Atresmedia trusts Amazon Web Services (AWS) for a hybrid cloud environment

Thanks to AWS cloud services, Atresmedia is at the forefront with more dynamic and digital services in a media industry with continuous changes in which the digital audience has more weight every day.

The media landscape is changing rapidly as new technologies develop countless ways to consume video and audio content. The growth of an audience of younger, digital-savvy users is contributing to this evolution. It is this group that Atresmedia Digital, the area of Atresmedia which controls content and digital media, is being directed as part of the group's transformation strategy.

Raquel Fernandez, Head of Digital Media Solutions at I3, a company in the Atresmedia group, admits that “adapting late would seriously harm business in the industry we operate in. In the last five years, strong competitors have emerged in the digital space and we want to continue being leaders.”

The ambition of the group increase your digital audience It required innovations in the broadcasting of programs, and Atresmedia thought that a first step to achieve this was the creation of new cloud platforms. AtresPlayer and Flooxer, two Atresmedia Digital channels, would broadcast new content and cover the main sporting events such as the Champions League Final. The enormous popularity of these events encouraged Atresmedia to look for a cloud based solution, which would give you the scalability needed to deal with unpredictable traffic spikes.

To develop these platforms, Atresmedia needed a high availability infrastructure that allowed it to adapt to the growing audience. This also had to have the necessary flexibility to allow the organization to evolve in parallel with the industry and have the tools to contribute to the development of digital experiences in the future.

Why Amazon Web Services

Atresmedia started using Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2012 to better manage traffic peaks for its digital terrestrial TV channels. For the launch of its cloud projects, the media group was convinced that AWS would be best positioned to continue supporting its growth.

Atresmedia runs its infrastructure in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and use Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to record and archive your data, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to automate administrative tasks such as database configuration. This structure gives the communication group more time to focus on AtresPlayer (your main online channel) and Flooxer while continuing to grow its user base.

The company also relies on Amazon DynamoDB, a flexible NoSQL database service that offers ultra-low latency and automatic scalability based on capacity. Atresmedia uses it on the Flooxer platform to manage the volume of viewers who open push notifications while watching TV, as well as to record the television habits of its users. “Amazon DynamoDB provides us with the perfect service to track our audience and optimize their viewing experience,” says Fernández.

The company caches data and extends its open source databases with Amazon ElastiCache. “Thanks to Amazon ElastiCache we can quickly respond to our users' requests, which was one of our main objectives this year,” says Fernández. Finally, in order to improve the viewing experience of users, Atresmedia benefits from Amazon CloudFront to broadcast streaming videos in 4K resolution (including 360-degree images).

The advantages

Atresmedia's main objective was to adapt to a media industry in continuous change with more dynamic and digital services. With the migration to AWS hybrid infrastructure, the chain has unique user base multiplied by 25 of its digital platform until it reaches 5 million.

This is a result of the development and maintenance of the new cloud-based projects, Atresplayer and Flooxer. Both provide faster streaming speeds and new digital experiences to younger audiences to adapt to the way they consume content.

"Before, our physical infrastructure was very different and only had the capacity to offer service to 200,000 users. Thanks to AWS, we can reach 5 million users and currently there are 7,000 users who register at Atresmedia.com every day," says Fernández.

The consequence is not only the company's ability to cope with its growth, but the developing new and better viewing experiences. "Our technological milestone with AWS was without a doubt the 2017 Champions League Final, which exceeded all our expectations. We feel very proud," says Fernández.

Thanks to the availability, scalability and key services Thanks to its new infrastructure, such as Amazon CloudFront, Atresmedia was able to broadcast the final match through its online channels with astonishing resolution. To be exact, users were able to enjoy the match in 4K and live a 360-degree VR (virtual reality) experience thanks to the installation of 360º cameras in strategic locations at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, Wales.

"In two seconds, 20,000 users registered and the system worked perfectly. It was incredible," emphasizes Fernández.

The network used a similar strategy in the broadcast of the last episode of the Spanish series titled Velvet. The last 15 minutes of the program were recorded live and 20,000 registered users were able to watch it in 360-degree format.

Thanks to AWS, Atresmedia is able to develop an environment that provides these experiences in just five minutes, much faster than the company could achieve on its own. "If we had tried to develop new services with our own servers and our physical databases, we would have needed two days to provision our infrastructure. If we had needed more hardware, everything would have taken up to three more months," explains Fernández. Beyond that, the availability of its systems has reached 99.9 percent and meeting the digital needs of its new consumers allows the brand to remain competitive.

Atresmedia is very satisfied with the service it currently provides to its users. Fernández sums it up by stating: "in a single word: incredible. With AWS we have overcome the challenges we have faced and we are very happy with the results."