Support for Video on Demand legacy platform
Modern Solutions for Legacy Challenges in Video Streaming
In today’s rapidly growing world of video-on-demand (VOD) and live streaming, delivering a smooth and reliable experience isn’t just a luxury—it’s a necessity. Evolution Digital, a leading VOD provider, found itself facing tough hurdles: frequent service interruptions, aging infrastructure, and limited visibility into system health. These challenges stood in the way of providing the seamless user experience their audience expected. That’s where Knackforge came to the rescue.
Challenges
Outdated Systems and Unreliable Performance
With a sprawling VOD and live streaming platform serving multiple customers across various locations, Evolution Digital struggled with service interruptions and lagging performance.
Reactive Issue Handling – Problems with storage and service availability were only addressed after end users reported them, resulting in delays and customer dissatisfaction.
Frequent Downtimes – Critical servers—including video asset and authentication servers hosted in on-premises data centers—suffered repeated outages during peak traffic hours.
Legacy Infrastructure – Supporting applications for asset management, customer handling, and authentication were built on outdated frameworks and databases that had reached end-of-life support. This created security vulnerabilities and severely impacted performance.
The Solution
To simplify and optimize the client’s media management, Knackforge implemented a scalable and cost-efficient AWS-based solution:
Automated Video Format Conversion – Using AWS Elemental MediaConvert, we converted source files into MP4 and M3U8 formats, eliminating manual processing.
Efficient Content Delivery with AWS CloudFront – Replaced Cloudinary with AWS CloudFront to deliver media files directly from Amazon S3, enabling faster streaming and lower latency.
Scalable Storage with Amazon S3 – Migrating to S3 removed file size limitations and enabled multipart uploads for large files. S3 Lifecycle Policies were implemented to move older files to Infrequent Access storage, significantly reducing costs.
The Impact
From Costly to Cost-Efficient, from Cumbersome to Seamless
High Costs – Previous media hosting and delivery setup with Rackspace and Cloudinary cost around $100,000 annually.
Upload and CDN Restrictions – Rackspace’s limitations on file uploads and CDN distribution hindered scalability and performance.
Operational Complexity – Using separate services for storage and CDN made media management cumbersome and inefficient.
Technologies Used:
- AWS Elemental MediaConvert
- AWS CloudFront
- AWS S3
- Python
- AWS Lambda