By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic — 15 times higher than it was in 2017 ( Cisco)

More video content is uploaded in 30 days than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years ( Invisia)

According to Forbes, 90% of customers say video helps them make buying decisions and 64% of customers say that seeing a video makes them more likely to buy.

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, selling to enterprises or consumers, one thing is clear: digital video is here to stay.

How does your organization take advantage of this growing trend and own the monetization, distribution, and management of your expanding digital video strategy?

It all starts with taking back control of your video infrastructure. If you’re relying on Youtube or other simplistic, one- or two-dimensional video platforms, your opportunities are limited.

You need infrastructure that can expand as quickly as the business team can ink deals.

So, what are the core components of a modern digital video infrastructure?

Origin/Source - Location of digital video content

Video Content Management System (VCMS) - Manage metadata, organization, and distribution of your digital video

Content Delivery Network (CDN) - a CDN is a system of distributed servers (networks) that deliver video and other content as quickly as possible to end-users and consumers

Encoding Pipeline - A video encoding (sometimes called “transcoding”) pipeline comprises of systems, hardware or software that compresses and optimizes digital video for distribution.

Clients/Players - A client or player is a software application that allows your viewers to actually watch your video content.

Now let’s dive deeper into each of these.

A video origin or source is where a video file is stored by an organization. For small companies, this might only be Youtube. For larger organizations, they often have custom-built or SaaS solutions to store and manage all of their video content.

Highly scalable - Enough to handle a large volume of origin requests.  This is particularly true for live streaming events

Multi-regional -   Localizing an origin as close to the majority of the users that consume the content as possible.

Efficiently Optimized for Costs - All cloud providers charge fees for data leaving their networks.  As such, optimising efficiency in terms of cost, between origin and CDNs, is paramount to maintaining a healthy margin.

Located Near CDN - An origin and CDN should be close to each other.  In terms of geographic proximity to each other, this reduces latency and overall quality of service for content distribution. We’ll talk more about this in a moment.

A video encoding (sometimes called “transcoding”) pipeline comprises of systems, hardware or software that compresses and optimizes digital video for distribution.  It is an essential piece of video preparation and delivery that ensures proper formatting for end-user experiences. For example, it is a best practice to ensure that video is encoding into various bitrates so that users on varying qualities of connection can watch without interruption.

Encoding pipelines should have the ability to:

Encode content using widely supported industry standard codecs

Encode to different bitrates and formats to support streaming to viewers with varying quality of connection and bandwidth

Encode to multiple file formats for delivery to multiple end players and/or download use cases

Encrypt content for digital rights management

Detect  and preserve advertising signaling metadata so that ads can be stitched in later on advertising breaks

Before your videos can be streamed, you need to ensure metadata has been set and is available to end viewers to provide sufficient context when showcasing your content. Beyond this, you need to be able to organize your content, whether that’s on your site, an OTT channel, or an MRSS feed to your partners.

Video content management systems should feature the ability to edit:

According to Akamai, a  CDN is “a highly-distributed platform of servers optimized to deliver content including web applications and streaming media. This network of servers is dispersed across many physical and network locations, in order to respond directly to end user requests for web content and fast, secure media delivery. It acts as an intermediary between a content server, also known as the origin, and its end users or clients.

Without a CDN, content origin servers must respond to every single end user request. This results in significant traffic to the origin and subsequent load, thereby increasing the chances for origin failure if the traffic spikes are exceedingly high or if the load is persistent.”

CDNs are typically priced in a way that allows for high-scale so organizations do not have to incur prohibitive network and computing costs to deliver content to end-users at scale. The goal of a CDN is to provide end-users with the same quality viewing experience regardless of where they are in the world.

Global - Make sure your CDN partner(s) can deliver high-quality video playback to where your users are with as many edge nodes geographically near your consumer base as possible.

Able to Optimize for Different Types of Content - A CDN should have different options for types of content like VOD, progressive media, and live streams along with a high cache hit ratio

Scalable - As your audience and overall success grows, your CDN partner(s) should be able to expand service alongside your organization.

A client or player is a software application that allows your viewers to actually watch your video content.

Every web-based video client or player should support:

The latest video codecs for both audio and video

Support adaptive bitrate playback for different bandwidth scenarios

Casting to Chromecast and , Apple Airplay, etc

Multiple language closed captioning and subtitles

An Open Javascript API framework so clients can manipulate the player surface for their own implementations

Advertising support through industry standard VAST tags

Supported across multiple devices and/or browsers; HTML5 web player as a standard for desktop and mobile web, as well as native applications for playback on mobile and OTT/Connected TV apps and marketplaces

Video players are constantly evolving and changing, and a video player on a closed-system like Apple TV is a completely different animal than an open HTML5 browser optimized for desktop browsing.  Managing the variety of players in the wild can become daunting once a publisher moves beyond their website. Dynamic Player Technology (DPT) allows teams to scale their video without investing in various video players based on the end-point.

 Deciding How to Build the Core Components of Your Digital Video Infrastructure 

When it comes to expanding your digital video infrastructure to distribute your content anywhere and anytime, there is one critical question...how? Do you piece together your CDN, utilize AWS’ suite of media-specific products, and develop your own analytics? Do you utilize video SaaS providers like Zype to facilitate the entire management, distribution, and monetization of your digital video? Or, do you utilize a hybrid model where you might bring your own CDN but rely on SaaS providers for specific pieces?

However you decide to build your core digital video infrastructure, having the power to control your future without huge investments is critical to the ever-evolving digital video landscape.

Want to dive even deeper into these core components? Download Zype's Digital Video Infrastructure: The Complete Guide to learn more.

The 5 Core Components of Every Digital Video Infrastructure

A few lines of code to a ready-to-watch video player and stream

Developers can use the Zype Video API to upload video files to the Zype platform, transcode them, and receive back a fully integrated video player and ready-to-watch HLS stream to integrate into websites and applications in just a few lines of code.

In this example, we will show how to upload a file via multipart HTTP POST request, along with additional video metadata.  Zype will automatically transcode the video as soon as the upload completes. We will then show how to get back a fully integrated video player that is ready to embed, as well as a ready-to-watch video stream.

NOTE:  This example is written in ruby and leverages the ‘httpparty` and `json` ruby gems.  Any language is supported that can speak http.

First, you will need a Zype account. If you don’t have one please request one here. You'll need to retrieve your Upload API Key and Player API Keys from the platform from the API Key Settings section.

3. Retrieve your VideoID (from the Upload API call response) 

Now that you’ve uploaded the file, you can start using the unique Video ID

You can do a lot with the video file outside the scope of this article. Learn more in our Dev Center.

 4. Retrieve a Video Player to embed  or a Streaming URL 

For the player_response, you’ll get back a video player that is ready to embed into your website. It will look something like this:

"https://player.zype.com/embed/5de9664fe6ab785e13bc882a.html?api_key=9d376352-1f60-42e3-9f4e-6ffd12fb72eb"

You can also embed using JavaScript, or have the video automatically show up in your OTT or mobile app endpoints.

For playing directly using your own player infrastructure, use the streaming URL. This will be a fully functional HLS Manifest URL  that is ready to attach to any video player on any device. It will look like this:

https://player.zype.com/manifest/5de964dbb2540e5e22945970?api_key=9d376352-1f60-42e3-9f4e-6ffd12fb72eb

This will render a well-formed HLS Manifest that looks something like this:

#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=1239040,RESOLUTION=1128x480,CODECS="avc1.4d001f,mp4a.40.2"

https://manifest.zype.com/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ1cmwiOiJodHRwOi8vdnNtLnp5cGUuY29tLzU2ODJiMGJiNjk3MDJkMmEwYjAwMDAwMC81ZGU5NjRkYmIyNTQwZTVlMjI5NDU5NzAvNWRlOTY0ZGNiMjU0MGU1ZTIyOTQ1OTcxLzVkYzllNjAwZGExNjMxZTMzMGIwOTI1Mi8yYzdkMjQyNS1hYTM5LTRkMjAtYjM5NS03M2YwODljMTQxMjIubTN1OCIsInBhcmFtcyI6eyI2cExLTVEzeSI6IlNxaTNOZzkwIn0sImV4cCI6MTU3NTU5MTU3NX0.XHxjbH_UT5NBQ538sOInKUTptZoVXvLhYVFsRgDeZ48

#EXT-X-STREAM-INF:PROGRAM-ID=1,BANDWIDTH=2793472,RESOLUTION=1692x720,CODECS="avc1.4d001f,mp4a.40.2"

https://manifest.zype.com/eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJ1cmwiOiJodHRwOi8vdnNtLnp5cGUuY29tLzU2ODJiMGJiNjk3MDJkMmEwYjAwMDAwMC81ZGU5NjRkYmIyNTQwZTVlMjI5NDU5NzAvNWRlOTY0ZGNiMjU0MGU1ZTIyOTQ1OTcxLzVkYzllNjVhZGExNjMxZTMwODZmNTJkNC9hZTA1NjViNi1jODE4LTRhMjctYTNiZS04NjczMWRjZGE3ODcubTN1OCIsInBhcmFtcyI6eyI2cExLTVEzeSI6IlNxaTNOZzkwIn0sImV4cCI6MTU3NTU5MTU3NX0.PT2917E26tIn4KO3J0NucujQn8RPQMHknWU-A-G1teg

Introduction to the Zype Video API

DIY solutions seem like a great way to grow your video business. You can be fully independent and own your content at the same time, what's not to love? Well, it’s an idea that seems a lot better than it actually is.

A do-it-yourself OTT solution is a complicated process of creation, development, and business strategy that can quickly become very expensive and time consuming — especially for those who are new to video businesses and video platforms. Let’s take a look at what goes into a DIY OTT solution.

Smaller libraries are easier to manage and organize, but as your content grows, your system needs to keep up. Keeping track of different file versions for different platforms, like mobile, web, or set-top devices becomes more and more difficult as you continue to add to your library. Also, if your platform restricts certain monetization policies, you are now looking at separate systems to manage your AVOD vs. SVOD vs. TVOD content (at Zype, we handle all three, including hybrid models. Click here to learn more).

Application Development, Administration and Maintenance

There’s a lot that goes into developing and maintaining your video business. Maintenance becomes your responsibility. Every time your hosting platform or streaming destination endpoint updates their platform and software, you will need to make sure your apps are still compatible. Eventually, custom systems become too complicated for everyone to understand, and only the system administrator can do this.

With a DIY solution, it is your responsibility to make sure your videos are viewable on all of your endpoints. Streaming quality, internet connection, and bandwidth are all important factors to consider when evaluating a streaming service. Also, delivering to multiple platforms only makes it more complex when accounting for the viewer’s internet connection, device of choice, mobility and localized infrastructure in other regions. Also, you must make sure that your content is encodable so everything is up to the viewer’s internet speed.

Discoverability is also another area where a DIY solution adds an extra layer of stress. You need to create, manage and present your metadata in a way where you can reach your desired amount of viewers. Metadata, information that describes the key characteristics of the video, like the title, author, actors, description, etc, is so important because it allows for your content to show up in search engines and app stores. You also need to consider indexing, so that someone visiting your website can find your videos.

Digital Rights Management is a crucial aspect of content licensing that designates legal regulations around geographic availability, but it can also get extremely complicated. There are a bunch of third-party vendors who do this for you, but you need to make sure that their solutions are compatible with yours. If DRM is not properly implemented, there are very serious potential legal consequences.

A DIY OTT solution seriously distracts you and your team from the main reason why your customers flock to your OTT service — your content. It’s challenging and extremely difficult for one person, or a small team to accomplish; it involves third parties, coordination and discipline. Keeping track of all the moving parts while managing multiple vendor bills and paying higher rates for each usage component means the cost of doing business can get extremely high.

There are better solutions. Request a demo from Zype right here.

Why You Should Hesitate About a DIY OTT Solution

A DIY OTT Solution Sounds Great, But Should Make You Hesitate — Here's Why

Video-centric publishers, broadcasters, and enterprises typically have an outsized focus on content programming and distribution decisions: “ What content am I publishing, where am I publishing it, and how many viewers can I reach? ”

While these decisions are incredibly important to focus on, a challenge that may not always be top of mind is thinking about the Content Management Lifecycle, with a specific eye towards digital asset preservation.

How do you make sure the video content you own and manage digitally is secure, highly available, and will be formatted and distributed in the right protocols as new distribution opportunities emerge?

A snapshot of the contemporary Content Management Lifecycle:

In this diagram you can see what a sample content import, storage, transcoding, delivery, and publishing/distribution lifecycle might look like for video enterprises.

Increasingly important is ensuring your video content storage and management solution ensures support for both the present and the future.

Evaluating digital asset preservation needs:

Video enterprises should evaluate format portability, security, availability, and redundancy as important factors in their content management lifecycle. This way you can ensure your evergreen content will not only be distributed efficiently today, but available for future distribution opportunities as well!

Interested in learning more about Zype? Check out zype.com/request-demo/

Thinking About the Content Management Lifecycle

Since launching Zype Playout, we've been excited to show an in-depth look at the easiest way for video product teams to create, monetize, and distribute broadcast-quality, linear live IP-delivered streams. Awarded NAB Product of the Year Award for B2B Streaming at NAB Show 2019, Zype Playout boasts channel creation, program management, support for multiple monetization setups, among other exciting features. And we think it's pretty awesome that Zype Playout contributed meaningfully to Zype's full-stack video content management and distribution service, helping Zype secure the title of OTT Exec Company of the Year 2019.

With Zype Playout, you'll be able to build, program, and broadcast linear channels created from playlists of videos that already exist in your Zype library

 What are the key features of Zype Playout? 

Distribute to your Owned and Operated websites and video apps, plus OTT marketplaces

Syndicate to partners like YouTube, Twitch, and any other RTMP or HLS standard-based destination

Monetize O&O by using subscription and purchase paywalls

Gain more audience metadata by adding a registration wall

Keep your channel fresh by adding or editing your Playout channel rundown through your source playlist

For those of you who have configured Zype Live to broadcast a live event in the Zype platform, Zype Playout will be a synch. Even if you don't have familiarity with live events, we doubt you'll have any issues understanding the steps outlined below. Remember that with Zype Playout, you'll be able to build, program, and broadcast linear channels created from playlists of videos that already exist in your Zype library.

Step 1 - Determine where your channel will be distributed - Playout destinations determine where you'll distribute your Playout stream, whether it's to existing owned and operated websites and videos apps, to YouTube and Facebook Live, or to custom destinations.

Step 2 - Review and edit your channel rundown - Because your Playout channel is created from a playlist in your Zype library, you can use an existing playlist for your channel rundown, or build a new source playlist to use when you create your channel.

Step 3 - Create your channel - Once a Zype Playout channel is created, it exists in your Zype library just as a video or live event would. You can add or edit metadata like a custom thumbnail image, and test the broadcast to view your channel rundown (Zype Live customers will be familiar with this) right from the Manage Channels page.

Zype handles all of the complex underlying video packaging, broadcast server management, and infrastructure; we work to normalize video bitrates, renditions, and aspect ratios from different videos in your library to provide a cohesive, high-quality stream experience to successfully broadcast your Playout channel.

Glad you asked! We always recommend our Help Center as a good source of knowledge when trying to dig deeper. We've created a Zype Playout section covering playout destinations, playout channels, monetization, and more.

Visit the Zype Playout product page to for a high-level overview of the product and it's capabilities. If you aren't working with Zype today but would like to learn more, request a demo with our team.

Up Close and Personal with Zype Playout

Netflix serves over 140 million hours of content per day, globally around the world.

Building a system to be able to scale to that many customers, while delivering high definition video, with no lag, requires significant engineering effort. Today we will deep dive into Netflix’s technology stack and cloud infrastructure to examine exactly what tools, processes and architecture they use to deliver their high-quality content streaming services.

Understanding Netflix’s tech stack can help OTT and other digital-video providers get a view into the backend required to support these types of services; or you can just use Zype, and let them handle online video delivery for you.

 The History of Netflix’s Digital Architecture 

First, a lesson in the history of Netflix to set some context. Before the era of “Netflix and chill”, the company physically delivered mail-order DVD’s to your doorstep.

Netflix racked and stacked physical servers in on-premise data centers that they owned. These data centers housed databases and applications Netflix used to track customers, maintain inventory and customer billing.

By the time broadband became commonplace, and everyone owned a smartphone, Netflix needed a way to deliver videos to computers, internet connected tv’s and mobile phones as part of their strategy to evolve the company. This meant moving away from a traditional data center and harnessing the power of the public cloud. Beginning in 2008, Netflix started migrating their on-premise servers & applications into Amazon Web Services (AWS) after experiencing an on-premise data center outage that stopped the business for three days. Startled by the lack of resiliency, over the course of seven years they were able to move 100% of all assets into the cloud and remain one of the pioneers of cloud computing.

Netflix is prominent in the cloud community for sharing their knowledge during the migration to the cloud.

Taking a peek into their architecture, Netflix maintains hundreds of AWS accounts that isolate the various parts of their business from Subscriptions, to Content Delivery, to Personalized Recommendations.

Netflix is able to quickly develop features because all of their engineers are empowered to launch resources in their appropriate accounts, without having to get approvals from various parts of the company. By utilizing AWS Organizations and Account Units, Netflix is able to organize their applications by engineering teams, providing autonomy and speed for engineers.

Within these AWS accounts, engineers use a myriad of technologies to deliver high fidelity video streaming.

Let’s start with how Netflix is able to serve videos. First and foremost, all content is stored in object storage like Amazon S3 and cached by using AWS CloudFront. This enables Netflix to distribute video content all around the world with low latency speeds.

Videos need to be ultimately transcoded into various formats for optimal viewing based on the device you are watching content. Mobile video is transcoded differently from Desktop videos, because of the different screen sizes, resolution, and network availability.

Take for example streaming on a phone. You will go in and out of signal depending on where you live, and in order to continuously deliver video, it needs to dynamically adjust & buffer, so you have a consistent viewing experience. This transcoding is called H.264, and Netflix is able to do this by harnessing the power of AWS Elastic Transcoder, which takes videos and formats them appropriately.

Video streaming is only a small part of the picture.

Customers have a smorgasbord of choices when watching videos on Netflix. In order to keep customer engagement & retention high, Netflix employs a personalization algorithm to help uncover videos that a customer may be interested in based on their previous viewing history. This means that all interactions when watching a video must be recorded. Netflix is able to do this by utilizing data streaming technologies like Kafka, and storing data in NoSQL databases like DynamoDB. Their engineers then write applications that are deployed on AWS EC2 or AWS Lambda that accesses this data to compute personalized videos to show.

Not all data is stored in a database. Some data is better suited to be stored on disks. Netflix is known to employ the usage of Hadoop to aggregate various types of data and move them into data warehouses or other databases across the company. Netflix has data science teams that sift through this data to do business analytics, like determining how many customers are watching a certain movie, or how likely someone is going to unsubscribe from the service.

While it is impossible to analyze every part of Netflix’s business the above describe a few major components for delivering online video.

In order to enable these features, developers need to be able to quickly deploy their code, that is tested and can be rolled back if a bug is introduced. This is no easy feat, and Netflix has developed a very sophisticated Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline for providing a mechanism to deploy cloud applications. Netflix invented and open-sourced their tool, called Spinnaker which allows developers to make small changes, test them with automated tests, and then get them live to a small subset of users, which then automatically rolls out globally over time after the confidence level that a bug has not been introduced increases.

One of the major discussion points when moving to the cloud is security. Netflix has publicly documented their security practices. Content is locked by region so movies in Europe may not be available in the United States. This is done by employing DRM solutions in the cloud.

Internally, Netflix uses AWS IAM to lock permissions for employees, and applications with least permission privilege, so that even if a user becomes compromised the damage they can do is minimal, as they would not have access to the entire set of assets in the cloud.

Being in the cloud, also means using SaaS products internally to improve productivity of the workforce. Netflix uses JIRA for managing engineering tasks, and Confluence for documenting requirements. With a large workforce, managing passwords is difficult, so Netflix employs single-sign-on technologies like OneLogin to allow access to various SaaS products without having to remember hundreds of different passwords. SaaS tools are always changing, and knowing Netflix, they will be adapting to be more efficient.

 Building Netflix’s Tech Stack & Backend...The Easier Way 

That concludes our breakdown of Netflix’s technology stack and cloud architecture. Developing video on demand requires a large engineering staff, hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud computing (if you are going to operate at Netflix scale) and a decoupled architecture that allows applications to scale so that they are resilient in the face of performance issues and outages.

Zype can help offload many of the heavy lifting operations required to deliver OTT video, I encourage you to check us out.

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The 5 Core Components of Every Digital Video Infrastructure

Introduction to the Zype Video API

Why You Should Hesitate About a DIY OTT Solution

Thinking About the Content Management Lifecycle

Up Close and Personal with Zype Playout

Netflix's Tech Stack: Breaking Down Netflix’s Backend for OTT Providers in 2019

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