Scaling a VOD transcoding platform. Which model fits your growth? 

The challenge of scalability

By nature, VOD catalogs evolve over time. Some assets will disappear, while new assets will be added. And the rhythm at which assets are added and removed from the catalog is not necessarily a constant. This means that the challenge to address is to have a VOD transcoding platform that can scale.

That requires scaling at two different levels:

• An infrastructure that can scale
• A transcoding software that can scale

This article will explore the key scaling features and different scaling models.

An infrastructure that can scale

There are three main models to consider: cloud-based transcoding, on-premises transcoding, and a hybrid approach that blends both. Each option has its own scalability strengths and trade-offs. 

Cloud-based infrastructure: elastic scalability

Running your transcoding in a cloud environment offers virtually unlimited scalability, making it a popular choice for VOD platforms that need to handle fluctuating demand efficiently.

Cloud scaling has its benefits:

• Instant resource allocation: Cloud platforms provide on-demand compute power, meaning you can scale up instantly during peak times and scale down when demand drops
• No infrastructure maintenance: Cloud providers manage the hardware and software updates, reducing the operational burden on your team.

Cloud scaling also has its challenges:

• Unpredictable costs: Cloud services operate on a pay-as-you-go model. The costs associated cannot be controlled.
• Data transfer fees: Moving large video files between storage and the transcoding system can add unexpected costs.

On-prem infrastructure: scaling within fixed limits

On-premises transcoding provides full control over the encoding pipeline but requires careful planning to ensure scalability. Unlike cloud-based solutions, scaling an on-prem setup means investing in more hardware, which can be a slow and expensive process.

On-premises scaling has its benefits:

• Predictable costs: Hardware investments are upfront, so costs remain stable over time, unlike cloud’s variable pricing.
• Full control: Customize encoding workflows, optimize hardware utilization, and avoid cloud provider limitations.
• Security & compliance: Some organizations prefer to keep their content in-house to meet regulatory requirements or protect proprietary assets.

On-premises scaling also has its challenges:

• Hardware limitations: Scaling requires purchasing and deploying additional servers, which can take weeks or months. On the other hand, there can be unused resources.
• Infrastructure maintenance: you will need to manage the hardware and software updates

Hybrid infrastructure: the best of both worlds?

A hybrid transcoding model blends on-premises infrastructure with cloud-based resources. This approach allows VOD platforms to process baseline workloads in-house while leveraging the cloud for spikes in demand.

Hybrid offloading benefits:

• Dynamic workload distribution: On-premises systems handle steady-state encoding, while cloud instances handle overflow when demand increases.
• Cost-efficient scaling: Avoid the high costs of over-provisioning on-prem hardware while minimizing cloud expenses.
• Redundancy & reliability: If on-prem resources are fully utilized or fail, cloud resources act as a failover, ensuring uninterrupted service.

Hybrid offloading challenges:

• Complexity: This means a non-systematic offloading to the cloud, but rather an approach that ensures cloud is only used when due availability dates cannot be met.
• Integration: Seamlessly integrating transcoding pipelines across cloud and on-premise environments requires careful architecture planning. The choice of the infrastructure should be independent of the business need of preparing a VOD asset.

A transcoding software that can scale

While infrastructure scalability is crucial, the transcoding software itself must also support dynamic scaling. A well-architected transcoding solution should allow for the automatic spinning up and down of transcoding processes based on demand. This means efficiently distributing workloads, managing compute resources, and ensuring seamless integration with both cloud and on-premises environments. Without scalable software, even the most robust infrastructure can become a bottleneck, limiting the ability to handle peak loads and fluctuating content demands.

The key features required for a scalable transcoding software would be:

• Versatile solution: the transcoding software needs to be based on cloud-native services , and be designed to work on any infrastructure, either on bare-metal servers or in cloud platforms.
• Elastic resource management: the software should be able to dynamically allocated resources based on the pending transcoding jobs. This would avoid underutilization of resources when not required, and prevent bottlenecks during peak demand.
• Orchestration and load balancing: the transcoding solution needs to includes efficient job orchestration to distribute encoding tasks across available resources, whether that is on-premises or in the cloud.
• Optimized resource utilization: the said software needs to take full advantage of the allocated resources, reducing idle time, and improving cost efficiency.

The Ateme Solution

To address these challenges, Ateme provides:

• TITAN File: a cloud-native, feature-rich transcoding solution with premium video quality
• PILOT Media: the next generation workflow orchestration and media supply chain platform
• Ateme+: Emmy-award-winning TITAN technology now available as SaaS in Ateme+

Key benefits of TITAN File

• Award-winning video compression engine making the best of compression efficiency and video quality
• Feature-rich for seamless integration when it comes to formats and metadata
• Scalable micro-service architecture that brings elasticity and ensures robustness and resilience
• Cloud-native solution allowing deploying on-premises and/or in any cloud

Key benefits of PILOT Media

• Automate and prioritize tasks using metadata and business logic, based on business objectives.
• Centralize orchestration to surface operational and financial insights.
• Minimize infrastructure costs with global consolidation, storage life-cycle rules, and hybrid deployments leveraging on-premises investments and cloud elasticity.
• Facilitate new revenue opportunities by easily adding new or improving existing workflows, within a few clicks.
• Migrate workloads incrementally to support change management and investment cycles.

Key benefits of Ateme+

• Frictionless on-boarding with a single pane-of-glass that is easy to integrate to current workflows
• Lower TCO with no upfront capital and an accelerated time to market
• Cloud Agnostic platform that can operate in your chosen cloud provider
• Best of breed scalability and redundancy that scales to your requirements
• Clear pricing with pay-as-you-go and subscription models

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