Red Bull Media House Makes Media Workflows Location Independent Using AWS for the Edge

As the multiplatform media arm of Red Bull energy drink, Red Bull Media House’s mission is to inspire with extraordinary stories and media experiences from both direct-to-consumer productions and through partnerships. These media products include global live broadcast events, exciting and inspiring local stories encompassing original short- and long-form programming, and feature films from around the world. Well known globally for its high-quality, adventurous programming, the company scales production resources in response to the parent company’s strategic decision-making.

A fundamental aspect of large-scale productions involves onboarding the best available freelance editors, graphics artists, and other talent, who are spread across multiple time zones and often are most creative at nontraditional hours. They collaborate with in-house producers, editors, and other personnel who work at production facilities in Salzburg, Austria, or Santa Monica, California. Production personnel require access to extremely large video files—under certain circumstances, 1 hour of footage shot in 4K can consume nearly 140 GB of storage per hour. To share footage, production teams often must ship hard drives around the world. And productions can stall as editors wait for high-resolution footage to load.

Red Bull Media House also needs ultraperforming compute power to process video at the highest possible bit rate, the speed at which video transfers. For example, the bit rate of 4K footage starts at about 100 Mbps. Red Bull Media House needs to optimize the bit rate so that productions don’t glitch.

In early 2022, Red Bull Media House began to explore the idea of postproduction in the cloud. It deployed small proofs of concept on a self-developed solution in parallel with a backup on-premises workflow.

Convinced of the concept’s feasibility, Red Bull Media House turned to the AWS account team, which involved AWS subject matter experts in media and entertainment as well as an AWS Partner to provide technical guidance and architectural support. They have been incorporating feedback from users as they complete selected projects without disturbing business processes or experiencing downtime.

Using AWS for the Edge solutions, Red Bull Media House is building an infrastructure to support a consistent hybrid experience. Rather than invest in fixed servers, Red Bull Media House powers its media workstations using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Production personnel work from anywhere and are not limited by on-premise throughput.

Red Bull Media House is building its media archive on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance. Red Bull Media House uses Amazon S3 to store projects that are in progress but not actively being worked on, saving costs while maintaining short retrieval time when an asset is needed.

To bridge the gap between its on-premises resources and workloads in the cloud, Red Bull Media House uses AWS Direct Connect, which creates a dedicated network connection to AWS from on-premises resources. In fact, Red Bull Media House has cut its turnaround time to deliver certain content from months to days.

By operating in the cloud, Red Bull Media House can employ the best talent in the world for virtually any given project, regardless of time zone. Creative personnel don’t have to travel to a production house or live event, which significantly reduces Red Bull Media House’s carbon footprint. Additionally, the company has less need to ship heavy postproduction equipment, another important factor for the company’s sustainability goals.

Over the next several years, Red Bull Media House plans to continue to work alongside the AWS account team and AWS Media and Entertainment experts, using their domain-specific knowledge to build on the foundation so that they can better address the business’s dynamic requirements.