CustomerLocalTV
IndustryMedia & Advertising
ServiceCloud Adoption

Cloud powered video rendering for LocalTV, with 80% speed improvements.

ServiceCloud Adoption
IndustryMedia & Advertising

Cloud powered video rendering for LocalTV, with 80% speed improvements.

Meet LocalTV

Headquartered in Leeds, LocalTV Ltd. is the largest local broadcast television group in the UK and one of the UK’s leading diversified local media companies.

Local TV owns and operates nine television channels providing sales and video services to over 7 million homes or approximately 25% of all UK television households. They leverage local content to bring services and value to consumers and advertisers on television, digital and social media platforms.

80%

Video processing speed upgrade, with full adoption of AWS Cloud services

Business Challenges

LocalTV specialise in high quality video and advertising content, reaching and audience of over 300,000 per month. LocalTV’s challenge was to replace an old, in-house windows system that wasn’t performing to a high enough standard. It was becoming slow, producing upload errors and needed a refresh and adoption to cloud services. With hundreds of large format video files added regularly, LocalTV had to future proof their existing infrastructure which meant building a new cloud dependant system with Firemind.

We knew that switching to AWS Managed Services whilst adopting best practices when building a new infrastructure would solve the issues the client was experiencing and enable savings opportunities and free up considerable time.


Why us?

LocalTV knew that they needed the experience and expertise of a Cloud partner that understood both the pains of internal servers and the benefits of full cloud adoption.

Firemind were able to listen to the customer, understood the many varied challenges they faced and from there, work backwards to a scalable air-tight solution.


Our solution

Firemind’s solution was to build LocalTV’s website from the ground up, making it highly available, responsive and compatible with changing customer demands and request rates.

As such, Firemind made use of AWS Application Load Balancers, Elastic Container Service, AWS MediaConvert, AWS CloudFront and Amazon S3. Amazon ECS was also hooked up to CloudWatch, for deploying monitoring tools and alarms for CPU Utilisation, being responsive to change and auto scaling.

For the Load Balancer, Firemind’s solution was to put this behind a CloudFront Distribution. This was to improve caching, instead of making uncached requests to a load balancer which would’ve incurred a further cost. Also, Firemind understood CloudFront’s benefit in providing faster response times for users around the world. Local TV host video content on their website and within user access areas, so quick loading times were essential.

Included in the solution was a rebuild of Local TV’s media transcoding service. Previously this was all done via a Windows server, however Firemind decoupled their architecture and moved to Amazon ECS, API Gateway, AWS Lambda and AWS MediaConvert – this part of the solution also utilised CloudFront as a CDN. MediaConvert is a managed service, providing a variety of outputs for broadcast and online video playback. Lambda is a microservice provider, enabling rapid response times within the infrastructure when a video has been submitted for transcoding by MediaConvert.

Furthermore, CloudFront was used to playback the video files for Local TV’s website from an S3 bucket. Firemind chunked the files into smaller parts that were outputted by MediaConvert, supporting users on slower connections.

Firemind also made use of AWS Web Application Firewalls with CloudFront to ensure that malicious requests didn’t get through to the origin server. Firemind utilised multiple rulesets including the CommonRuleSet, WordPressRuleSet, IPReputationList and SQLRuleSet.

Added value

Once the solution was completed by Firemind, LocalTV were ecstatic due to the improvements that resulted from cloud adoption. The project resulted in an 80% faster, more responsive website with a brand-new end-to-end video processing service for the client to use. This was vigorously tested and experimented with to ensure that all video files sent through were properly transcoded before being sent to the website for playback.

40%

Cost projected savings when moving from Google Cloud Platform to AWS.

Unlimited Storage

Switching to cloud storage ensured LocalTV could continue to upload their footage with no risk of down time or upload errors.

The move from internal servers to the cloud will ensure an unlimited, scalable, backed-up and secure storage facility that will continue to contain LocalTV’s media.


Multi Level Encryption

AWS could provide full security with the use of KMS for encryption at rest and ACM for encryption in transit.


Cloud Savings

Over 50% initial monthly savings when moving from an independent storage supplier in-house, to cloud storage using Amazon S3.

Client Satisfaction

“Firemind have a deep knowledge of technology and how to use tech to solve business problems. They’re very progressive and are helping to transform our business and operations within the cloud. They are extremely technically advanced compared to other tech and development companies we’ve worked with. Very professional in our dealings with them and are true partners to our business, not just suppliers.”

Lesley Mackenzie

CEO

Want to find out more?

Break away from internal servers and embrace the cloud. Firemind can integrate with your roadmap to deliver brilliant execution.

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