Canadian SVOD pioneer employs cloud platform integrated to optimize subscriber experiences, streamline workflows, and drive growth in competitive online video market
Portland, Ore. – July 25, 2016 – Elemental Technologies, the leader in software-defined video solutions, today announced that shomi, a Canadian subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service, is using Elemental to help reach its goals of rapidly scaling and accelerating growth in the Canadian online video market. shomi reports that Elemental Cloud, used in 
conjunction with the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon CloudFront, helped 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 distinguishes itself in the Canadian field by manually curating content collections rather than relying on algorithms to pre-select consumer viewing options. Subscribers access over-the-top (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 personalized 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 & Network Infrastructure, shomi. “We’re preparing video assets for viewing nearly 20 percent faster than before and rapidly scaling our offerings and subscriber base, thanks to Elemental and its deepening integration with AWS services. This is critical to meeting the growing demand in the Canadian streaming market.”
Using Elemental compression and packaging solutions integrated with AWS storage and origination services, shomi also has streamlined workflows. Cit
ing a 10-fold increase in cloud-based resource use over the past 12 months, Augusto noted that “we’ve enjoyed Elemental Cloud so much that we’ve moved all of our content to it – and we’ve already moved all our video origin to AWS. Going forward, we plan to use more Elemental and AWS Cloud-enabled features.”
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 correspondingdigital rights management (DRM) schemes and stored on Amazon S3. shomi currently uses Amazon CloudFront as an origin server directly out of S3 to realize the benefit of high S3 throughput to an Akamai CDN for delivery to customers on a full range of connected devices. Additionally, file-based transcoding is used on-premises for on-going development testing and to output mp4 files. These adaptive bitrate outputs are also uploaded to the cloud for packaging and storage in 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.”
About Elemental
Elemental Technologies, an Amazon Web Services (AWS) company, empowers media companies to deliver premium video experiences to consumers. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, the company pioneered the use of software-based video processing to distribute and monetize video over the internet. As the leader in software-defined video solutions, Elemental powers video infrastructure for more than 850 top-tier media franchises worldwide and helps pay TV operators, content programmers, broadcasters and enterprise customers bring video content to any screen, anytime – all at once. Elemental solutions are deeply integrated with AWS services, giving video providers the ability to quickly, easily and economically scale workflows on-premises or in the cloud. To learn more, visit www.elementaltechnologies.com and follow @elementaltech on Twitter.
Press Contact
Laura Barber
Elemental Technologies
[email protected]
(503) 703-3638
