Democratizing Access to Cultural Assets Using AWS Marketplace with Sesc

Founded in 1946, Sesc is a nonprofit institution that provides social assistance, as well as education, health, culture, and recreation programs, to over 7 million people throughout Brazil. Sesc’s cultural programs and projects bring together entertainment, reflection, and participation from the perspective of building knowledge, values, and ways of being, doing, and living. Serving more than 2,000 municipalities, most of the attractions reach places that are not usually part of the traditional cultural circuit. Sesc’s mission is to democratize access to quality artistic performances, museums, and libraries. The company has contributed a variety of services that encourage workers in the Commerce, Goods, Services, and Tourism segments to fully exercise their citizenship.

Sesc began using AWS in 2016 to migrate digital workloads to the cloud. “The selection of AWS as our cloud service provider was predicated on three fundamental pillars: technical capability, project economy, and reliability,” says Fernando Tuacek, manager of Sesc Digital.

To overcome initial migration challenges, Sesc opted for support from AWS Professional Services, which supplements cloud teams with specialized skills and experience to achieve results.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic made it virtually impossible for Sesc to hold in-person cultural events. In response, Sesc decided to accelerate its migration and that of Sesc Digital, a distribution solution that provides global audiences access to a broad collection of audio, image, text, and video materials. Sesc wanted to make its rich collection of Brazilian heritage music available to a global audience, further supporting its mission to bring its community together.

To achieve this, in early 2023, Sesc began the Relicário Project. It gathered previously unreleased audio recordings by renowned national musicians at Sesc units in São Paulo and made them available worldwide with no sign-in required. One such recording was an iconic performance by João Gilberto, one of the pioneers of Bossa Nova, which is a type of soft samba music, from 1998. Sesc set an ambitious deadline to launch the project on the 25th anniversary of the performance. This meant that Sesc needed to build a universally accessible audio player, offer good audio quality, and provide security compliance for a multiplatform launch on Sesc Digital—all within 45 days. Sesc once again turned to AWS Professional Services for help with bringing important cultural performances to the public within a short timeframe.

Though Sesc is not a government agency, it does follow public sector procurement practices. Assuring compliance and security for the Relicário Project was therefore crucial because Sesc wanted to follow the streaming industry standards for media protections through the digital rights management standard. Sesc used AWS Marketplace to discover a digital rights management service that guaranteed media protection through an encryption and decryption mechanism using streaming industry standards.

The company also used AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights to simplify its risk assessment. This provides third-party application security, data privacy and residency, and access control in a unified dashboard to help accelerate the procurement process. “Purchasing the digital rights management service through AWS Marketplace helped us meet procurement requirements with confidence,” says Tuacek. “If we had to build something from scratch, we certainly wouldn’t have met the project deadline.”

By using the AWS Marketplace, Sesc not only met mandatory security requirements but also experienced accelerated and simplified processes for contracting and managing external services. This approach bypassed the traditional and time-consuming bidding and contracting procedures typically associated with organizations of this nature. “Contracting the media encryption service via AWS Marketplace was a crucial step in simplifying the integration with our solution. Everything was within the AWS environment, and it allowed us to avoid going through our bidding process,” says Tuacek. “Without this streamlined approach, we would not have met the tight deadline required to launch our solution.”

In 10 days, Sesc designed its audio streaming solution and developed a proof of concept. In the remaining 35 days, it built the full, modern solution. As a nonprofit looking to optimize costs, Sesc opted to use serverless AWS services and infrastructure for the Relicário Project. “Having a fully serverless solution has greatly optimized our operation,” says Carlos Rocha, coordinator of Sesc Digital. “We don’t have to manage servers or patches or complete other time-consuming management tasks.”

Sesc chose AWS Elemental MediaConvert, a file-based video transcoding service with broadcast-grade features, to put all its media for the project into the right formats. With fundamental guidance and expertise from AWS specialists, the Relicário Project launched in April 2023 with excellent audio quality—performing as well as, or better than, other streaming solutions.

Even without massive advertising, the Relicário Project achieved more than 10 million streams from more than 15 countries by the end of 2023. It also generated more than 200 mentions in the press globally.

In addition, the São Paulo Association of Art Critics awarded the Relicário Project the 2023 APCA Award in the Special Project category. This award is one of the most prestigious Brazilian cultural accolades, and it shows that Sesc is making significant contributions to Brazilian arts and culture.