shomi Exemplifies the Benefit of the Cloud

In 2015, two major players in the Canadian communications business, Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications, came together to roll out an exciting new consumer over-the-top (OTT) offering dubbed shomi. An expert team at the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service curates content to align with the specific appetites of the Canadian market: currently its video content base includes approximately 1200 movies and more than 10,000 television episodes.

With the goal of scaling to offer a broad range of viewing choices, and to deliver premium content coast-to-coast, shomi sought a cloud-based solution for video processing and delivery. It found one in Elemental Cloud running AWS infrastructure, using Amazon S3 for storage and Amazon CloudFront for content distribution.

When the shomi service launched, it originally employed other encoding and distribution solutions. Yet as the company’s experience with Elemental and AWS has grown, so have the benefits of cloud infrastructure, and now the company’s operations are fully migrated to Elemental-AWS solutions.

In the last year, the cloud processing and storage that shomi required grew ten-fold. “We have enjoyed Elemental Cloud so much that we have moved all of our content to it,” said Augusto Rosa, Senior Director, Head of Video & Network Infrastructure for shomi. “We are preparing video assets nearly 20 percent faster than before, and we are rapidly scaling our offerings and subscriber base.”The Elemental Cloud workflow allows shomi to manage, process and package large batches of content for on-demand OTT video delivery. Adaptive bitrate assets are packaged with popular digital rights management schemes and stored on Amazon S3. Directly accessing assets from S3, Amazon CloudFront acts as the origin server to give high throughput to third party CDNs for content delivery to a broad range of connected devices.

Rosa added: “Thanks to Elemental and its deepening integration with AWS, we plan to use more Elemental and AWS features going forward. This is critical to meeting the growing demand in the Canadian streaming market.”