42Streams Powers OTT Media Distribution with Predictable Costs and Scalability

High-level bullet points:

• Scaling up additional services, capabilities, and traffic as needed
• Accessing predictable pricing and top-tier reliability to manage costs effectively
• Generating a solid return on investment

Top streaming companies spend billions of dollars building infrastructures to distribute on-demand content and support live events across the web. Small and mid-size players face numerous challenges in this highly technical and competitive market. This case study explores how 42Streams collaborates with OVHcloud® to overcome these hurdles and provide over-the-top (OTT) solutions for media content providers and broadcasters. 

Client

42Streams provides live and on-demand streaming services for a wide range of media-related customers. Their platform allows individual influencers, creators, distributors, providers, broadcasters, as well as event, corporate, and religious enterprises to stream content to both public and private viewers over the internet. In addition to their streaming technologies, 42Streams also provides an orchestration platform called Symphony.

By simplifying and automating complex OTT workflows and maintaining cost control through vertical integration, 42Streams equips its clients with the ability to deliver content without the need for streaming technical expertise. This approach not only makes content delivery more accessible to small and mid-size businesses but also significantly enhances the value of 42Streams' services.

Challenges

The U.S. market is mature and highly competitive, dominated by a few major players. A seamless mixture of multiple complex technologies is necessary for quality streaming. This is a daunting task for even the largest streaming companies. 

Network, computing, and economic limitations, especially in Latin America, called for resourceful and alternative approaches. 42Streams implemented effective solutions to enable prediction, control, and function in challenging technical and economic environments. Moreover, the range of devices and screen sizes required a solution for generating renderings without creating an excessively large content library.

Solutions Delivered

Leveraging OVHcloud’s Bare Metal footprint, 42Streams recently launched their transcode-on-demand(TOD) service, a powerful and affordable hybrid distributed system that renders video on the fly into any streaming format desired by the client.

OVHcloud’s mid-grade bare metal servers have consistently provided 42Streams a rare balance of top-tier reliability, affordability, and performance.

Also known as dedicated servers, bare metal servers offer users exclusive access to physical server hardware without the need for virtualization. Clients have exclusive use of the server’s resources, including CPU, RAM, storage, and network connectivity.

Results, ROI, and Future Plans

“Before OVHcloud, our monthly OpEx was absurdly high for services that simply didn’t scale,” said Clay Lambert, 42Streams, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer. His perspectives on OVHcloud bare metal are compelling:

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There is generally an unsustainable economic trajectory when solely using cloud services for production operations. It really is death by a thousand cuts combined with a flat revenue-to-OpEx spread; the more Customers use your service, the more you pay your cloud providers; for the most part, it’s a one-to-one mapping. OVHcloud’s bare metal provides a better way, one that enables us to keep more of our revenue growth due to our own productivity innovations.

Because OVHcloud maintains the actual boxes and the network while also maintaining flat, predictable pricing, we do everything above the firmware and are able to obtain and improve operational efficiencies. For a small SaaS company like ours, that’s about as close as it gets to owning and controlling the entire vertical operational stack.

We cannot own and integrate everything in-house, so OVHcloud is the next best thing. It’s effective, reliable, predictable, and affordable, and we know what we’re paying for. There are scant few service providers out there today that enable this kind of success benefit.     
 

- Clay Lambert, 42Streams, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer