Vision Media stays ahead of the curve with cloud innovation enabled by AWS

For Vision Media, necessity is truly the mother of invention; the company’s media and entertainment (M&E) roots date back to the 1980s when it started delivering studio scripts. 30 years later, the company has innovated continually to accommodate industry shifts, a strategy that’s made Vision Media a dominant force in the digital film, TV, streaming, and awards screening space. The company was one of the first to help entertainment leaders pivot from physical to digital screeners more than ten years ago, with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Since then, some of the biggest names in M&E have leveraged its secure screening tools and Screener Passport platform to distribute and promote their content in compliance with studios and all major guilds. In April, Vision Media announced its next venture, a free Starter Plan of its screening service, which is democratizing access to secure, online video sharing inside and outside of the entertainment industry.

“Vision Media has quickly become a digital-first company, a journey that in which AWS has played a key part. Developing our offering in the cloud has given us more flexibility to innovate, and stay ahead of the curve,” shared Joanna Syiek, Senior Director of Marketing, Vision Media. “There’s nothing more satisfying than helping entertainment leaders across the globe securely share their video content and scale marketing outreach, and with the help of AWS, we’re able to do that quickly and at scale. The technology makes it easy to innovate and deliver offerings like the Starter Plan, which expands high-end secure screening and media storage capabilities to indie filmmakers, small businesses, and other organizations that might not be otherwise able to afford such services.”

A powerful and secure backend

From Screener Passport to the free Starter Plan, AWS technology helps power Vision Media’s offerings. On the backend, these services rely on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, Amazon CloudFront for content delivery, AWS Elemental MediaConvert for video transcoding needs, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for content and data storage. Commenting on the infrastructure, Vision Media CTO Jason Deadrich explained, “The advantages to running these services in the cloud over on-prem are extensive, and our clients feel a sense of security, knowing that we’re backed by the leading cloud provider.”

Transforming ideas into realities

While Vision Media has acted as a trusted studio partner for decades, in the last few years, the team began considering how it might expand its offering to serve a broader base. The team decided to prioritize the expansion of its secure, high-quality screening and promotion tools already being used by the major studios, to create a solution for independent and boutique operations.

“What started out as an idea to help creative organizations of all shapes and sizes share their movies, TV shows, and other media content with audiences on a budget quickly became a comprehensive tool with DRM, session-based watermarking, protected viewing windows, metadata integration, and more. The Starter Plan provides studio grade tools at no cost, and as customers grow, the platform can grow with them to help accommodate their needs,” stated Syiek. “With AWS and its responsive support team, we were able to scale our technology quickly and efficiently to seamlessly execute on this vision.”

To access the free service today, users simply visit visionmedia.com and sign up for an account. Once inside the interface, users can create private screening rooms to meet their needs. They can upload video content, customize their background, look, and feel with their logo and brand, and create a branded, private screening room experience with minimal effort. “It provides a huge advantage over using third-party streaming platforms, which often redirect audiences to other content after watching your title,” Syiek added.

Expanding into new markets

While many indie filmmakers and smaller media companies have already adopted the plan, there’s growing demand for the service outside of entertainment. From universities to real estate companies and beyond, businesses and organizations are exploring the service as an option for securely screening content to a gated audience via a fully nested, branded experience.

“Since launching the Starter Plan, we’ve seen a steady influx of interest from a broad audience, which is exciting,” explained Syiek. “We’re thrilled to provide them free access to a powerful solution that may have previously been out of reach.”

If Vision Media’s rich history is any indication of its future, the industry can expect exciting developments on the horizon, especially as its team continues to innovate. Syiek concluded, “We’re sitting in a really interesting moment in the entertainment world right now, and we’re excited to continue evolving our services in the coming years with the help of AWS.”

For more information about the work Vision Media is doing, visit www.visionmedia.com.