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November 04, 2021

Firstlight Media runs on Azure to provide an uninterrupted, high-definition streaming experience

Firstlight Media is building on a long history of OTT platform innovation for streaming providers around the world, including AT&T, Rogers Sports & Media (including Sportsnet), newcomer Struum, and others. OTT refers to going “over the top” of the cable box to provide streaming, like Netflix and Roku. Firstlight Media’s mission is to help the company’s customers—multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs), telcos, and entertainment and sports providers—deliver best-in-class content via live and video on-demand (VOD) streaming.

As companies across all industries began to digitally transform, Firstlight Media saw an opportunity to innovate for customers while orchestrating a move from on-premises to a public cloud. Using key Microsoft Azure components, including Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to host microservices, Azure Blob Storage and Azure Files to manage data storage, and Azure Load Balancer and Azure Application Gateway to manage network traffic, Firstlight Media led development of a cloud-native OTT architecture—Gen5—that enables uninterrupted quality streaming.

Firstlight Media

The laborious effort of on-premises streaming platforms 

Firstlight Media has roots in Quickplay Media, which advanced the science of on-premises, private cloud OTT platforms for its customers for 15 years. The value of the on-premises platform led AT&T to acquire Quickplay Media. When Firstlight Media acquired the Quickplay business and technology from AT&T in 2020, the team used their vast experience and technology expertise to spur creation of a platform that would leapfrog existing OTT technology. 

The Firstlight Media team looked to the cloud to solve several major issues. First, building a scalable, on-premises streaming platform historically required making additional investments in hardware, labor, and maintenance. Second were the logistical concerns of identifying where the datacenter would physically live, determining where and how to deploy the infrastructure, designing the infrastructure, and procuring and installing equipment. Third was the need to maintain the platform in the long term. 

Balbinder O’Neil, Vice President of Solution Engineering at Firstlight Media, explains, “Customers want to launch new features quickly, in a matter of weeks or days. They want to monetize quickly. They want to prevent churn. It’s a lot more difficult and a longer process when you’ve got an on-premises platform, and you might need to buy more hardware for an event coming up that you know is going to draw lots and lots of concurrent users. How do you scale when you don’t have the time or flexibility to procure additional hardware?”

Digital transformation takes Firstlight Media into the cloud

Firstlight Media wanted to improve its datacenter’s scalability, decrease customers’ upfront investments, and maintain 99.99 percent availability, so it began a digital transformation and migrated its live and VOD streaming on-premises infrastructures to the public cloud. It was a well-timed shift as content providers and entertainment companies began to look for ways to capitalize on the public cloud’s elasticity and acceleration of time to market. 

The company transitioned its OTT platform from a private cloud, platform as a service (PaaS) concept to a next-generation streaming platform—built on Gen5 architecture that has been created exclusively for the public cloud—to scale rapidly, reduce costs, increase flexibility, and decrease deployment times. 

Microsoft Azure was the first public cloud that Firstlight Media tested. On-premises, Firstlight Media used MySQL databases, Kubernetes and third-party storage solutions, and third-party solutions for NoSQL and graph databases. Azure has cloud-based equivalents, making it nearly seamless to migrate to Azure Database for MySQL, Azure Blob Storage, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The compatibility of Azure with open-source solutions meant that Firstlight Media could retain its NoSQL and graph databases, too. The transition from third-party storage solutions was nearly seamless—the only change Firstlight Media had to make was in the way it authenticates and retrieves Azure Blob Storage objects. 

“We built an encoding algorithm that can efficiently run any complex encoding workflow on commodity hardware.”

Jerald Mejarla, Chief Architect, Firstlight Media

Video on demand, starring Azure

To process VOD in Azure, the algorithm divides a video into smaller segments, thereby splitting the encoding workflow into chunks of data. As the video is segmented, Kubernetes containers spin up for each piece of video and run it through the encoding workflow. 

Jerald Mejarla, Chief Architect at Firstlight Media, explains, “Right now, our VOD encoding workflow runs seamlessly on Microsoft Azure in such a way that if you drop in video content, the video content automatically triggers the VOD workflow using Azure Event Grid. Once the event is captured, our workflow kicks in and automatically spins multiple jobs based on the type of video, splits the video into multiple segments, encodes the video, and then publishes to Azure Blob Storage. In this entire stage, the content is only maintained in Azure Blob Storage. It’s never stored in a premium disk or Azure database.” 

“One of the biggest advantages with Azure Blob Storage is the elasticity. Before when there was a disk failure, we would have to reprocess jobs. If there was an increase in the encoding workflow, we had to scale the storage accordingly—there had to be continuous monitoring of the storage,” Mejarla says. “With Azure Blob Storage, we don’t have to worry about that. It’s like an indefinite kind of storage without the limitations and expense of SSDs.” 

Anything stored in Azure Blob Storage is automatically encrypted, making it easier for a datacenter using it to comply with Motion Picture Association (MPA) best practices for content protection.

“With Azure Blob Storage, we only pay for the cost of encoding, the cost of streaming live content, and only when that particular segment is on the blob. The process runs only when the encoding is happening, so if there is no encoding happening, it scales down to zero.”

Jerald Mejarla, Chief Architect, Firstlight Media

Recasting a live stream with Azure

Processing continuous live streaming requires focusing on high availability, efficient compression and encoding, and improved, consistent video quality. On-premises, Firstlight Media accomplished this through a dual rack base that could segment and multicast traffic within the datacenter. This ensured that if one encoder failed, another active encoder would be there as backup to maintain the live stream. To emulate this on Azure, Mejarla and his team created a unique proxy that automatically replicates the necessary network and error correction protocols into two parts that are automatically received by two different encoders. To mitigate any delays or outages, Firstlight Media also created a time synchronization algorithm so that all encoding starts at the same time. Using AKS, the company replicates live channels further so that live streams won’t be interrupted in the event of an outage.

Firstlight Media architecture diagram
Figure 1. Firstlight Media architecture diagram; for a larger version, go to the Downloads section of the left-hand sidebar

“Even if you create 10 different live channels—replicas of the same live channel—all 10 different live channels will start the video at the same frame. It will start encoding from the same frame, and then it will publish to the same origin at the same time,” says Mejarla. 

Real savings and future plans with Azure

It used to take upward of a year to get an OTT platform built for a customer. “In our current state, we can launch a full-fledged live and VOD service in less than three months,” Mejarla says. He also says moving to the public cloud has been more cost-effective from a coding perspective. 

Being able to support Azure on any datacenter means Firstlight Media can spin up an OTT platform as close as geographically possible to its customers to reduce streaming latency and meet regional compliance requirements. The elasticity of Azure Blob Storage and AKS means scaling up and down is instant, requires no hardware left to collect dust after a live event is over, and can help accelerate time to market. 

Firstlight Media tests and compares its cloud-native OTT platform against an on-premises OTT platform. So far, VOD and live workflows have performed the same or even better on Azure than on-premises. 

Firstlight Media plans to continue exploring how it can innovate with Azure, and it is working on low latency for live streaming and on how to integrate with 5G technology.

“We’ve proven that moving to the cloud has actually been very successful for our customers.”

Balbinder O’Neil, Vice President of Solution Engineering, Firstlight Media

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