How site developers create the future of TV
We constantly talk about a variety of innovations in the field of virtual infrastructure and real cases of IaaS technology use by Russian business. To do this, we organized a special corporate IaaS blog .
Today we decided to look at the experience of Western colleagues on the example of the company BAM, which has traveled from the IT department to the largest developer of technologies in the field of Internet broadcasting.
/ Photo m1try / CC
')
The story of the launch of TV on the Network by the experts of BAM began in 2015. The project team was in New York and worked hard on a very large project.
Its essence was to collaborate with HBO. As you already understood, the project was HBO Now, which actively promoted the channel itself and even Apple.
Such support from giant companies did not even allow a close assessment of the potential size of the audience, which simply could immediately overload and bring down the service on the very first day of its operation.
The situation was complicated by the problems that were observed on the side of HBO Go - the channel’s own design. The audience of the series “Game of Thrones” caused disruptions, which were again and again discussed in public space.
That is why HBO turned to a company that created new standards for online broadcasts during the 2014 World Cup - a technology startup whose history began in the depths of the US baseball league - Major League Baseball Advanced Media or BAM for short.
The project started as a league's internal IT department, but over the years its expertise in the field of streaming video has become simply invaluable. As a result, the company was able to analyze the bulk of the scenarios of potential failures and ideally hold the premiere of the fifth season of the Game of Thrones on HBO Now.
When the BAM team first started its business in 2000, management decided to engage a consulting firm to work on the site MLB.com. As a result, they did not get a working site - everything had to be done independently.
In-house development is a good thing, but even then you need to know when to stop. BAM stepped on their rake in this case, when they decided to experiment with streaming multi-language audio from games. The company spent several million dollars on the development and promotion of the product, but never received even thousands of subscribers.
By 2002, the failure of the first projects put the company on the brink of ruin. She was saved by the fact that the MLB baseball league gave BAM control over the ticketing process. The huge amount of the advance allowed the BAM team to make a bid for streaming video.
The first broadcast of the company was at a speed of only 280 kilobits per second, but the audience was huge - 30 thousand fans. After a couple of weeks, the company introduced the first paid streaming video product, which gathered more than 100,000 subscribers in its first year of operation. Since then, BAM has had no money problems.
The company's IT specialists were among the first in the world to solve video compression problems, analyze the geographical position of the viewer and simultaneously deliver content using a variety of applications. In addition, BAM has built its own data centers and even communication lines.
Leadership in this area allowed the company to approach the era of smart phones fully armed. During the App Store presentation, the MLB application was already there, and relations with Apple only strengthened afterwards (as a result, baseball league applications ended up in the iPad and Apple Watch presentations). The company has always been one of the first to create online streaming technologies for iPhone, Roku, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Apple TV.
At the same time, despite all the innovativeness and development of advanced streaming technologies, BAM maintains its original function as the IT department of sports clubs in baseball league, developing websites and mobile applications for them.
Until now, BAM remains an internal division of MLB, but management has plans to separate the technology into a separate business. The management is confident that the expertise of employees can help create new types of content that have not been on the TV market before this time.
Today we decided to look at the experience of Western colleagues on the example of the company BAM, which has traveled from the IT department to the largest developer of technologies in the field of Internet broadcasting.
/ Photo m1try / CC
')
The story of the launch of TV on the Network by the experts of BAM began in 2015. The project team was in New York and worked hard on a very large project.
Its essence was to collaborate with HBO. As you already understood, the project was HBO Now, which actively promoted the channel itself and even Apple.
Such support from giant companies did not even allow a close assessment of the potential size of the audience, which simply could immediately overload and bring down the service on the very first day of its operation.
The situation was complicated by the problems that were observed on the side of HBO Go - the channel’s own design. The audience of the series “Game of Thrones” caused disruptions, which were again and again discussed in public space.
That is why HBO turned to a company that created new standards for online broadcasts during the 2014 World Cup - a technology startup whose history began in the depths of the US baseball league - Major League Baseball Advanced Media or BAM for short.
The project started as a league's internal IT department, but over the years its expertise in the field of streaming video has become simply invaluable. As a result, the company was able to analyze the bulk of the scenarios of potential failures and ideally hold the premiere of the fifth season of the Game of Thrones on HBO Now.
"It was a sprint race at a distance of three and a half months that we were given," - said a company representative.
When the BAM team first started its business in 2000, management decided to engage a consulting firm to work on the site MLB.com. As a result, they did not get a working site - everything had to be done independently.
In-house development is a good thing, but even then you need to know when to stop. BAM stepped on their rake in this case, when they decided to experiment with streaming multi-language audio from games. The company spent several million dollars on the development and promotion of the product, but never received even thousands of subscribers.
By 2002, the failure of the first projects put the company on the brink of ruin. She was saved by the fact that the MLB baseball league gave BAM control over the ticketing process. The huge amount of the advance allowed the BAM team to make a bid for streaming video.
The first broadcast of the company was at a speed of only 280 kilobits per second, but the audience was huge - 30 thousand fans. After a couple of weeks, the company introduced the first paid streaming video product, which gathered more than 100,000 subscribers in its first year of operation. Since then, BAM has had no money problems.
The company's IT specialists were among the first in the world to solve video compression problems, analyze the geographical position of the viewer and simultaneously deliver content using a variety of applications. In addition, BAM has built its own data centers and even communication lines.
Leadership in this area allowed the company to approach the era of smart phones fully armed. During the App Store presentation, the MLB application was already there, and relations with Apple only strengthened afterwards (as a result, baseball league applications ended up in the iPad and Apple Watch presentations). The company has always been one of the first to create online streaming technologies for iPhone, Roku, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and Apple TV.
At the same time, despite all the innovativeness and development of advanced streaming technologies, BAM maintains its original function as the IT department of sports clubs in baseball league, developing websites and mobile applications for them.
Until now, BAM remains an internal division of MLB, but management has plans to separate the technology into a separate business. The management is confident that the expertise of employees can help create new types of content that have not been on the TV market before this time.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/264257/
All Articles