of production and postproduction scenarios to deliver high-quality, engaging entertainment content to fans in a timely manner.”

IMDb uses Amazon S3 to redundantly store data on a number of devices across multiple independent locations, known as Availability Zones, protecting the company’s data from failures and errors. “That security provides peace of mind,” Detisch says.

IMDb has demoed remote workstations that edit entirely in the cloud, an innovation it might incorporate in the future. “We’re building something that is robust, secure, and set up for long-term success,” Detisch says. “This video asset storage system is a core facet of our team’s foundation for the future.”