Google Cloud Platform Blog
Fastly uses Brightcove’s Zencoder service on Google Cloud Platform for reliable live video streaming
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Today’s guest blog comes from Casey Wilms, product lead for cloud media services provider
Brightcove
, and Lee Chen, head of product at content delivery network
Fastly
. Fastly leverages Brightcove's Zencoder cloud-based encoding service, which runs on Google compute, to offer a powerful Live video streaming solution.
In the streaming video world, streaming live events without hiccups is a bit like the Holy Grail. Now, with a bundled transcoding and delivery package from Fastly, customers can leverage the power of Brightcove’s Zencoder cloud transcoding solution and Fastly's unparalleled content delivery network to offer events with an impeccable user experience.
Background on Brightcove and Fastly
Brightcove's Zencoder is a cloud-based transcoding solution for Live video and VOD. Customers like
Funny or Die
and
SmugMug
have built their video workflow around Zencoder to encode large volumes of video affordably and quickly. Performance is paramount for Zencoder, so Brightcove relies on the Google Cloud Platform for consistently great service around the globe.
Fastly is a next-generation content delivery network (CDN) that can cache any type of content and has zero-delay, instant purge (in ~150 milliseconds) across dynamic content, compared to two minutes (or even as long as six hours) on a traditional CDN. This allows Fastly to truly cache dynamic content for businesses like Twitter, Github, and Foursquare. Since Fastly’s goal is to deliver content that is as close to real time as possible, it made sense to package Zencoder as part of a broader live video delivery solution. Fastly’s event-based transcoding, powered by Zencoder, offers businesses a faster and more seamless video streaming service. For example, one customer test streamed video from Mexico to the central U.S. and had virtually no latency, around 50 milliseconds.
How the Brightcove/Fastly Integration Works
Let’s say you have a live event that you’re streaming online for your audience. Your production team provides you with a Program Out signal to your live encoders. You generate the source signal, which is sent to Fastly’s event-based transcoding, powered by Zencoder. Zencoder then transcodes that signal into different bitrates and resolutions (renditions), and Fastly picks it up and distributes it to the end user’s app or Web player. When the event is over, the transcoding instance spins down, and you won’t have to worry about paying for more time than you’re broadcasting for.
Why Brightcove Chose Google Cloud Platform
One of the benefits in using Fastly and Brightcove’s live online video delivery package is that Zencoder runs on Google Compute Engine, which means everything is hosted in the cloud. Brightcove tried other infrastructure hosting platforms, and found that only Google Compute Engine delivers the kind of high responsiveness, consistency, and performance needed to offer seamless live video streaming.
Because Google Cloud Platform is built on the same network Google uses, network latency is extremely low, resulting in best-in-class speed and reliability. Thus, Brightcove can spin up server instances as needed to meet spikes in demand. Google has achieved a level of consistency across their cloud in terms of compute and network performance that is simply impossible to find with other vendors. That means the 100th server that's spun up can be expected to exhibit the same compute profile as the first. Instances start up in about half the time of Amazon. Also, thanks to Google Compute Platform's per minute billing granularity and automatic discounts, customers using the live online video delivery package will get an unbeatable price point.
Another thing Brightcove doesn’t get from anyone else is the level of customer and engineering support that Google offers. If the team has an issue, they can email Google’s support and get a response right away. They can end up talking to a product manager, and if they file a support ticket, they get a call the next day, which is totally unheard of in the cloud platform world.
Faster Streaming, Happier Customers
Because Google Cloud Platform launches instances in less than half the time of the rest of the industry, Fastly is able to launch new customers through Brightcove in a turnkey way. If a customer has an on-demand broadcast, like a music broadcast or sporting event, that gets a choke in the CPU, it translates to latency, and viewers end up watching a stutter step or getting completely disconnected. If anything goes wrong with the live stream, it’s urgent to fix the problem immediately, since it’s impossible to redo an event that happens live. The amount of support required to satisfy customers for a live event is an order of magnitude higher than other types of video service. Thanks to Google Cloud Platform's consistency and speed, Fastly and Brightcove can rest comfortably knowing their customers will be happy.
-Contributed by Casey Wilms, product lead for media processing technology at Brightcove, and Lee Chen, Head of Product at Fastly
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