Canadian SVoD service shomi is using technology from Elemental to help reach its goals of scaling and accelerating growth in the Canadian online video market. Elemental Cloud, used in conjunction with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront, is being deployed to help the SVoD service launch and surpass subscription targets set for its first year of operation.
A joint venture between Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications, shomi aims to distinguish itself in the Canadian field by manually curating content collections rather than relying on algorithms to pre-select consumer viewing options. Subscribers access OTT content through the company’s website and apps, including, most recently, the Xbox One, and through VoD libraries from participating cable providers.
“shomi’s strong brand and unique, highly personalised SVoD offering have pushed us to the forefront of the OTT market. Now, we want to go further,” said Augusto Rosa, senior director, head of video and network infrastructure, shomi. “We’re preparing video assets for viewing nearly 20 per cent faster than before and rapidly scaling our offerings and subscriber base.”
In an Elemental Cloud workflow, shomi uses Elemental to manage, process, and package large batches of file-based video content for both OTT and VoD delivery. Adaptive bitrate assets are packaged with corresponding digital rights management (DRM) schemes and stored on Amazon S3.
“Elemental’s deepening integration with AWS Cloud will create a range of highly-scalable solutions to help our M&E customers be more agile, cost-effective, and elastic in delivering viewer services via the cloud,” said Aslam Khader, chief product officer at Elemental. “We are excited to help shomi connect subscribers to the video they want on an increasingly large scale.”
