FanDuel enriches OTT video content using the Nomad Platform and AWS

Sportsbook and online gaming company FanDuel Group (FanDuel) saw a growing need to provide rich metadata, flexible viewing options, and low-latency video delivery for its live streaming and on-demand content across multiple devices.

The company turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to unlock the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services. FanDuel used Nomad, an AWS Digital Customer Experience ISV Competency Partner and digital-asset management software company, to modernize its content management system (CMS) and live streaming needs for over-the-top (OTT) content. That led to a reimagining of FanDuel’s media infrastructure, drastically reducing its time to market for new features and unlocking added value for customers.

Transforming content management to be agile and efficient

FanDuel needed a single, cloud-based solution that would scale efficiently, deliver media with low latency, and simplify management of both live and video-on-demand (VOD) content. In addition, FanDuel’s content needed to be available in multiple encoding formats, languages, and regions.

Available through AWS Marketplace, the Nomad Platform is an intuitive, AWS cloud-native content and asset management solution that uses the advanced capabilities of AWS Media Services and AI to enrich, discover, and distribute content libraries. This product provides FanDuel with simple-to-use live-channel management, intelligent programming features, archive management, tools for adding rich metadata, secure access and distribution of media, and more.

Nomad is powered by AWS, from its asset management and discovery tools to its media enrichment capabilities and content syndication. The solution encompasses content storage, conversion, translation, caching, and security using a suite of AWS services.

Because Nomad CMS runs in the cloud, FanDuel can scale it as needed to support its growing business. And the company doesn’t have to worry about managing servers, maintaining a physical database, or building in-house tools.

Using the power of the AWS to simplify and enhance content management

Using Nomad, FanDuel can view and organize its rapidly growing library of videos, audio, and other media with ease. Nomad stores its content library using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

FanDuel processes its live video streams using Nomad and AWS Elemental MediaLive, which encodes live video for broadcast and streaming to any device. Another benefit of Nomad is that it facilitates the management of the AWS Elemental Link Device Family of encoding devices, which connect live video sources to AWS Elemental MediaLive. As it migrates content from FanDuel’s studios through the production pipeline, Nomad stores video in AWS Elemental MediaStore, a storage service optimized for the performance, consistency, and low latency required to deliver live streaming video content.

FanDuel uses Nomad to perform content enrichment, adding transcriptions, subtitles, and translations automatically to thousands of hours of audio and video. The AI capabilities of AWS power these features. Using Nomad significantly reduces the amount of manual work that FanDuel does to provide these important accessibility features.

Nomad also uses Amazon Rekognition, which offers pretrained and customizable computer vision capabilities to extract information and insights from images and videos, to automatically add valuable context to its video content, helping customers search for and discover it.

Distributing and localizing content around the world

FanDuel TV includes games from international basketball leagues in Australia, China, Germany, and France. With an audience that spans various countries and languages, translation and localization capabilities are essential. Nomad performs automatic translation of its content using Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service that delivers fast, high-quality, affordable, and customizable language translation.

Nomad also includes features for managing VOD content, metadata, and security. Nomad uses AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based, video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features, to distribute VOD and syndicated content for multiple devices and encoding formats.

As part of its adoption of a serverless architecture on AWS, Nomad uses AWS Lambda, a serverless compute service that lets users run code without thinking about servers or clusters, to invoke events and connect other AWS services.

Improving content delivery on AWS

FanDuel plans to continue expanding its use of Nomad and AWS as it builds new features to excite customers. “We’ve already made great improvements to our CMS, and we’re taking advantage of the benefits of using AWS to keep innovating,” says Eric Girard, senior manager of FanDuel TV and FanDuel TV+ at FanDuel Group.