Case Study: utd. by content achieves 70% lower operating costs and rapid, scalable video transcoding with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

utd. by content - Customer Case Study

utd. by content is a global media-management and digital-distribution company (about 100 employees) that prepares and localizes video content—transcoding, subtitles, audio, encryption—and distributes it to remote outlets. Their challenge was that high-volume, project-driven transcoding ran on costly on-premises servers that were hard to account for (shorter-than-expected depreciation), inflexible for demand spikes, and required strict security and MPAA-aligned controls to protect clients’ intellectual property.

The company rebuilt its media-asset and transcode pipeline on AWS—using Amazon EC2 (one large storage node and multiple transcode nodes that scale from five up to 20+ instances), Amazon S3 and EBS—deployed in six weeks with AWS technical support. Results include operating costs of roughly 30% of equivalent on‑premises workloads (~70% savings), capex for projects cut from ~50% to under 10%, much faster provisioning (6 weeks vs 17 weeks), MPAA-aligned security, and near‑100% availability with the ability to scale to hundreds of instances for peak demand.

utd. by content

Gerald Hinton

Senior Director of Technology