Case Study: Sky Italia achieves rapid, cost‑saving HD transcoding of 5,000+ videos with Google Cloud Platform

Sky Italia Optimised HD transcoding with preemptible VMs

Sky Italia, one of Italy’s largest broadcasters with millions of subscribers and part of Sky plc, needed to transcode its entire back catalogue and new daily content into HD within very tight deadlines—processing over 5,000 videos—while its on‑premises infrastructure lacked the CPU capacity (HD needs ~4× CPU) and had strict security requirements.

Working with Go Reply, Sky Italia built a hybrid transcoding solution on Google Cloud Platform using direct peering for secure micro‑segmentation, Google Custom Machine Types for right‑sized capacity, and cost‑effective preemptible VMs orchestrated by a Go Reply API to balance availability. The hybrid system processed the archive in one week, cut cataloguing time for new assets, significantly reduced costs and improved security, and the team is now moving toward containerisation and Kubernetes for further efficiency.

Sky

Gabriele Ubertini

Head of Technology Research and Engineering