Transforming the Media & Entertainment landscape with DevOps
The media and entertainment industry is one of the frontrunners when it comes to adopting new technology. Netflix, which started as a DVD rental shop, is one of the pioneers when it comes to adopting and inventing newer methods on the technology front to serve its customers better. The transformation has revolutionized how consumers consume media and its share in the internet traffic and consumption is an indicator of the same. The shift in media consumption has led the industry to invent newer models to attract customers. The online media-services providers have turned into major producers. TV networks like HBO and Showtime are coming with direct-to-customer options. With every major TV network expected to come up with apps and streaming services, a race for aggregators and over-the-top providers is hotting up. And this race is not only for movies and TV shows, it is for music, gaming, radio, podcasts — anything and everything that your brain can consume.
Let me specifically talk about video streaming. Now, I come from a generation where I had to go to DVD parlors to rent a movie that was released 2–3 years ago. It is enthralling for me to see the revolution that this industry has gone through. Who would have thought that we could play, pause, stop a movie on our devices at will? The modern video streaming service providing giants like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and many others are not only providing content on-demand but are also implementing intelligent systems that can analyze your consumption patterns and suggest tailored content according to your interests.
There is a new world altogether sitting behind your devices that has made it possible to deliver all this to you. However, this increasing consumption and demand have not only changed consumption and production patterns but also has posed some challenges on the technology side.
Major challenges faced by video streaming platforms
The challenges can be divided into business challenges and technology challenges. Business challenges are the ones when there is an oversaturation of media and difficulty in monetizing media in terms of consumer’s changing habits. But I, being a developer at heart, will focus on the technology-related challenges and some of these are –
- Reaching out to subscribers anytime, anywhere on demand
- Dynamic scaling for when the demand is high especially in case of live events, premiers, popular content
- Auto-adjusting the quality of content depending upon the dynamic network environments and internet connection speeds
- Packet loss due to errors in data transmission
- Latency, congestion, and delays
- Maintaining seamless viewing experience across devices
- Ensuring the video quality as per the viewing preferences
- Outages, slow clouds, and Content Delivery Network (CDN) issues
- Deliver fast-track rollouts to support next-gen media services.
Every one of us is a subscriber of some or the other provider and we all understand that nobody loves slow, buffering, and low quality viewing experience. Reliability, capacity, and scalability are major benchmarks for any video streaming providers. Especially the capacity and scale are one of the critical factors because you never know when, where, and which content may go viral.
What’s the solution?
Continuous updates and rollouts in the process while delivering content seamlessly is essential. There is no option to stop the ongoing delivery during the upgrades…read more.
