Case Studies
Saranyu Media Platform Powers India's Leading Premier Music Video Service
Increasing Popularity of Music / Music Video Services
Online / Mobile streaming music service has been one of the most popular new age media services across the world. India is no exception to that. There are several online / mobile streaming music services that serve music lovers with high quality music streaming in various Indian languages.
A top tier content aggregator and a veteran in mVAS domain in the Indian mobile ecosystem (now on referred to as customer) recently launched a direct to consumer, sophisticated music streaming service available through its high quality Apps on Smart Phones & Tablets (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone). To complement the music service, the App also featured a Music Video streaming service through which a user can stream popular music videos in several languages both Indian and Western. The overall service required a monetization mechanism other than popular Ad based models and the App included a paid subscription for streaming full length Music Videos.
In Search of Video Service USPs
However, the customer needed to create USPs in its App to be a winner in the highly competitive market. Hence the customer chose the following as its key differentiators to be built into the App and the streaming service.
- Adaptive Video Streaming: Given that Smart Phones support adaptive streaming protocols like HLS, it is imperative that service providers exploit this capability to improve user experience and reduce bandwidth costs.
- Better Video Delivery: Deliver the best video that matches the capabilities of the device like screen resolution, video codecs, & streaming support.
- Freemium Model: Enable Freemium model in the App so that user can stream sample videos at no cost, but full videos when subscribed.
Apart from this, the customer had an existing video / music ingestion, management and delivery workflow that had manual process steps like transcoding. The customer was looking to automate the same, as the service complexity would now increase manifold to support features like Adaptive Streaming.
Enter Saranyu
After evaluating the available video platforms for this purpose, the customer chose the Saranyu Cloud Media Platform for the following reasons,
| Objectives | How Saranyu media platform addressed the objectives |
|---|---|
| Easily migrate the existing workflow to new platform | The REST API provided by the platform could be easily plugged into existing customer workflow from CMS to Application. |
| Ability to leverage customer's existing video storage on Amazon S3 | The platform runs off Amazon AWS and hence could easily integrate with Amazon S3 video store |
| Automate the transcoding process and also minimize transcoding cost. | The platform automatically launches EC2 virtual machines based on job complexity when transcoding and removes when not required thus minimizing the cost. |
| Adaptive Video Streaming | Saranyu platform supports end to end adaptive streaming from transcoding till delivery via HLS / RTMP / Smooth Streaming. Also, using innovative techniques supported adaptive streaming even with low end Android phones where no adaptive protocols are supported. |
| Ability to splice videos for creating trailers from full length videos. | The platform has several media processing features that helped in automating the trailer creation. |
| Uniform video delivery to different devices | With Saranyu's device detection mechanism, the video delivery is automated with its Smart Video URLs that is device agnostic. |
Saranyu engineers the solution
The customer had several developement teams working on its application and the service. It had chosen a top tier CDN for delivery, an application design company for building the Smart Phone / Tablet App, Saranyu for providing the media platform, and itself managing the content ingestion, backend integration, and service management.
Given that the App and the service are media centric, it required someone with thorough knowledge of the innards of the media processing and streaming to ensure the media components of the service is integrated properly. The customer chose Saranyu to oversee the integration of all of these components regarding video aspects.
Saranyu engineered the CDN integration by carefully choosing the transcoding and streaming parameters like video bit rates, profiles, m3u8 files, HLS segment sizes, and CDN configuration parameters for iOS streaming. Saranyu also enhanced the Android App Media Player to provide start-up time algorithm to choose the best video for streaming thus ensuring good user video experience on many devices.
The premier music video service is now serving more than 2 million iOS/Android users and good percentage of those using full length video streaming service. The Saranyu media platform has transcoded several thousand music videos at a very low cost, into tens of formats leading to 100,000 transcodes. It has already served half a million video views in a short span of time since the music video service is launched.