We’ve built proprietary cloud infrastructure that can ingest, store, and serve media at an industry altering speed and price point. Powered by this underlying system, our product allows teams of any size to manage a library of media in the cloud without the need for internal developers or various vendors. In a sense: We are bringing enterprise grade technology usually reserved for television networks to every brand in the world over the internet at a $10 entry point.

1️⃣ Ingest

• Transcoding: Taking a media file and creating multiple different copies at degrading levels of quality. We transcode every asset that comes into our system at the point of ingestion so that we can store it and serve it as cost efficiently as possible. This is not possible with other data structures other than media.
• Codecs: A formatting system used, in this case, to transmit video. H.264 is the most common video codec. We are able to use H.265 because we have an end-to-end system and do not have to worry about compatibility issues. Because of this, we can compress videos to save on storage costs while preserving quality.
• Batch migration: Web hooks and scripts that can automatically move data from one system to another. We have created tools that can automatically move media from other storage services to ours or from local storage systems to the cloud.

2️⃣ Store

• Spectrum storage: Data can be stored in the cloud at various levels of accessibility. Cold storage is when you need to infrequently access the data and warm storage is when the data is always ready to be immediately served. We store users' media across a spectrum of storage based on the systems learnings about their consumption patterns.
• Bidding system: Cloud storage is a commodity and there are various providers out bidding each other in a race to the bottom. While we use AWS for most of our storage, we are integrating with other data centers and have created a system that can choose a provider that offers the lowest price in real time.
• Unit economics: As you store more information within a data center you receive price discounts. We have already hit our second tier of price discounts with AWS and will continue to blend down the cost as we store more. In this way, no company could go directly to AWS for a cheaper price (ignoring all additional cost saving measures we have built).

3️⃣ Play

• HLS streaming: Media can be moved to someone’s local device in pieces over time, rather than all at once. This means you can watch a video in full without the entire video moving onto your phone or computer (think Netflix or YouTube). We use our version of HLS streaming to make sure the costs behind serving video are tempered.
• Transcoding on the fly: Rather than always creating copies of a video, you can create copies as someone plays it back. In our case, we transcode only the first portion of a video and then can transcode the rest of the video as it’s being watched. By owning the system that is serving a video, we can optimize the total storage footprint.
• Media player: If you own a playback touchpoint, like a video player, you can analyze bandwidth conditions and consumption patterns. The fact that we own the end consumption experience allows us to further optimize our tools.