U.S. Satellite Operator Breaks New Ground in the Cloud with Live and On-Demand OTT Offering

The Solution

The satellite operator chose to deploy a complete end-to-end OTT system on the Mirantis Cloud Platform, which provides an agile infrastructure platform based on OpenStack,Kubernetes and other open cloud technologies, offered through managed services. Harmonic’s cloud-native VOSTM Cloud solution handles the media processing and delivery workflow, allowing the operator to deliver over 250 OTT channels, including high-quality live TV, to its customers on any screen. Currently, the OTT service supports delivery to Android and iOS devices, PCs and game consoles.

The operator chose Mirantis Cloud Platform to rapidly deploy new services using a scalable, private cloud based on open source software and commodity servers instead of proprietary, specialized hardware. Mirantis Cloud Platform is available as a managed services offering that provides a public cloud-like experience in your own datacenter, with an option to later transfer operations to your own team, backed by Mirantis training, support and documentation. Mirantis Cloud Platform provided customized infrastructure that was deployed in a 300 node cluster. It provided more than 100 Gbps of egress bandwidth to support hundreds of channels of streaming content.

“With the cloud, we get the speed and agility we need to adapt quickly to customer demands and offer new, more personalized entertainment services,” says the senior cloud architect at the company. Examples of new capabilities they were able to introduce using the new platform include cloud time-shifting and support for multiple video profiles.

Mirantis Cloud Platform features both OpenStack and Kubernetes to support virtual machines, containers and bare metal all from a single platform. It includes DriveTrain, a lifecycle management system that enables the continuous integration and continuous delivery of new features and functions into production, so end users can benefit from new innovations as rapidly as possible. The StackLight Operations Support System (OSS) incorporates best-of-breed logging, monitoring and alerting systems to maximize cloud availability, perform accurate capacity planning, and optimize performance.

Using VOS Cloud, the operator can perform encoding, transcoding, encryption and ABR packaging on the fly, for up to thousands of live channels. Moreover, the VOS Cloud solution integrates seamlessly with customer management systems, client applications, DRMs and other technology partners to support sports blackout and dynamic ad insertion for increased monetization.

With the VOS Cloud solution’s flexible, usage-based pricing, the operator only pays for services actually used. Eliminating CAPEX costs from the equation made it possible to launch the OTT service rapidly.

The Result

In just two months, the satellite operator attracted more than 200,000 subscribers to its OTT service. Mirantis and Harmonic’s expertise in cloud infrastructure and OTT deployments enabled a rapid service launch measured in weeks instead of months – which is unprecedented. One of the largest OpenStack cloud environments delivering live video anywhere, the OTT service was initially deployed in a 300 node cluster and now spans more than 500 nodes in multiple datacenters. 

The VOS Cloud solution was the perfect fit for this project’s aggressive schedule and requirements, providing the operator with the flexibility to manage all aspects of video processing and delivery on OpenStack cloud infrastructure. 

Flexibility to integrate the best cloud components for their business requirements was also crucial in their decision to deploy OpenStack based infrastructure. “OpenStack brings innovation to meet our needs better than private vendors. Cloud architectures in a closed ecosystem just don’t allow for enough freedom of integration and customization,” says the senior cloud architect of the company.