July 22, 2015

Spuul

Spuul is an online video streaming service specialising in premium Indian entertainment content. Brightcove’s video encoding service, Zencoder, allowed the company to handle the high demands of transcoding large film files. Brightcove tell us a little more

Situation

Spuul was rapidly expanding its programming choices to cater to its fast-growing subscriber base. Most of its users were from India, but the company soon found itself addressing a global user base and Bollywood film buffs from countries around the world including the UK, Pakistan, USA, Middle East, Australia, Singapore, South Africa, Canada and Malaysia.

In addition, 80 to 85 per cent of its customers were consuming content on their mobile devices. Faced with growing volumes of professional, high-quality files that were large in size and needed to be published on a plethora of new devices, Spuul turned to Zencoder for a cloud-based transcoding solution that would offer huge scale and future-proofing against today’s array of interconnected devices.

Solution

Traditional, on-premise video encoding methods were inferior in comparison, as they did not provide the scalability, flexibility, speed-to-market and reduced total cost of ownership that Spuul wanted in its media service.

“We had looked at doing encoding on our own with our own equipment,” said Michael Smith,  Chief Product Officer for Spuul.

“Ultimately, we decided to keep everything in the cloud and all on-demand. That way, we realised a predictable cost model by paying only for what we needed and not have to worry about maintaining any systems. It just made sense.”

A Secure, Optimised Network for Video Streaming

Smith further added, “We shifted to a cloud-based strategy because scalability is also key to our business. We are constantly implementing new technologies to maintain the standard of service our customers expect. The developer-focused flexibility provided by Zencoder’s API allows us to integrate quickly to existing workflows and improve our transport stream optimisation.”

With the ability to increase speed to market, Spuul found it easy to commercialise its huge library of Bollywood film and TV content. Its assets go live within a short period of time whilst achieving maximum efficiency, with minimal disruption to existing workflows. The cloud infrastructure provides Spuul with a low total cost of ownership for media service deployment and a predictable cost model by eliminating the need for large, upfront and idle investments, in addition to long-term maintenance considerations altogether.

Zencoder Attributes

Expanding Platforms and Devices

As a company on the cutting edge of technology, Spuul aimed to focus on all aspects of its business, from encoding movies to streaming them to its apps and sites that support the streams, and the tools that enabled a smoother distribution process. Tremendous processing power is required to scale video initiatives and to quickly deliver high-quality video to users’ connected devices. Zencoder proved to be an extensible tool in increasing customer engagement for Spuul on multiple platforms and devices.

As the company expanded its reach to iOS, Android, Web, mobile Web, Panasonic TV, Samsung TV, LG TV, Google Chromecast and Google TV, Spuul leveraged Zencoder to support its multi-device strategies and future-proof against new devices and additional bitrates. Zencoder enabled Spuul to scale operations in the cloud by handling the re-encoding of libraries while still process day-to-day content.

“Zencoder has definitely transformed our business by allowing us to harness our capabilities and scale with the latest mobile formats. We are very happy with the results we are seeing so far and definitely look forward to integrating other solutions from Brightcove’s suite of technologies to continue enhancing the viewing experience and the way we deliver and monetise content,” Smith says.

Conclusions

Zencoder met Spuul’s criteria in terms of its ability to handle the high demands of transcoding large film files that came in at all times, in addition to being easy to deploy, easy to manage and to keep overhead costs low.

Zencoder’s cloud-based service, featuring extremely fast transcoding, industry-leading reliability, unmatched input file compatibility and output support for all connected devices, gave Spuul access to the fastest encoding times through a comprehensive API. With a highly scalable cloud infrastructure, Zencoder could scale to match Spuul’s encoding demand as their library grew.

Whether streaming content to iOS, Android connected TV’s, set top boxes or other devices, Zencoder enabled Spuul to support the latest video streaming standards and guarantee exceptional video experience on all devices. All that without the hassle of having to invest in expensive hardware that can have unpredictable end-of-life scenarios