AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How Accenture Video Solution is Bringing Fans Closer to the Events
By Sagar Gordhan, Associate Director – Accenture
By Anita Srivastava, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
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| Accenture |
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With the global exposure associated with the media and entertainment industry, enterprises want their fans to get closer to the events.
Accenture and Amazon Web Services (AWS) combined forces to provide a cloud-based multinational digital offering that empowers fans to tailor their own viewing experience.
The solution includes immersive multi-camera angles and event statistics, as well as deep insights into global fan behavior with direct-to-consumer digital relationship. Read more about this Accenture-AWS success story.
Accenture Video Solution (AVS) allows enterprises to modernize their digital video platform architecture. This drives profitability through increased innovation velocity and operational efficiency, while at the same time providing a range of capabilities and extensive feature set to drive audience scale and business growth.
AVS is a web-scale, microservice-based, cloud convergent IPTV/OTTV platform that supports end-to-end core digital video business processes. This includes content, service, commerce, and user experience management to create data-driven, hyper-personalized, and audience-centric experiences.
Based on its diverse set of microservices and architectural approach, AVS enables new and innovative operating models that provide a stage to launch adjacent digital services into the home to drive customer retention and average revenue per user (ARPU).
Industry Challenges
Media companies and aggregators are in fierce competition for consumers’ limited attention and share of wallet.
To stand out and succeed requires decisive action in three areas:
- Unlocking the power of data, and applying it on an enterprise level to extend customer lifetime value and reduce operating costs.
- Transforming operating model towards a data-driven agile methodology to increase innovation output while lowering operational costs.
- Modernizing platform architecture to enable rapid adjustment to market dynamics, while enabling new adjacent services and revenue.
AVS Solution Overview
AVS is a cloud-based platform that helps businesses modernize and scale their internet protocol television (IPTV) and over-the-top (OTTV) video platform architecture on AWS.
AVS provides the tools to power digital video businesses, from content management through end-user experience, while driving sustainable growth.
An agile suite of containerized video microservices provide end-to-end video platform services and speeds implementation of new features, reduces development effort, and provides a nimble platform for continuous innovation.
The AVS solution consists of three main modules:
- Content Management System (CMS): Simplifies and scales the content supply chain for digital content metadata and rights management, while orchestrating transcoding and packaging for delivery to origin servers. The rich and extensible data model enables an immersive content experience.
- User Experience Management: Off-the-shelf editorial features to rapidly curate and personalize omnichannel experiences for different audience segments and multiple devices, while improving speed-to-market and reducing developer headcount.
- Microservice Video Back-Office: Allows feature-rich services consisting of video on demand, linear TV, and network DVR services across IPTV and OTT-TV networks and devices. Provides management of service and subscription, commerce, devices, and implementation of new use cases at speed.
Technical Architecture
AVS is a containerized microservices-based solution that can be deployed in Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS (ROSA) or as a self-managed OpenShift cluster on on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) nodes.
It is available as a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-like managed service in an Accenture-managed account, or as a software standard architecture deployed within an end-customer environment.
The architecture diagram below shows the AWS services and their interactions.
Figure 1 – AVS technical architecture.
AVS uses a standard three-tiered network architecture deployed using its own Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). The public subnet only consists of load balancers, bastion hosts, and OpenVPN virtual private network (VPN) server for connectivity to and from the internet. The application layer components are deployed in a private subnet.
The Content Management System (CMS) module is based on the Microsoft .NET platform solution. Servers within the module use Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with MSSQL as its database. For content storage, it utilizes Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
The CMS module consists of the application and web servers for application and web hosting, respectively. Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) server is used for for event data processing queues and communication between the application and web-hosting servers.
The Video Back-Office is a microservices-based solution. It consists of a business-to-business (B2B) microservice layer and business-to-customer (B2C) API orchestration layer providing frontend APIs for consumer media and entertainment applications.
As well as being API-driven, the AVS platform provides easy-to-use consoles for configuring and managing the service, including a console called UI Builder for configuring and managing the end-user experience.
AVS Solutions supports various data persistence solutions, which includes Amazon RDS, Cassandra, and Elasticsearch.
AVS deployment leverages multiple AWS Availability Zones (AZs) to provide highly available services.
Use Cases
Migrate from Monolithic Architecture
AVS offers an agile suite of containerized video microservices that provide end-to-end video platform services for IPTV and OTT-TV. APIs and API orchestration layers provide smooth migration from legacy on-premises systems to cloud-based IPTV/OTT TV platform. This speeds implementation of new features and reduces development effort
Improve Customer Experience
AVS provides a stable cloud video platform that delivers a high quality, consistent user experience. A cross-platform user experience (UX) builder simplifies end-user media application development across multiple device platforms. Nimble architecture enables businesses to quickly add new content and features to help meet user demands. Enhanced metadata ingestion and management simplifies content operations and increases effective catalog size.
Key Solution Benefits
- Up to 20-30% reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO): Infrastructure use optimization, operational simplification, and innovation efficiency to reduce costs.
- Up to 20% better customer retention: Stable platform offers hyper-personalized experiences, targeted bundles, and new adjacent services.
- Up to 30% effort reduction: Simplified and automated back-office processes and server-side end-user experience curation reduces time and effort for app development.
- Up to 20-30% increase in effective catalog size: Content management system with rich metadata and comprehensive editorial curation capabilities increases the breadth of content viewed.
Conclusion
The goal of Accenture Video Solution (AVS) is to provide an innovative, operationally efficient, and cost-optimizing solution which helps meet customers’ digital video service needs.
AVS breaks through today’s technological barriers that prevent scaling audiences, while maintaining controls on costs and platform stability. The modern platform is simpler to evolve and operate, enabling continuous delivery of innovation with a lower cost of ownership.
By working with the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), a strategic collaboration by Accenture and AWS, you can learn from the cultures, resources, technical expertise, and industry knowledge of two leading innovators, helping you accelerate the pace of innovation to deliver disruptive products and services.
Connect with the Accenture team to engage with a network of specialists steeped in industry knowledge and skilled in strategic AWS services in areas ranging from big data to machine learning.
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Accenture – AWS Partner Spotlight
Accenture is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP. A global professional services company that provides an end-to-end solution to migrate to and manage operations on AWS, Accenture’s staff of 721,000+ people include more than 20,000 AWS-trained technologists with more than 12,000 AWS Certifications.