Case Study: Magnolia Pictures accelerates content transcoding and scales global OTT delivery with AWS Elemental MediaConvert

Magnolia Pictures Charts a Path in the OTT Market

Magnolia Pictures, founded in 2001 by Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner, is a leading U.S. distributor of independent and documentary films with a large, diverse, and increasingly global library. Facing the challenge of entering the crowded OTT market on its own brand—while delivering a premium, scalable experience for multiple genres, languages, devices, and markets—Magnolia needed a flexible, cloud-based infrastructure to manage ingest, transcoding, quality control, and distribution without massive upfront investment.

Magnolia partnered with OWNZONES and deployed the OWNZONES Connect Platform on AWS, using AWS Elemental MediaConvert to automate and run concurrent transcoding and end-to-end media workflows (ingest → analyze → transform → QC → monetize). The platform enabled channel-based, device-optimized delivery across web and major apps, multi‑CDN distribution, DRM and captioning. As a result, OWNZONES prepared Magnolia’s 40,000+ minutes of content for multiscreen distribution in under one‑third the time of previous approaches, and new titles are now ingested and published rapidly to a global-ready OTT service.

Magnolia Pictures

Jeff Cuban

Chief Operating Officer