Cloud for development companies: Babystep.tv uses Azure to launch “rockets” from its new SPACEPORT

We continue to talk about the use of the Microsoft cloud for solution development companies (ISVs). In this issue, we present the story of the Babystep.tv cloud solution, whose mission is to help parents bring up their children around the world.

Spaceport is a software developed by us to optimize the process of video filming, where each video is a rocket that is being prepared for launch.
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Our plan for 2015: make 1000 videos about children of preschool age . As practice has shown, it is not an easy task to organize regular shooting of children aged from birth to 6 years.

It is necessary to take into account hundreds of nuances that we did not even suspect: legal, technical, financial. Having started the work, we communicated on each video by e-mail and very soon realized that a completely different approach was needed with this amount of materials ... For each video, we had to discuss dozens of questions, exchange files with voice acting, editing, music - all this turned into complete chaos in the mailboxes, and then in the heads of the team. Our task was to reach the pace of filming at least 100 video tips for parents per month - which means at least 2000 e-mails, even with the most modest estimates. In such a flow of information, it was simply impossible to organize the process with the speed we needed. With the help of Spaceport we managed to structure the whole process of filming.

Our team consists of a wide variety of specialists: experts in children's development issues, script writers, producers, managers on actors - and all these people have their usual processes and tools for work, which we have combined in Spaceport. We have long been looking for options for software that could help us to shoot and organize communication between different actors. But we could not find suitable software. We tried everything: from ordinary task trackers, to specialized software used for filming TV shows or a big movie, but they didn’t suit us because of our specifics: “videos are short, but are shot at the same time and in large numbers”. Now in our office in Los Angeles, we are doing what no one else has done before us - we produce more than a hundred one-minute video clips monthly with tips for parents.

Therefore, we decided to create our own software for our videos. We called this program Spaceport, and each video - a rocket.

Each of our rocket runs a few steps from the idea to upload to our media server, from where the video is broadcast to customers:

• the “idea” stage, where experts choose ideas for new videos;
• stage “scripts” - here copywriters draw out ideas in the script;
• the “shooting” stage - here the operators and producers shoot the video according to the written script, and lawyers control all the nuances, compliance with the laws and regulations of the shooting (for example, under the US law, you can shoot a baby-baby no more than 20 minutes a day in the presence of two observers from the state );
• the stage “voice acting”, - at this stage the voice acting is performed by a voice-over;
• stage “final installation”;
• stage “translation into other languages”.

At each stage, the work must be approved by certain people before the video goes to the next stage.

The system is now at different stages are more than 700 video clips and this base is constantly updated. Every day dozens of videos change their status - some go to the shooting, some to the voice acting, and some are uploaded to the media server.

We faced a question: where to place Spaceport? It so happened that we received a grant from Microsoft Azure for beginner startups and gladly placed our resources in this cloud.

In 2014, Microsoft launched Microsoft Go to Market Accelerator - a program of individual work with start-up entrepreneurs, designed to accelerate business development. Program members gain access to Microsoft technical and marketing resources. The Russian office of Microsoft works with these companies individually by providing access to technical, marketing and business resources. Graduates of the Microsoft Go to Market Accelerator program include companies such as News360, Clickberry, and Fitting Reality.
The head and inspirer of our company presented the project at a meeting of the Advisory Board of the program in December 2014, with the result that we received a grant of $ 60,000, $ 5,000 per month for Azure service. For which we are very grateful to the Microsoft team and, in particular, to Natalia Radosteva for believing in us and constant support on all issues.

How we use Microsoft Azure

To host Spaceport, we created several virtual machines in the data center West USA. Since we shoot videos in LA, we decided to choose a data center in California, so we stopped at West USA, with a plan for expansion to Europe.

On Spaceport's servers, life is constantly in full swing:

• load new scripts;
• create preview versions of montages with watermarks;
• the dubbing with music is stuck together (thanks, ffmpeg);
• packages are formed to be sent to media servers (a track with aac-sound and several video tracks (h.264) with different bitrates are placed in the mp4-container in order to provide customers with a suitable Internet connection quality);
• loads translations in different languages, etc.

It is important that Azure allows us to scale resources. With the growing number of video clips in the system, we have already twice expanded the amount of disk space and the power of virtual machines. It is convenient and safe to do in the control panel. In the period when the flow of new videos is especially high - we increase the power of our machines, and when we work mainly on scripts and text materials - we reduce, optimizing costs.

Another important point: Microsoft makes triple backup of the contents of hard drives to preserve data integrity. For us, this is archi-important, since all our data is stored in the cloud, and only from time to time are physical backups made to external hard drives.

From time to time, like all cloud hosting providers, Microsoft does technical work. In these situations, virtual machines may be unavailable for about 1 hour. To solve this problem, we use “accessibility groups”, which combine several virtual machines, ensuring that only one of them can be turned off for maintenance at a time.

Why does Babystep.tv have so many clips?

The history of babystep.tv is simple. The CEO of the company and his spouse are parents who are faced with an abundance of very different, sometimes outdated, sometimes conflicting information about child development and upbringing. It became clear that today there are many websites about children, many forums for mothers, many books about parenthood, many educational films, we hear a lot of advice from friends and older generations ... But it’s hard to find time for so many sources of information. The search for comprehensive, understandable and accurate answers to the questions that arose was the impetus for creating a service convenient for all parents, which will collect the most necessary advanced information about childhood and will provide it to parents precisely when it is most relevant for them.

The goal of babystep.tv is to spread in the most convenient format advanced knowledge about children, about the features of their development and about building harmonious relationships with children.

Modern parents are very busy, they want to be in time, so the founders chose the most popular and simple format for receiving information - a short video: “1 minute - 1 video - 1 tip”. All videos are tied to the age of the child. The plan for 2015 is to make 1000 videos for the age from birth to 6 years and provide the world's first educational plan for parents. At the beginning of autumn we will launch an updated version of the portal containing more than 400 video tips. The application for iOS is already in the AppStore. In addition, we are actively working in the B2B sector, and have already started selling videos to content companies. Surprisingly, our partners from China showed an incredible interest in the commercials.

Babystep.tv creates a new product for parents, and for us our content and our Spaceport are the most important asset after the people who work in our team.