Case Study: BBC achieves elastic scaling and near-real-time live-to-VOD delivery with AWS Elemental

BBC - Customer Case Study

The BBC’s iPlayer grew rapidly after its launch, especially with mobile apps and international rollouts, but its original hardware-based transcoding platform became a bottleneck — inflexible, monolithic and unable to handle spikes in demand or new device profiles. To overcome these limits the BBC rebuilt its delivery pipeline as Video Factory, a next‑generation, modular system designed to scale with audience demand.

Video Factory combines on‑premise processing with Elemental Cloud for elastic, software‑defined transcoding, enabling real‑time parallel processing and packaging for hundreds of device profiles. The move cut live‑to‑VOD turnaround from nine hours to about 20 minutes (and as fast as three minutes for some programs), lets the BBC scale up for simultaneous peaks, and now supports over 36.5 billion minutes of content a year, more than 7 million daily requests, thousands of devices and large daily volumes of mezzanine and ABR streaming assets.

BBC

Phil Cluff

BBC