AOL on Vidispine Hybrid Cloud

Executive Briefing 

Vidispine “Media Cloud Partner”, XPlatform Consulting, helped AOL build out a hybrid cloud solution cross four offices and three separate AWS S3 object stores. Vidispine was selected after a thorough research of cloud-based media asset management solutions. The implementation is a Vidispine Media Repository engine running on AWS connecting to VidiCore Server Agents (VSAs) installed in each office. The VSAs is monitoring local directories and folders, creating proxies, thumbnails and extracting metadata. The link to the local, large, original files are kept so that the cloud-side Vidispine Media Repository Engine is always up to date.

Benefit

AOL achieved a workflow for global ingest and distribution including a federated view of all available assets. Content can now be streamlined to AOL Ad and Monetization Platform.

The Challenges 

AOL is a truly global business with users, customers, and content everywhere. In a fast-paced media landscape, there is a growing need for finding all content wherever it resides and then repurpose it to do fast turn-around storytelling. The first offices to connect are Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC. Toronto (Canada) and Detroit coming next AOL needed a way to scale fast yet keep quality and agility in the delivery process. Cloud was a given piece of the new architecture, but managing large video assets while keeping a rigorous cost control is anything but simple. The key challenges were:

• Multiple geographically spread out team, collaborating and creating content at high pace and quality.
• Finding, sharing and distributing content with low friction, as close to ‘self-service’ as possible.
• Implement a cloud-based solution for scale and reach but at the same time avoid unnecessary movements of large files.
• Strict cost control, preferably all OPEX

How Vidispine, AWS & XPLATFORM consulting helped 

XPlatform Consulting (XPC) proposed a Vidispine Media Repository with APIs on AWS for the workflows, distribution and a user interface custom-built from XPC. The cloud-side Vidispine was then connected with local VidiCore Server Agents (VSA) to deal with the On-Prem load and large original files.

“AOL engaged me to develop an enterprise solution for media asset management that will provide a hybrid on-premise and cloud infrastructure. The solution needed to be based on an open API and support all emerging video codecs and media file formats. Vidispine and its VSA functionality not only provided all the feature requirements but also exceeded in areas of security, reliability, and high availability.” - Nicholas Stokes, founder XPlatform Consulting
 

Technologies Involved

• Vidispine: Vidispine Media Repository (API-based content management), VidiCoder, and VSA (VidiCore Server Agent)
• AWS: Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, Amazon RDS, Amazon SES, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNF.
• Other: Aspera Orchestrator and Cantemo Portal.