MediaKind improves video delivery in minutes with move to Azure

Delivering better quality video in minutes

The next time you watch or stream your favorite show or sports team, you might have MediaKind to thank for the smooth, dependable, and enjoyable viewing experience. Born as part of networking and telecommunications company Ericsson, MediaKind has been a standalone entity for six years that supports businesses across the media industry with end-to-end video delivery solutions, including content delivery, video compression, and video service distribution. “We’ve shifted our investments and market opportunities toward the broader media landscape, which includes broadcasters, streamers, and other types of video loads, including corporate video loads,” says Erik Ramberg, Head of Global Business Development at MediaKind.

As MediaKind can attest, media workloads are highly compute and egress intensive and traditionally rely on on-premises equipment. Many media companies are hesitant to make changes apart from refreshing hardware every few years.“Transitioning from their comfort zones to general-purpose architectures and then cloud architectures is a big leap for very large businesses that depend on stable, high-performance infrastructure,” explains Ramberg. And as Allen Broome, MediaKind’s Chief Executive Officer notes, “People get really upset when their entertainment is offline. Seconds of downtime costs broadcasters and streamers millions of dollars in advertising and brand revenue.”

In recent years, the video market has become increasingly competitive. As more companies provide innovative ways to engage customers through video, deploying on-premises infrastructure and not touching it for several years no longer works. In response, MediaKind is helping shift the industry by proving that media workloads can perform reliably and at scale in the cloud. To accomplish this, it decided to build on its existing relationship with Microsoft and develop its platform around Microsoft Azure. Using Azure AI services, Azure Linux-based Azure Kubernetes Service, and other Microsoft products, it immediately gained dynamic scaling capabilities and additional capacity for its compute-intensivemedia customers and workloads. “By moving our video operations to Azure and opening up new capabilities, we’re now able to dynamically dub programming into any language and caption videos to open up new audiences who don’t speak the original language in a matter of minutes,” says Broome. 

Moving to Azure to unlock new capabilities and meet customers where they are

MediaKind strives to deliver a ready-to-use experience for its customers where all video preparation is done for them so they can focus on extracting business value from their workflows. “We focused on Azure from the start because a large segment of our organization came from Microsoft, and we were further driven by the core capabilities and engagement from their support staff,” says Ramberg. After setting up all of its back-end management in Azure, MediaKind started bringing its entire technology portfolio and its product workflows to Azure, including core video processing, storage, packaging, and streaming.

Throughout the process, most of the company’s portfolio has been redesigned for the cloud. “We went through a re-architecture of our core components and a microservices transformation to break everything down to smaller components that can be life cycled faster and scaled independently,” explains Boris Felts, Chief Product Officer at MediaKind. “We’ve achieved a complete software transformation in some domains that now allows us to move workflows anywhere we want with Azure Kubernetes Service and containerization.”

MediaKind is committed to meeting customers where they are, including on transitional journeys. For those customers, it goes hybrid with both on-premises and cloud deployments. While it supports different private and public clouds, MediaKind strives to provide Azure-first services. “Our customer DAZN is a great example because it had a different deployment, and we initially only did a disaster recovery for it,” says Ramberg. “As we outperformed its existing infrastructure, we were able to accelerate moving DAZN onto our Azure infrastructure.” Adds Felts, “What’s going to make the biggest difference for us with Azure moving forward is Microsoft’s focus on AI workflows and products like Azure OpenAI Service. These are going to be differentiators in how we go to market, evolve, and provide services to various customers, clients, and partners.”

Building slam-dunk solutions for major sports leagues and entertainment providers

Given the extended period between hardware refreshes at most media companies and their need for always-on performance, MediaKind being able to show the benefits of its solution in action is particularly important to persuade customers to make the switch. Fortunately, it already has the full support of several leading global media content providers.

Working with Microsoft, MediaKind provides the video infrastructure for a popular subscription-based service for live and on-demand sports games. The service was initially built on different infrastructure that the sports league found too constraining. When it decided streaming was the future, it wanted to get ahead of the market and selected MediaKind to help realize its vision. “We’ve had two seasons now achieving a high degree of reliability with some of the most premium content in the world, showing that these types of solutions work really well on Azure,” shares Broome. 

Whether it’s a sports matchup or another big-ticket live event, one of MediaKind’s core advantages is its delivery of reliable real-time streaming. “Live video streaming is more difficult than on-demand video and requires unique investments, expertise, and capabilities from a partner the size of Microsoft that has the infrastructure to support it and the teams to help work around issues as they occur,” says Ramberg. “Only Microsoft can provide the scalability and capacity required to handle some of our largest customers, like DAZN and DIRECTV.” 

Capturing Azure and AI momentum now and into the future

MediaKind appreciates the mature set of products and services available in Azure and the support it receives to ensure it can use them—and new ones as they emerge—to rapidly adapt to the market’s needs and offer new solutions to customers. It also has access to global footprints of compute and storage and the networking between them, in addition to seamless interconnections with multiple content delivery network providers. “There’s a variety of product versions for processing and storage, which allows us to feature certain price points for certain markets,” adds Felts. “The ability for us to cost optimize and have the tools and access to look at that in the Azure portal over time has been critical.”

From customers’ perspective, the appreciation for Azure is mutual. “A lot of what we can do now to support customers wouldn’t be possible without being cloud native and cloud deployed and having the infrastructure scale of Azure,” says Ramberg. “Azure isreally leading the waywithbeing able to complement dramatic changes in the media landscape with the value from AI and the operational rigor to handle live events and large-scale broadcasts.”

In one recent commercial deployment for a sizable and complex telecommunications project spanning multiple countries, MediaKind was able to move from the planning stage to go-live managing videos, back ends, and front-end integration in only three months. “To compare what we did here against other operators, it could’ve taken up to three years,” says Felts. “The speed we get from Azure and having our setup optimized with Microsoft helps capture the momentum of traditionalists embracing the cloud, which is only going to accelerate.” 

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