CineSend Grows Video Streaming Business by 1,000% with Secure Content Delivery Solution Built on AWS

CineSend is a provider of secure video storage, encoding, and delivery solutions. The company serves a diverse range of customers, including flagship airlines, Hollywood studios, global financial institutions, top colleges, and other enterprises. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company experienced a significant spike in demand for its video streaming services. Having built its product suite on Amazon Web Services (AWS), CineSend quickly and efficiently scaled to support new and existing customers. 

Using solutions such as AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features, CineSend can provide users around the world with secure file storage and delivery, antipiracy protection, and on-demand streaming. By delivering a differentiated, powerful solution on AWS, CineSend has expanded its business across sectors and helped its customers deliver cutting-edge video experiences.

Founded in 2014, CineSend first targeted its video solution toward independent filmmakers and later realized that it could expand its technology to support other industries. “There was a need to provide an accessible service to help media creators share their video in a more secure way, whether delivering to a venue or an online streaming event,” says Colin Carter, founder of CineSend. “We later adapted the product that we had built for filmmakers for other businesses and new use cases.” Now the company serves over 10,000 global users and supports customers that include studios, distribution companies, airlines, banks, universities, and more. CineSend is also a provider of antipiracy and video security, holding a patent for the active watermarking technology PiracyDetector. This solution reports piracy attempts of streaming video in real time, protecting creators. PiracyDetector also delivers deep analytics to help creators better understand media performance and their content’s return on investment. 

A cloud-native company from the start, CineSend chose to use AWS services to enhance its offerings. “We ultimately migrated almost everything over to AWS because we wanted to use tools like MediaConvert,” says Carter. “It was much stronger than our previous provider’s offering.” CineSend also realized that it could provide its customers with more resilient and secure storage on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance—than it could with another provider or by hosting content on premises.

To stream content directly to users around the world, CineSend uses Amazon CloudFront, a content delivery network service built for high performance, security, and developer convenience. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for CineSend’s services rapidly spiked due to the cancellation of in-person events and a resultant pivot to online delivery. Because CineSend can stream video live or on demand to any location using Amazon CloudFront, its customers used its solution to host events remotely. “Hundreds of successful product launches, film festivals, and media events in 2020 would not have happened were it not for CineSend,” says Eric Rosset, vice president of business development at CineSend. “In March 2020, we were able to quickly support the virtual edition of the Cleveland International Film Festival, one of the first film festivals to go online, as well as the hundreds of other festivals and events that followed suit.” 

CineSend’s solution also helped its higher education customers securely stream video lectures and other content to students, faculty, and alumni. In 2020, CineSend also saw an increasing demand for innovative, video-based marketing initiatives built on its solution, such as Air Canada’s “Travel at Home” campaign, which reached over 4 million frequent flyer members. Using its scalable, cloud-native solution, CineSend effectively supported its customers’ live events and remote content needs—which resulted in a 1,000 percent increase in its video streaming client base during 2020. 

CineSend’s streaming solution relies on MediaConvert to produce high-quality video outputs to help its customers configure content for optimal viewing on any device, including large screens, small mobile devices, and television sets, through a process known as transcoding. To deliver a top-quality streaming experience, CineSend uses a feature on MediaConvert called Quality-Defined Variable Bitrate (QVBR), which minimizes wasted bits and scales video bitrate to maintain consistent video quality. “We can use the QVBR feature to efficiently stream higher-quality videos,” says Rosset. 

CineSend uses Amazon S3 to encrypt data at rest, which it uses to demonstrate to its customers that their content is safe, secure, and accessible when needed. This level of security is especially important for customers in highly regulated industries, such as financial services. One of the largest global financial institutions uses CineSend to deliver customized programming, such as lectures by thought leaders, to its high-net-worth customers. “We’ve built a highly secure video streaming platform using many AWS services,” says Carter.

Using AWS services such as MediaConvert and Amazon CloudFront, CineSend can securely and efficiently deliver content to global users, thereby continuing its rapid growth trajectory. The company plans to implement real-time engagement features into its solution to help users interact with each other simultaneously through video. “We have chosen a cloud provider that is established and trusted so that we can continue to better serve our customers,” says Rosset. “Using AWS, we have the capacity to meet our future business growth.”