Red Bee Media
Red Bee Media is one of the world’s leading broadcast service providers. In essence, it provides specialized managed services for media companies and broadcasters covering the end-to-end content flow from live event to screens in any format globally. Its core services are efficient production, channel origination, media management, post production, OTT, access services, content enrichment and distribution.
With broadcasters demanding a lower cost for its services, it can no longer afford to only be tier-one service provider, however to make the economics work, it must deliver our services to the entire market, expanding to tiers two and three. But there’s one problem: The service fees need to be more cost-effective and commercially flexible to allow its customers to invest more in content. To achieve this, Red Bee had to rethink the entire delivery chain to determine a new model. One area it had to address was the infrastructure costs of its data centres.
David Travis, Red Bee Media, commented:
“We’ve worked with our partner 7FiveFive in different ways in the past, but it was crucial for this project because it understood our mission. 7FiveFive helped us finesse our story and translated it to Cisco. 7FiveFive brought in a more IT-centric broadcast knowledge that was the glue between Red Bee’s broadcast expertise and the commodity compute industry. I now realize how badly we needed 7FiveFive as that go-between, because in hindsight I see how much we still had to learn. We underestimated the level of complexity, and Red Bee Media probably started with better economies of scale than most media companies globally. This is what I would tell a CTO or CIO thinking about embarking on a similar journey: Don’t think you can transform yourself unknowingly. It’s a big investment that requires a vision and ambition to change. It takes a huge amount of expertise and planning to merge an agile cloud-deployment micro-service philosophy with a commodity compute vendor. The broadcast sector is already complicated before we add this additional layer, so you will want to consider the underlying complexity of your industry as well. Even from a security perspective, trying to create that pure multi-tenant architecture is complex. Trying to achieve that on your own without a proper foundation would be like doing open-heart surgery without going to medical school. You likely need someone to help you through this. It was through Red Bee Media, Magenta, and Cisco all working and learning together that we developed something that I think is really next generation and unique in the media industry.”
