Vidyard, a business video platform, helps customers grow their business through the strategic use of online video. Along with hosting video content, Vidyard reveals who is watching videos, with detailed viewer analytics and engagement data that can be pushed directly into customer relationship management, customer support, or other platforms. With Vidyard’s analytics, business users in marketing, sales, support, communications, and training can personalize and target messages more precisely.
Vidyard must ensure seamless video upload and playback capabilities for its customers, which often brings challenges. “There are many complexities when it comes to video delivery, and we want to make it as simple as possible for ourselves and our customers,” says Devon Galloway, chief technology officer and co-founder of Vidyard. “For example, there are always challenges with uploading and encoding video, and fast playback times are exceptionally important.”
The fast-growing Canadian startup also needed the ability to scale quickly. “When we first launched, we had a very small team and no customers,” says Galloway. “We needed technology that could help ramp up fast as we grew over time.”
Supporting spikes in video usage was another concern. “We host live-streaming events, where hundreds of thousands of people tune in to watch a video for one hour,” Galloway says. “There’s a massive spike in traffic during that hour, and it often requires significantly more compute power to support it.”
The company must also ensure its customers’ data is secure. “We deliver a lot of private video content, as well as public-facing content, and we need all that content to be highly secure in case of audit,” Galloway says.
Vidyard chose to launch its platform on the cloud to meet its performance, scalability, and security needs. Company management felt the clear choice was Amazon Web Services (AWS). “AWS was unmatched as far as its variety and power of services, and we knew AWS would give us the opportunity to scale our business quickly and cost-effectively. That’s why we started our business on the AWS Cloud from day one.”
Vidyard runs its video platform on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets used for all customer video content uploaded to the platform.
The company also uses Amazon Elasticsearch Service, hosted on Amazon EC2 servers, to track video-viewing data. This data, along with all customer account information, resides in an Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) database. Additionally, Vidyard uses Amazon EC2 to support dashboards that customers interact with when they create and edit video content. The organization is also using AWS OpsWorks, a configuration-management service, to coordinate its Docker-based microservices container architecture. Finally, the entire Vidyard platform is contained within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), giving Vidyard the security and management options it needs.
Using AWS, Vidyard can ensure seamless video delivery. “We have customers all over the world, and we strive to give them the exact same experience when it comes to video performance,” says Galloway. “We can do that using AWS, which makes it easy for us to manage video uploading, distribution, and playback.”
Vidyard has also been able to boost video-upload performance. “Our customers are constantly uploading video files, which can each be multiple gigabytes in size, so they’re concerned about upload speeds,” says Galloway. “Using Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3, we can enable very fast upload speeds. In fact, we recently utilized a configuration in Amazon S3 that resulted in up to 30 percent faster video uploads, requiring no work from my team.”
The company can now scale its compute and storage resources on demand, which helps support business growth. “We are a very fast-growing company. We’ve tripled our customer base, product usage, and revenue each year since we launched,” says Galloway. “AWS gives us a platform to easily support that growth well into the future. We couldn’t do that if we were using our own internal tools.”
Vidyard easily manages spikes in video-platform traffic using AWS. “When we have those massive traffic spikes during live-streaming events, we can add enough compute to support them with a few clicks,” Galloway says. “We don’t have to go out and procure a bunch of servers months in advance, and then pay for them even after the event is done. The flexibility we have using AWS is incredible.”
Additionally, Vidyard is able to give its customers confidence that their data is secure. “When we mention to customers that we are on AWS, we essentially inherit the AWS reputation for scalability and security, and it makes those conversations easier,” says Galloway. “Security is critical to our customers, and AWS helps us take care of that concern.”
Vidyard is exploring new AWS services, and has plans to leverage them in the future to meet new business requirements. “We adopt new technologies frequently, and it’s reassuring to know AWS is right there with us when we do,” says Galloway. “We look forward to that relationship continuing as we keep growing our business.”
To learn more about how AWS can help you manage your digital-media solution, visit our AWS Digital Media details page.