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Telco & Media

GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM IS THE SOLUTION FOR SKY ITALIA

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Sky Italia has teamed up with the Go Reply cloud partner to develop a hybrid transcoder on the Google Cloud Platform.


SCENARIO

Sky Italia, one of the largest media companies in Italy, with more than 4.8 million platform subscribers, faced a significant technical challenge when it made the decision to transcode its full catalogue (more than 5,000 videos) in high definition. The situation was not complex only for the fact that the operation would have required four times the amount of CPU used for standard videos, but also because of the rather aggressive timelines: the project had to be completed in the span of just a few weeks. Sky Italia therefore needed a new resource as part of its infrastructure in order to be able to meet the timeline: the company selected Go Reply, a Google Premier Partner, and the Google Cloud Platform.

"We needed to transcode all our assets with the new bitrate set, optimising both time and costs: it was impossible to complete this task relying only on our existing infrastructure. Thanks to the Google Computer Engine, we were able to render the instances so fast that the transcoding process became child's play: no extra expense, no wasted time"

Gabriele Ubertini, Sky Italia

SOLUTION

The solution identified is fully effective and economical, while meeting the necessary security requirements. Instead of installing extra hardware, a new transcoding capability was put in place: Sky Italia and Go Reply developed a public cloud and an on-premise hybrid HD transcoder. The solution was then optimised thanks to the use of Custom Machine Types that respond quickly to demand peaks without the need for over-provisioning, and to more economical preemptible VMs, guided by a Go Reply API which manages the end-to-end process, calculating the availability and balancing the preemptible VMs with the standard instances. The preference for the Google platform is based on the fact that it was the only one to offer direct peering, which provides additional bandwidth capable of ensuring a secure micro-segmentation of the video during transfer to the cloud. The project was thus implemented, making it possible to archive the full Sky Italia catalogue in just one week instead of a month.


  • SECURITY

    Increased security
    thanks to direct peering

  • SAVINGS

    Solution integrated
    with the existing architecture

  • INTEGRATION

    Solution integrated
    with the existing architecture


Go Reply is the Reply Group company that provides consulting, managed services and integration solutions for the media, finance, retail, manufacturing and other sectors. Go Reply is a Google Premier Partner and won the Google Cloud 2016 EMEA Partner Award in recognition of the excellence of the support offered to its customers in solving challenges using Google Cloud products.


Sky Italia, headquartered in Milan, is one of the largest TV broadcasters in Italy. The company is part of Sky plc, Europe’s largest media company and pay-TV broadcaster, with over 22 million subscribers.