BBC Explains How and Why it Created Video Factory, Cloud Backend
For the BBC, online video needs to be just as reliable as traditional broadcast television. To make that a reality, it brought its video processing back in house and, in 2013, created BBC Video Factory, which includes a scalable message-driven cloud-based architecture. At the 2014 Streaming Forum conference in London, Henry Webster, executive product manager for media services at BBC Future Media, explained the through processes that made Video Factory a reality.
"We learned very much the importance of building in resilience at every step, so building in redundancy, ensuring that we've got resilience in every single place in the chain," Webster said. "The cloud, and choosing to use the cloud, helped us achieve some of that, because in a way we couldn't have afforded or really dreamt of building out the sort of resilient model that we wanted if it was in an on-premises world, because that would mean building out multiple data centers."
Webster and his team planned the project, and promoted it to get internal support.
"We pulled together a project we call Video Factory to rectify a lot of those problems, but also just in our ability to deliver and our ability to be flexible to meeting the audience's expectations. It took quite a while for us to get buy-in from across the organization," Webster remembered. "That was one of the things that we spent quite a lot of time actively doing, to help them understand the importance of spending money on getting a resilient service."
To learn more about BBC Video Factory, watch the video below and download Webster's presentation.
Growing Pains: BBC Video Factory – Online Media Comes of Age
With the development of its iconic BBC iPlayer service, and its impressive digital coverage of the 2014 Olympics, the Corporation's online output is coming of age. In September 2013, VideoFactory was born, and this session describes how it is designed to deliver the robustness typical of traditional broadcasting while embracing cloud computing.
Presenter Henry Webster, Executive Product Manager - Media Services, BBC Future Media
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