Enhancing global content delivery for a seamless viewer experience

Client Overview

A regional media company aimed to increase reachability for its audience by launching an over-the-top (OTT) streaming platform. The key objectives were to provide low-latency, high-quality video streaming to a global audience with secure content delivery, and the increased scalability for traffic surges.

Challenges

  • Providing a seamless, high-definition video experience to viewers regardless of location. 
  • Providing content in a secure way to mitigate risk of unauthorized access and piracy. 
  • Scaling up the service to accommodate busy periods without degradation of service. 
  • Reducing operational costs associated with content delivery and server maintenance. 

 

Solutions Implemented

1. Global Content Delivery with Amazon CloudFront

Utilized Amazon CloudFront as the Content Delivery Network (CDN) for video content stored in Amazon S3 to provide low-latency, and high-throughput streaming content to remote users across the globe.
Configured CloudFront with multiple edge locations to accelerate content delivery and reliability which improves buffering by fixing playback issues.

2. Protect Content Access

For the media section of the website, we dependent on CloudFront’s signed URL and signed cookie capability to protect access so that authorized users could view protected media.

– We also incorporated HTTPS so that data could not be intercepted or tampered while being transferred in transit.

3. Scalability and Reliability

Used CloudFront’s global edge location network enabled us to automatically scale content delivery based on expected user demand while ensuring a consistent level of performance during traffic peaks.

Utilized CloudFront’s origin failover capability, allowing us to automatically route requests to a secondary origin for continuity in the event of primary origin failure, and ultimately allowing us to offer a more reliable platform.

4. Cost Optimization

Through the use of CloudFront to cache content in edge locations, data transfer costs were reduced by minimizing the need to issue requests back to the origin servers.

We were able to analyze usage patterns with CloudFront’s real-time metrics and continuously look for opportunities to drain additional costs and improve performance.

Results and Benefits

  • Improved User Experience: Achieved faster content loading times and reduced buffering, increasing user interaction and satisfaction. 
  • Improved Security: Offered secure content delivery through encryption and access controls that protected intellectual property rights.
  • Scalable Infrastructure: Withstood heavy traffic volumes during peak events without performance slumps.
  • Cost Efficiency: Lowered operating expenses by optimizing data transfer and leveraging CloudFront’s pay-as-you-go pricing model.

Conclusion

By integrating Amazon CloudFront into its OTT platform, the media company was able to successfully address its content delivery issue globally, security, scalability, and cost control. The solution provided a robust and efficient infrastructure capable of delivering high-quality streaming experiences to viewers worldwide

7 Powerful AWS NOVA Gen AI Tools That Make AI Work For You (No Coding Required!)

AWS PartyRock: Showcasing the Creativity of Artificial Intelligence

AWS Hosting Services Efficiently Overcomes 4 Major Performance Hurdles

AWS Cost Optimization for Progressive Labs.

How CostQ’s Compute Optimizer Cuts AWS Costs: 5 Key Areas You Can Optimize Today