SRG SSR streams 4,000 events per year using AWS Elemental

Learn how Swiss broadcaster SRG SSR created a flexible and scalable streaming solution using AWS Elemental.

Benefits

months to migrate an on-premises infrastructure to the cloud: 9

hours streamed per year: 16,000

to 700 events streamed per month: 500

reduction in costs: 30%

Overview

As a publicly funded nonprofit, Swiss public broadcaster SRG SSR must deliver high-quality, accessible programming while maximizing the value of its funding. When it came time to modernize its event streaming infrastructure, the company turned to a cloud-based approach for greater scalability and cost efficiency. SRG SSR built a new solution using media services from Amazon Web Services (AWS). Using cloud-based video transport, encoding, and packaging services, SRG SSR has improved stream quality and uptime while supporting unlimited concurrent streams. The new architecture reduces costs, avoids vendor lock-in, and makes it easier to adopt emerging technologies.

About SRG SSR

SRG SSR’s mission is to provide the Swiss public with access to free and independent media. It serves Switzerland’s four linguistic regions and helps promote understanding between different cultures.

Opportunity | Using AWS to build a streaming solution for SRG SSR

Founded in 1931, SRG SSR provides information, entertainment, and educational programming to the Swiss public. The company has 17 radio channels, seven television channels, and a streaming platform. By 2022, SRG SSR’s on-premises streaming system had reached its limits.

The infrastructure was bound to 4–6 year capital investment cycles, which restricted agility and innovation. “We needed to anticipate the demand for the next several years when purchasing equipment and services,” says Samuel Spycher, solutions architect for the Stream Team at SRG SSR. “That limits innovation, especially in a field like live-streaming where new technologies are always emerging.”

The on-premises infrastructure also capped streams at 720p resolution and 32 concurrent channels. Additionally, the system stability was suboptimal; if one server went down, it would take six channels down with it.

To deliver higher-quality streams, scale capacity, and improve resilience, SRG SSR decided to move to the cloud. After evaluating providers, it selected AWS for its comprehensive media portfolio. “We knew that switching to AWS, we would not have any quality issues,” says Spycher.

Solution | Gaining scalability and flexibility using AWS Elemental

SRG SSR worked alongside AWS solutions architects and AWS Professional Services—which helps businesses achieve their desired outcomes using AWS—to design and build the solution. “They helped us sketch out the basic solution,” says Spycher. “That was a huge benefit.” The company also used AWS Countdown Premium for comprehensive guidance across the entire project life cycle. “That eased our nerves when we were approaching the big go-live deadline, knowing that somebody was actively monitoring the solution and was there to help in case we needed them,” says Spycher.

The platform’s cloud-based livestream stack is built on AWS Elemental, which provides a comprehensive portfolio of purpose-built media services. The solution uses AWS Elemental MediaConnect for secure, reliable live video transport; AWS Elemental MediaLive to encode live video for broadcast and streaming; and AWS Elemental MediaPackage to prepare and protect video for internet delivery. This media stack can be replicated as individual stacks for each event using AWS CloudFormation, a service that speeds up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code—which means that there’s no limit to the number of concurrent events that SRG SSR can stream.

The architecture also maximizes redundancy. Video signals are ingested in physically separate rooms, then sent through redundant MediaConnect flows and MediaLive encoders in multiple Availability Zones. MediaPackage distributes protected streams to the content delivery network, ensuring uptime even if a component fails.

By standardizing on infrastructure as code, SRG SSR not only accelerated deployment but also fostered closer collaboration between developers and media engineers. “We built a DevOps team that has end-to-end responsibility for the services,” says Cinzia Lago, product owner for the Stream Team at SRG SSR. “That change made us more agile and able to involve stakeholders earlier in the process.”

Outcome | Streaming 16,000 hours of events per year

The migration was completed within 9 months. Since going live with the new solution, SRG SSR has reduced its cloud costs by 30 percent and almost doubled its annual streaming hours. The broadcaster expected 8,400 hours of event streaming per year but now delivers 16,000 hours across 500–700 monthly events. Streaming on the platform is in 1080p, with the option to upgrade to 4K resolution in the future.

Infrastructure as code has also transformed the speed of major projects. “We moved our infrastructure from one European region to another in just 6 weeks,” says Spycher. “By contrast, moving our physical infrastructure from one data center to another would have taken years.”

With flexibility now built into operations, less-critical events can be run in cost-saving modes while high-profile broadcasts benefit from full redundancy. Overnight, when no events are streaming, costs approach zero.

The system’s built-in redundancy, along with the high availability of cloud infrastructure, means that a single failure will not affect a stream—an essential part of building trust both with audiences and with the internal teams who plan events. “To gain the trust of our internal users who plan these streaming events was a huge step forward,” says Chris Bitzi, department manager of technical distribution at SRG SSR.

Using AWS, SRG SSR has built a future-ready streaming foundation that balances cost-efficiency with the flexibility to support Switzerland’s diverse audiences. Building on the project’s success, the company plans to migrate its video-on-demand offering to the cloud as well. “Using AWS, we can scale so fast and so easily,” says Bitzi. “With on-premises infrastructure, that simply would not be possible.”